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The quest for a simple smartwatch

binarymoon.co.uk

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Re: The quest for a simple smartwatch

#91

Post by miniwark »

The author is a bit strange.

He said than he have only tree requirements: Phone notifications, step counting & long battery life. But then faced with a Casio he said "Casio watches showed promise, but their limited notifications and unattractive styling didn’t meet my preferences for a more elegant design"...

His final choice may have been more because of the "elegant design" than his initial requirements. He confirm it more or less because he even "had to disable a ton of fitness tracking features that I’ll never use just so that I could do the things I wanted."

Re: The quest for a simple smartwatch

#92

Post by somethingsome »

lopis wrote: post #51
profsummergig wrote: post #18

Was talking to an older lady the other day. Very non-tech. Only uses an iPhone and an Apple watch. No laptop or tablet/iPad. Gets a surprisingly large quantity of things done via her phone. My phone is an Android. She shared 2 things her iPhone can do that I don't think my phone (OnePlus 7 pro) and watch (Amazfit T-Rex 2) combination can do: - she can always find out where she parked her car - her watch buzzes to war…

Google (Maps?) has done the car parking location for 10+ years. But like many things Google, Google software is not well integrated with itself, and discoverability is bad. It's perfectly possible that this feature has been removed and re-added several times during the last decade, as is the fate of many Google projects.

My car is apparently parked on the same spot from 3 years according to Google maps, however it's very far from my house and I never go there, no idea how to unpin that location and set new ones.

Re: The quest for a simple smartwatch

#93

Post by NoboruWataya »

fbn79 wrote: post #88

I love my Garmin Instict. Has all the basic feature I love (always on display, activity tracking, notifications, ...) and I charge it only tree times a month.

I'm also happy with my Garmin vívoactive 3. It has the features I want and I can get it looking fairly minimalist. Battery life is good as well, probably over a week on a single charge, though maybe a bit less if I'm doing loads of activities.

I do like the look of the "hybrid" watches that have physical hands.

Re: The quest for a simple smartwatch

#94

Post by chimprich »

The title should really be the quest for a cheap smartwatch with battery life, which seems to be what the author was looking for. The more expensive Garmin watches have excellent battery life and solar charging.

I use a Garmin smartwatch. One of the surprising things about Garmin is that they don't have a proper app store. They have an app where you can load apps into your watch, but it's rather crippled by having no payment system.

That would be fine if all the apps are free, but they're not: a lot of the prettier watch faces (for example) expect cash - but there's no easy way to pay for them. I recently added a watch face which stopped working after a few days because the author wanted cash sent through some dubious third party website.

I presume they do this to avoid issues with Android / Apple rules about payment, but it's a poor experience.

Re: The quest for a simple smartwatch

#95

Post by ChainOfFools »

profsummergig wrote: post #18

Was talking to an older lady the other day. Very non-tech. Only uses an iPhone and an Apple watch. No laptop or tablet/iPad. Gets a surprisingly large quantity of things done via her phone. My phone is an Android. She shared 2 things her iPhone can do that I don't think my phone (OnePlus 7 pro) and watch (Amazfit T-Rex 2) combination can do: - she can always find out where she parked her car - her watch buzzes to war…

Pretty sure you could do both with Tasker, but it's one of those tools that is almost too powerful (therefore too generalized) to be casually approachable for simple things like this. There may be pre-existing templates that gets you fairly close.

For the parked car trick I would guess you'd do something like set up a trigger that fires when your phone or watch disconnect from your car's Bluetooth and drops a notification with your GPS location that you would tap on your way back to the car to have it pull up in Google Maps.

I have a similar task set up that automatically switches on my wireguard tunnel as soon as home Wi-Fi signal is below a certain strength for more than 10 seconds (the implication being that I am departing not only the house but also the immediate area outside where my Wi-Fi still operates). As a fairly unsophisticated Tasker user I was able to cobble this together in about 2 hours by starting from a template that did something similar, including the testing necessary to confirm where the cutoff dB should be.

Re: The quest for a simple smartwatch

#96

Post by Kaibeezy »

mft_ wrote: post #72
Kaibeezy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m an analog watch wearer and have been looking for something like that too. Found a dead Kickstarter thing that replaced the buckle on a watch band with a sensor blob, would have been perfect. A simple strap (or ring, I guess) with a minimal electronics package, waterproof, long battery life, that sends data to my phone. Anyone? Is it not a business? Everything goes upmarket. Oh, without a mandatory monthly fee, Ou…

I’ve been waiting for this for years. If it’s possible to stick health tracking features into a ring, it should certainly be possible to fit them into a watch strap. I’m imagining a standard-looking watch strap with a small display that would sit just below the face of whichever analog watch it was attached to. It could have a thin bridge joining the two sides of the strap together, running underneath the watch - thi…

Yep. Or even with no display at all, just the sensor package. And/or even with no watch at all, just attach it to one of the billion straps out there.

I was all ready to file a provisional when I found that smart buckle or whatever they called it.

Re: The quest for a simple smartwatch

#97

Post by agapon »

somethingsome wrote: post #89

I was very very positively surprised by the Amazon smartwatches, I brought a amazfit GTS 2 Mini Fitness Watch, and it fulfill the main points of the article, it was very cheap also (65€). The app is nice, not perfect but does the job at tracking steps, the GPS is accurate, heart, stress levels, sleep, etc.. Perfect synch with the phone, I receive the phone notifications, good waterproofing and the battery last someth…

Amazfit has nothing to do with Amazon, though.

Re: The quest for a simple smartwatch

#98

Post by caturopath »

chimprich wrote: post #94

The title should really be the quest for a cheap smartwatch with battery life, which seems to be what the author was looking for. The more expensive Garmin watches have excellent battery life and solar charging. I use a Garmin smartwatch. One of the surprising things about Garmin is that they don't have a proper app store. They have an app where you can load apps into your watch, but it's rather crippled by having no…

I am so satisfied with my Garmin Fenix. It's comically expensive, but it has been a dream compared to the Fitbits I used for years. Garmin has lots of lower-end watches, too, which would have resolved most of my headaches and many still have great battery life compared to the competition. I haven't touched the "smart watch" features, though.

Garmin conducts themselves really well, too. They make good stuff and do little to lock it down: you don't have to use their cloud shit if you don't want (I do use it and like it), they created a peripheral standard in ANT+ that became widely adopted, without actually privileging their own stuff, etc.

Re: The quest for a simple smartwatch

#99

Post by boredumb »

I got a couple pine time watches last year and have been very happy with them. They are bare bones so i'm sure they don't hit everyones use cases but I really enjoy it.

I also ended up stumbling on https://github.com/lupyuen/pinetime-rust-mynewt which got me interested in rust which i'm using as a daily driver now and have fully ingested the rusty kool-aid

Re: The quest for a simple smartwatch

#100

Post by occz »

somethingsome wrote: post #89

I was very very positively surprised by the Amazon smartwatches, I brought a amazfit GTS 2 Mini Fitness Watch, and it fulfill the main points of the article, it was very cheap also (65€). The app is nice, not perfect but does the job at tracking steps, the GPS is accurate, heart, stress levels, sleep, etc.. Perfect synch with the phone, I receive the phone notifications, good waterproofing and the battery last someth…

>I was very very positively surprised by the Amazon smartwatches

Wait, Amazfit is not created by Amazon, right?

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