> an enormous amount of watches becomes useless worldwide Not necessarily, some (many?) of these watches are usable without being connected to a phone. Besides

> an enormous amount of watches becomes useless worldwide Not necessarily, some (many?) of these watches are usable without being connected to a phone. Besides being a funcional watch, including timers and alarms, all the fitness tracking and activity recording features work fine, even those that use GPS, at least on my Venu 2.