One year my dad didn't know what to get me for Christmas so armed with the knowledge of "he likes technology" he bought me a smartwatch. Specifically a Samsung Galaxy Watch Active2. I was pretty sure I'd mentioned around him how I found the very concept of smartwatches stupid, but I didn't want to be rude of course so I wore it for several months and tried to acclimate myself to it.
The only thing is ever proved useful for was cheating on my tests in high school. The device has now resided in a drawer for over a year, untouched. To list a few of the things I quickly grew to hate:
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You had to flick your wrist to get the screen to turn on. This gesture was not always recognized no matter how distinctly you did it, which led to a lot of uncomfortable wrist flinging or giving up and pressing a button. You could force the screen to always be on, but then the battery wouldn't last a full day. Modern smartwatches seem to have fixed this with 1Hz displays, but it's still a thing and still stupid.
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Facer watchfaces are cool but unresponsive as hell - they can sometimes take seconds to update after waking the watch. If it's not a direct Samsung watchface, it's not going to be snappy.
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the watchfaces were all so distracting, overly busy, or ugly that I eventually left the thing set on Solaris, the only useful and decent fucking watchface, which displayed the TIME in plain 00:00 AM/PM, the DATE including day of the week, and the temperature outside with a littlw weather icon. This information plainly displayed atop a black void. It was the only watchface that didn't come to irritate the hell out of me.
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I do not do fitness tracking. I do not want to know my heartbeat, in fact the Idea of Samsung recording my vital signs on a regular basis deeply disturbs me. I don't care how many steps I've walked today. No I'm not wearing my fucking watch to bed that's the behavior of a sociopath. Besides you piece of shit you can't last 48 hours even in wrist-flick mode. This is a major selling point of all smartwatches, and is completely irrelevant to me, so that's like, 60% of the product right there, useless.
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because I use an LG phone, the Samsung watch refused to sync text messages. It could notify me about them, sure, but all I could do was read the notification.
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constantly trying to take priority for calls away from the phone is stupid. I never want to take a call on my wrist. That's dumb. This double sucks if I'm in the car and now the watch and the car want to get in a fight over who gets to steal call priority from the phone.
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oh yeah the car, did I mention the wrist flick gesture that never triggers when you want it to will trigger constantly while driving. You turn right and the gradual turning of your arm as you turn the wheel is inexplicably taken as a sharp wrist flick and you're momentarily distracted by your wrist lighting up. Especially distracting at night. Great fun! Not a safety hazard! I had to take the fucking thing off and put it in the seat next to me when driving at night.
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around COVID they introduced a handwashing timer app or something that was supposed to recognize the motions and sounds of handwashing and automatically begin a countdown. I tried it one time. When I washed my hands, it did nothing. Later in the day, I went to go piss. As I was pissing, it started the countdown. It complained that I did not piss for 60 seconds. When I went to wash my hands, it did not start the countdown. I uninstalled the app.
I do not like smartwatches.
I posted once or twice about how I've been wearing a Casio calculator watch. I bought it explicitly to replace the smartwatch. I wanted a watch with a couple extra bells and whistles, but was still a plain digital watch at heart.
It cost me $30. I've worn it every day for over a year. I've yet to have to replace the battery. It tells me the time up to the second, it tells me the date and the day of the week. It saves a couple phone numbers for quick reference. It's a functional calculator in a pinch. It has a useful stopwatch for timing my lunch breaks. Pretty much the only feature I miss on it from my smartwatch is that it can't tell me the precise temperature outside with a little icon for the weather conditions. But you know what? I can live without that on my watch. Know why? Because if I really want to know, I can take my phone out of my goddamn pocket and turn it on. I always keep the weather clock on my home screen.
The best part, however, far and away, is the compliments.
I have never been complimented on a watch, well, end of sentence. The smartwatch certainly never won any - it was a smartwatch, everyone's seen one of those. But it seems I can't do two days without someone walking into the store and remarking on how "cool" or "retro" my calculator watch is. "Whoa, is that a calculator watch?" "I haven't seen those in ages!" "Where'd you get one of those?" "I've never seen a watch like that before!" Some of these people are wearing Apple watches as they say these things, and I tell them I bought it off Amazon for $30 because Casio still makes them and it replaced my smartwatch that I hated. It's wonderful. My $30 piece of Japanese plastic apparently makes more of an impact and fashion statement than the digital glass "watches" tech companies spend billions trying to convince people are cool, impactful fashion statements.
Anyways buy a calculator watch they're cool.
