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 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.
Regular analogue silver/black self-winder 99% of the time.
Also, an offline smart-watch with gadgetbridge to record bike riding and badminton(heart rate, steps, GPS, duration, date, etc)
The simple smartwatch I have is older but does the job OK. Amazfit Bip. No need to pair it with a website to enable, just record sport and lift data off to gadgetbridge app.
That honestly sounds like a great balance! Plus, you have some privacy with your health data with that offline Amazfit, so some goons won’t sell that private info to some corner of the internet.
Regular watches - been wearing watches of some kind since middle school, and at this point I feel undressed or like something is missing without anything on my wrist. Like many others here, while I love the tech of smartphones (and admittedly the smart watches are really cool) but don’t want an even more in-my-face screen to further pull me into more phone time. Trying to really cut back on screen time. Also, if I went for a smart watch, I’d feel the want to wear it all the time both because of how much they are and to keep activity tracking data consistent, which would mean my collection of watches would likely get much less wear time.
Watch I have on now is the Citizen Eco-drive I got when I graduated college, years of service and frequent wear in situations I had no business wearing it and it’s held up great. Because of the eco-drive it’s one of my few watches I don’t have to worry about, it just always has the right time.
I really do relate to your reasons. I had been using a smartwatch from spring 2020 until last week, and while it was great for some fitness tracking, it ended up giving me health anxiety due to the constant feeling of ‘needing’ to meet all my fitness goals daily, and the notifications buzzing my wrist regularly breaking my concentration during work, or for slower times of the day such as sitting on the couch with my headphones and just focusing on the music.
Citizen FTW! Their Eco Drive Watches are the real deal. Accurate, reliable, won’t break the bank. Citizen really do live up to their name as a company, they’ve created a practical and economical slew of products that appeal to the everyday working man. Plan on getting one myself soon!
I currently have a smartwatch but I don’t like how I can’t prevent it from getting my text and phonecalls which I find useless because my phone is on me 95% of the time. The only way is to keep it on Do Not Disturb. It also for some reason has trouble updating, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. I just want it to tell time without all the fancy annoyances.
I take that back. I remembered I also wanted to track my heart rate. It’s pretty ridiculous I can’t simply disable notifications without turning off bluetooth.
Turning off bluetooth is just one option. You absolutely can set all notifications to only go through your phone. I don’t know your exact set up but I am certain that is possible and likely not too difficult
Regular watches for me. Specifically, relatively cheap automatics. There’s a certain kind of beauty to a mechanical watch, they’re impressive feats of engineering.
I’ve worn Fitbits in the past, but just long enough to know I’m not interested. I don’t need yet another thing to charge, I’ll just grab my phone for things beyond checking the time.
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.
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.
I’ve personally been using a apple watch series 2. See no need to upgrade it tells the time battery lasts a long time even after all these years of use and it can tell me my heart rate,play tappybird and I can listen to music on it I bought it used for £40 3 years ago complete with the box extra straps and a charger literally one of the best purchases I think I’ve ever made only compliant is that because the watch was manufactured in 2016 support dropped several years back and support for some applications such as audible has dropped which is a shame
Smart watch. Great for notifications and telling me if I need to pull my phone out and reply or not, whether mid conversation, driving, cooking, etc. Also fitness tracker so I don’t need my phone on a run.
I would never wear a dumb watch. I need my watch to do more than tell time.
I stopped wearing a watch completely until the exercise/sleep/fitness trackers and smart watches got fairly good. I was a big watch guy before nice Seiko, Citizen, Patek Philippe, and Breitling watches but then everything had a clock on it. My phone, my laptop, etc. No reason to have this expensive thing on my wrist getting banged up as I go through the day. Now I have a Huawei GT3 Pro because it has good sleep and fitness trackers plus the EKG and blood O2 level checks. It controls my music at the gym and the timer works well in the kitchen plus the flash light is extra handy.
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