@Edent I had a FitBit in the beginning. Expensive, nice enough health tracking app, rubbish battery life, useless as a watch since you had to touch it to see the screen.

When it's battery died completely after a year or so and the second replacement strap broke, I binned it.

Now I have a cheap Amazbit that lasts a month per charge, can read the time without touching and does basic health stats. Also notifications from apps I choose and call cancellation.

Occasionally it is a timer.

@Edent Well, we got a Samsung smartwatch. To replace a pedometer that had died.

Then we discovered that smartwatches can't count steps. They can only count arm swings.

So if your watch is on the arm that's holding a bag against your side or chest, the arm isn't swinging and it counts no steps.

Also, if you're sitting down taking NO steps, you can just swing your arm and rack up "steps."

In our opinion, smartwatches are useless.

@Edent

For me, the only function that I *really* want from a smart watch is notifications/alerts of calendar appointments, incoming calls and (some) messages, and some apps.

If it also told the time, that would be a bonus, but it is not a deal breaker.

@Edent In many ways, I think the big companies who offer a watch are vastly overselling the usefulness of them.

Speaking for myself: As someone with ADHD, the single most important element of them is that they can show me a notification without having to take my phone out of my pocket. As soon as the phone comes out, concentration is gone.

I've had a cheap Amazfit, an Apple Watch, and now a cheap second-hand Garmin, and regardless of what they're all *supposed* to be able to do, ultimately 95% is notifications, 4% is looking at the time, and 1% is all the other stuff, like step counting.

In fact, when I got the Apple Watch, I ended being pretty disappointed that what Apple had sold didn't really match what I actually did. Sure I *could* use it to track long bike rides, or hikes in the mountains, but I don't do those things. And the battery was never really adequate for that anyway.

So I'm now in place where, while I do value having a smart watch, I don't really see the point of spending more than about £50 on one.

@Edent i switched to a dumb watch when i realised i was mostly using my cheap smartwatch to tell the time — and since the screen didn't stay on, it wasn't good at that.

really not regretting that. i'm not setting as many timers, either.

@Edent the thing I /want/ to do on my watch, but haven't found a good non-apple implementation of, is very navigation instructions while walking. Looking at my phone every few minutes just to see the map is annoying, but I want some sort of map to see if this is my turning it the one 10 yards further on. I tried a third party app for pixel watch and when it worked it was pretty good but the reliability was "interesting debo" level at best

@Edent Funny you should ask. I'm probably a power user, but for a completely different reason than the guy in question might think. 😁️ I use Amazfit Neo. It's a Casio-like "smart" watch with an STN display. Smart being in quotes because it doesn't do that much. It just shows time & date, measures steps and heart-rate, has stopwatch, shows basic notifications (just a number), shows me who is calling me and has a find my phone feature. Real benefit of this watch is that the battery lasts for 3-4 weeks and it does basically everything I need. There are however some minor annoyances I had with it.

First, the notification is just a blinking icon (+1) that is shown for a few seconds. Really easy to miss. It doesn't have vibrations and the piezo buzzer has a really unpleasnt sound so I turned it off. Second, apart from the find my phone feature and declining a call, there isn't really a way to trigger some action on my phone.

So I tried playing around with it for a while. I installed this app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.llamalab.automate) and created two things:
1) When I get an important notification, it gets automatically repeated every few seconds until I turn on the screen. So the +1 icon on my watch keeps blinking because there is a never-ending stream of fresh notifications.
2) When the find my phone feature is activated, it plays a sound on my phone and shows a specific notification ("Watch is searching for this phone"). If you cancel the action, both the sound and the notification stop. So when I detect this notification, I lower the volume to 0%. If the notification is still there after 3 seconds, I turn the volume back up so the feature works as intended. If, however, it disappears early (because I cancelled it), I can use it differently. I can, for example, take a photo. So I essentially made a remote shutter button.

The monstrosity looks like this: (doesn't even fit on the screen 😁️)

@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.

@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.