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.
Regular watch. Don’t need to be hounded by any more notifications and don’t care about fitness data. However, it may be useful for people who need to keep track of texts, and fitness data.
I wear an automatic Seiko. I like that I don’t have to worry about a battery staying charged/wearing out over time. I just have to take a second every couple weeks to set it forward to account for it losing a few minutes. Another factor is when I looked at the smart watches that were available last time I got a new phone and they were all very large and I have small wrists which I don’t want to emphasize. My current watch fits well.
I would like to get a bracelet or something that tracks biometric data but from what I saw when I was investigating those is that they all have watch functionally as well and I don’t want to wear two watches.
You can get a Whoop band or Oura ring, or something similar - from what I’ve gathered they are just like regular bracelet or ring, with good sensors inside, and no screen to distract. Plus, this probably makes them way more lightweight than watch-like smartbands.
The whoop band looks like what I’m looking for but that membership is too steep for something that I just want to gather data. Thanks for the recommendations.
I have a couple of traditional watches that I occasionally wear and don’t own a smart watch because I don’t need another thing to worry about keeping charged.
Just a few days ago, someone around here was telling me about how they need a charger with 10 usb ports when traveling, because everyone in the family has a smartwatch and other devices that need frequent charging.
I like both, but I mostly wear a smartwatch. I don’t always hear notifications on my phone. Having my watch vibrate at the same time has been a huge improvement. It is also nice to be able to view and dismiss notifications without pulling out my phone.
I started experimenting with smartwatches soon after they first appeared. There were a lot of limitations, but having better access to notifications made them worth the tradeoff for me. Over time, the hardware and software have both gotten steadily better. I have owned and used four previous smartwatches. My latest, a Samsung Galaxy Watch6 Classic, is the first I’ve had with the battery life, display quality, and speed to make me feel like I’m no longer compromising. It works well as a basic watch, in addition to all the other features.
My other reason for sticking with smartwatches was not something I expected. I was able to build my idea of the perfect watch face for myself, using the Watchmaker app. Getting it to do everything I wanted required some serious programming, among other things, but I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to have exactly what I want on my wrist.
I do still wear regular watches, sometimes for particular occasions and sometimes just for fun. I have a Citizen Promaster Skyhawk A-T Titanium that serves as a dress watch and a Casio Pro Trek 3500T for when I’m camping or just need a watch I can’t accidentally break. Both watches are solar powered and both set themselves to the Bureau of Standards radio signals.
I would hate to have to choose one type over the other, but my smartwatch get most a lot more wear time than my others.
Like many, I stopped wearing watches when smartphones became a thing. Then I adopted the Apple Watch when that came out and wore one or another of them until this month. Something switched in my brain and I just decided that I hated that thing. Hated having to charge it. Hated the notifications. Hated feeling a need to close the rings. Hated the look of the thing. Hated that everyone seems to wear the same thing.
I started to learn about mechanical watches and bought an inexpensive but reportedly good quality one that looks nice to me. So far, I love it. There’s something viscerally satisfying about watching the movement through the display back, hearing the subtle sound, occasionally winding it, and contemplating that people can make such complex things that actually work.
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.
Regular watch. I like watches so I have a collection (mostly cheapos). I don’t want to give that up, I don’t see a point in a smartwatch (except maybe for counting steps), and I don’t want to have to recharge the thing frequently.
No watch at all - I check the time on my phone and I don’t see the point in saving a half second here and there checking notifications on a smart watch.
No. I prefer to not wear any watch. I dislike having something heavy strapped to my wrist.
And I dislike accidentally looking at clocks when I didn’t specifically query the clock time; it screws with my perception of the passage of time, causing unpleasant dissonance.
Also I work in food, which means washing my hands above the wrist every half hour at a minimum, and wrist jewelry gets in the way of that.
And I’ve never been mugged, partly because I aggressively look like someone not worth mugging, and strapping multiple hundreds of dollars to my wrist is counter to that.
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
I don’t like either. I don’t use things for fashion, and the phone alone gives me all the function of either watches without it giving me sensory issues by being a bracelet on my wrist.
I had a smartwatch for a bit and I realized the only things I cared about were the biometrics and clock. I got rid of it and got a nice watch and an oura ring that I only need to charge once a week and I much prefer this setup.
I don’t know how useful it would be without the membership as I haven’t tried it. I am unsure to be honest, the advanced features I am kind of on the fence about, but the sleep insights have been very helpful. I do like the workout tracking which I think is free.
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