Discussion
🆕 blog! “Are you a smartwatch "power user"?”
What do you use your smartwatch for?
A few weeks ago, I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about her Pixel watch and what features she used. He'd ignored me when I said I had a non-Google watch. She thought for a moment and said, other than …
👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/are-you-a-smartwatch-power-user/
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#android #gadgets #usability #watch
@Edent my Garmin watch lasts 3 weeks on a charge. Used for: Run, sleep and general health tracking, payments, loyalty cards, weather, notifications, torch, occasional navigation, fancy watch face with sunrise/sunset times, timers. Smartwatches have been very useful; a shame as I used to like proper ones and don't get chance to wear those much any more.
@Edent I use mine to tell the time, receive and preview notifications from my phone, as a step counter and fitness tracker, and for pointing the way to GPS coordinates when geohashing. I don't need a touchscreen to do any that, nor a colour display, and so the smartwatch I use has neither... which gives it about a month of battery life (a little more in the summer, when it gets some solar charging).
@Edent less and less of a power user over time honestly. I use my Apple Watch for: notifications, my main (max complications) detail face, audio player controls, occasionally sending a brief text response when getting my phone out would be in bad form, and even less occasionally being a remote viewfinder/shutter release (on a timer) for my phone for group shots.
@Edent Oh good, there's a terminal emulator for Wear OS, so we can play, uh, maybe Wumpus.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
@Edent
After collecting ALL that telemetry, I hope to god almighty he was just hitting on her.
"What do users do on their watch" aught to be a database query they do before every fucking backlog groom.