I personally quit smart watches. I owned an Apple Watch 2 and ‘downgraded’ to a Garmin Instinct. Couldn’t be happier.
Honestly all I want from my “smart watch” is to see notifications as they come in, and to see my upcoming events from my calendar(s) from a quick glance. That doesn’t require a powerful CPU or an hi-res LCD display.
I don’t want to do voice commands either.
You and me, comrade.
I went with the Amazfit Bip because it had a similar form factor and there were alternative firmwares for it, but after growing tired of fiddling with what is a hack-ish workaround, I decided to switch to the BangleJS2 when it came out. It’s not as polished as the Pebble Timeline UI, but it works well enough and it’s open-source.
I agree I got rid of mine until smart watches can last 2 days minimum on battery I won’t use one the die so quickly.
I was gifted a Garmin 235 in 2015 and the battery lasted a week. At this point it still lasts 3-4 days. I’m great about always having my devices well-charged, can’t imagine what many folks go through with the atrocious battery life on some of these “smart” watches that can barely go overnight.
How is the Garmin? I personally downgraded to a “dumb” Casio watch for my daily watch, but I still want something to at least track my heartrate and steps for whenever I exercise.
Garmin makes good watches, and the data capturing goes to Garmin connect without any subscription fee / pay wall to see all the data it tracks.
I’ve had a bunch of them (as a runner). I currently have a Fenix 6X partially because I was doing long runs and wanted the battery to last without worrying. I recently tried a pixel watch 2 for a few weeks and did really like the extra “smarts” but the battery life sucked.
I’ve just got the vivoactive 5 for the purpose of health tracking and weight loss / fitness. It’s my first SmartWatch. I’m very impressed with it, looks/feels great, full colour amoled but still over 10 days of battery life easily, etc.
The problem with Garmin is the amount of artificial segmentation they do, I know my watch is randomly crippled on some stuff (like no altimeter) to push people to the more expensive models, but since it’s my first one I don’t really know what I’m missing and the price/feature ratio felt good for me, maybe in a year if I keep at it I’ll miss some of that but for now it’s really helping me out with my lifestyle changes.
