Do you prefer to wear a smartwatch or a regular watch?
Would love to know what you guys think and your reasoning for it. I’m starting to see a lot of Apple Watches/Fitbits/Galaxy Watches in my area compared to more traditional timepieces.
I use a Garmin Venu 2. It’s a “smart enough” watch where it’s not annoying in terms of notifications, but it provides all of the data I could imagine needing relating to my fitness activities. I started using it after Mozilla reviewed Garmin’s stance on privacy.
I also have a Seiko kinetic watch I wear for nice or more formal events.
I have an Apple Watch because of its ability to detect falls. Since I commute a lot by cycling if I were to get into an accident(hit and run, or I fall off my bike) and fall unconscious, the watch would be able to alert the police and get me the medical attention I need. As well as the watch could provide the ambulance worker a way to identify me because my information is on the watch in case I forgot my id card.
What timing! I am so pissed at my smartwatch right now.
I got a smart watch because I was having some sleep problems, and I found that some Apple watches can monitor your oxygen levels while sleeping. I suspected it was related to other things like stress, but I wanted to be a bit more comfortable and say that it’s probably not sleep apnea.
So, the point is that I must wear it when I’m sleeping. Also, like any reasonable person, I have my phone set up not to disturb me at night. But at least on Apple watches, this means that my alarm goes off only on my watch. I can’t figure out any way for it to not go off on my watch, and only go off on my phone, unless I simply take off the watch.
It’s the MOST ANNOYING THING. First, because it means that you can’t have your alarm go off across the room. You can always turn it off on your watch, which means that you can even turn it off without waking up. And then, you have no alarm at all. So, if I absolutely have to wake up for some meeting or airplane or something, I can’t wear my watch to bed.
Also, maybe this is just me, but I hate when my watch vibrates on my wrist. I hate the feeling. Every time it vibrates, I have the urge to smash the thing. If I had to choose a set up, I’d have my phone always vibrate, and my watch never vibrate. But I can’t figure out how to make that work on Apple.
This morning was an absolute nightmare, though. Now, I’m used to turning off my alarm on my watch, but when I went to turn it off this morning, the watch was deep in some shitty menu. I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. And it was just vibrating on my wrist non-stop. Obviously, this was made much more difficult because I was just waking up.
I eventually figured it out, but the point is that the UI is obviously less refined than, for example, the phone UI, where this sort of alarm hiding has never happened in all of my years owning a smart phone.
Anyways, to answer your question, I prefer to wear a smart watch, because a regular watch doesn’t do anything for me. But goddamn do I hate my smart watch right now!
I don’t like either. I don’t use things for fashion, and the phone alone gives me all the function of either watches without it giving me sensory issues by being a bracelet on my wrist.
I enjoyed having a smartwatch back in the pebble days. I was kind of addicted to notifications (especially from datadog) at the time. My Pebble time made me feel less stressed because glancing at my watch was less effort than pulling out my phone.
Then Pebble was killed off, web-scale infrastructure became more reliable, and I learned to recover from my notification addiction. Now I’m happily watchless again.
Have you looked into Rebble? I’m still wearing my Time Steel as a daily driver. I’ve yet to find a newer smartwatch that hits all the features I care about.
Both, but much more of my days are an Apple Watch SE2 than my DW5600.
I use it as a HUD - I want to know the exact time for work, current temps high/low, sunrise / sundown times, and a pop up for screening phone notifications helps me quite a bit with not checking my phone as much. I also appreciate wrist heart rate (for keeping anxiety in check,) compass is neat, and knowing the local dB is helpful for keeping my tinnitus from getting worse.
I never thought I’d like a smartwatch until I tried one.
I use mine more as an mp3 player and I do find the vibration alarm feature very useful as sometimes a normal alarm clock doesn’t wake me. Apart from that don’t really see to much benifit over a normal watch.
It is nice to have things like maps etc on your wrist bit I can’t say I’ve ever actually used really used them.
Smartwatch. It’s very useful for triaging notifications (messages, email, phone calls, etc) and turning HomeKit devices on/off quickly or when my hands are full (Siri, open the garage door). Also extremely useful for fitness.
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