Smart…and not so smart watches
The dumbest thing about most smart watches today is that you’re expected to charge them as often as your phone. There’s one smart watch that defies this idiocracy, with a 30 day battery life, all the cool features and a $75 price tag. It puts Apple and Fitbit to shame. It should put us to shame for accepting expensive, impractical offerings.
It started, for me, as an experiment into whether smart watches were worth it: would I really benefit from having another attention-seeking device even closer at hand than my mobile? My first criterion was battery life. I struggle to keep my phone charged daily, so having another thirsty device was not an option. So it had to have at least 5 days battery life — enough to last a long-haul trip. At the time, the options were fitbit trackers, that didn’t really have watch faces, or the Pebble watch. The Pebble Time had just been released so I bought one. Sure enough, five day battery life, even with always-on screen. No heart monitor, but fantastic software. The timeline feature was genius, the notifications management was simple, as was the app store. But it wasn’t shiny enough. To keep things simple and long-lasting, the e-ink screen was low res and not very bright — it looked jaded next to an Apple watch.
Fitbit bought a flagging Pebble in late 2016, just as they released a new Pebble with heart monitor. This was either going…
