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I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C
- arnon 1y ago"Should I buy one? That's up to you, champ. I'm not your real dad" cool cool cool....
- edent 1y agoSorry son, I didn't mean for you to find out this way. Xoxoxo
- aneutron 1y agoImpressive for a 16GBP watch !
- _giorgio_ 1y agoXiaomi mi bands used to cost the same and were much better
- croes 1y agoBut no USB-C
- _giorgio_ 1y agoBut subpar everything
- jaian 1y agoI bought one. The touch screen was not good. The heart rate sensor was wild inaccurate at times. It was a pain to sync with my phone. And the strap gave me a rash. Not that I expect the watch in the article to be any better.
- neurostimulant 1y agoThere is also huawei band, which has similar low price but with seemingly better software than the xiaomi smart band. At the very least, the sync process is easy on both android and ios.
- Hoodedcrow 1y agoIt also works with Gadgetbridge without having to pair it in the official app first (for Xiaomi bands, you need to do it to extract a key, not sure how consistently it's doable nowadays). Apparently the supported featureset is not as complete as for Xiaomi devices, but seems to be enough to cover the basics. So Huawei are also easier to use without having to send your data anywhere.
- ackfoobar 1y ago> The watch is simply missing the two 5.1k resistors connecting the CC1 and CC2 pins of the USB-C connector to ground that are required to indicate to whatever is plugged in that it wants 5v power. This is so annoying. Back when USB-C was less prevalent, I bought a pair of wireless earbuds over another for the same reason as the title - because it used USB-C. But then I cannot charge it with my macbook, unless I add a USB-C to USB-A adapter.
- KerrickStaley 1y agoThis problem seems prevalent on cheaper devices. When I buy a device and discover it has this problem I always return it. I've seen it on the Hypervolt Go 2 (which I returned and replaced with a Theragun Mini) and on the Hitachi Magic Wand Micro (which I replaced with a Dame Dip). Like the post mentions, I think this happens because the devices are missing two resistors that are needed to indicate, when connected via a USB-C to USB-C cable to a charging brick, that the device wants 5V power. Resistors are cheap and I think the only reason they get dropped is carelessness. The whole point of USB-C is that you can charge any device with any power supply.
- sschueller 1y agoThis happens because these devices had USB microB before and the manufacturer just replaced the port without reading the spec. Even some mainstream products have this issue. I have an automatic door opener from a large company and the battery pack has the same issue. It is shipped with a special cable you have to use as no other USB-C cable works.
- imtringued 1y agoThere is also another problem. The spec is large and it's not aimed at those who want to implement the simplest possible USB C compliant device. Based on the table of contents the most promising section is "2.3.4 USB Type-C VBUS Current Detection and Usage" but it doesn't actually talk about anything you actually need. You're supposed to click through to the section "4.6.2.1 USB Type-C Current" where it shows the reference circuit, but it doesn't tell you the values of Rd, which are in section "4.11.1 Termination Parameters". It's a 300+ page document where you must already know what you're looking for. If you didn't already know that you need two resistors, you wouldn't be able to figure it out with the spec alone.
- polarbear67 1y agoCan it run doo...
- wslh 1y agoIt's always good to remember that battery life in sports watches (aren't they smart?) can last a whole week, and some models even have complementary solar charging.
- GaggiX 1y agoYou can also use a "dumb" watch that has 10 years battery life.
- 1123581321 1y agoOr that constantly charges with a solar face or mechanical motion.
- _giorgio_ 1y agoYou can get a Rolex
- 1123581321 1y agoIn my case it’s just a Citizen chronograph from eBay for $100.
- jaian 1y agoA Casio 5610 also charges with sunlight. To me it is the ultimate watch.
- wslh 1y agoSure, but I was talking in the context of smart watches that have several health sensors.
- _giorgio_ 1y agoXiaomi mi band's 10 battery lasts a week with all the functions enabled at the most expensive setting
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- cattown 1y agoWow! “built in torch” immediately puts this one ahead of all other competition I’ve seen so far. Not even kidding.
- vanderZwan 1y agoI think they "just" meant "set OLED screen to full brightness white", which is the kind of app my cheap Amazfit has too. And I can say from experience that that is still really useful, because OLED screens are pretty darn bright. In the case of Amazfit (which I presume is similar here) you can set it up to turn on when long-pressing the dial, it can switch between white and red light by turning the dial, and it takes a few seconds to reach full brightness instead of just switching on. Meaning you have a chance to change it to red without waking everyone up in the middle of a camping trip.
- progval 1y ago> There's a built in LED which acts as a torch - which is only useful if you wear it on the left wrist.
- scotty79 1y agoCould be useful on the other hand if you could flip the face upside down. Surely people who wear watches on their right wrist prefer the wheel to be on the left side and the LED is on the same side.
- throwanem 1y agoDunno about this one, but my Amazfits all have the option for wearing direction, so you can decide which way the controls face on asymmetrical models. It works and I've thought about using it even though I'm not a southpaw; worn distally, the Balance's digital crown tends to snag on things.
- throwanem 1y agoYou can also automate night mode by time of day, which is nice if like me you prefer simply to wear your watch to sleep. The red night display mode, at minimal brightness in a dark room, is enough to see when you want it but not enough to disturb when you don't.
- ofrzeta 1y agoI have an Amazfit smartwatch that gets charged by a simple USB cable with two pins that magnetically attaches to the back of the watch. When I was on vacation and forgot that cable I was able to make my own by cutting a USB cable and attaching the wires to the contacts of the watch with tape. That simplicity is hard to beat. And this watch is water resistant.
- jkkola 1y agoI have one too and I swear by it, but let's face it - it's not £16. But thanks for the tip about the cable!
- ofrzeta 1y agoIt's not £16 but I got mine (GTS 2 mini) when there was some kind of sale in a huge online warehouse for around 50 Euros. Since then I tried in vain to find it again for that price, until recently someone sold a bunch of new ones on eBay for around 45 Euros. So now I got my spare one in a drawer :) The £16 got no GPS, too.
- albatrosstrophy 1y agoThe battery is the single reason why I got the Amazfit. I use as a dumb health tracker and occasional GPS running. It easily lasts 4 weeks on a single charge. That's one less proprietary charging cable to bring on a trip.
- 1dom 1y agoI've been dying to ask about this somewhere where I might get a really informed response: What's the deal with Amazfit? I have an Amazfit GTR and it's been rock solid for a couple of years. Before that, I had an Amazfit Bip for a few years which was incredible. It did notification, GPS, heart rate tracking, always on display and battery life of 2 - 4 weeks. It did this years and years ago, when the best Android could do was 24 - 48 hours, and it did it for like £60 instead of £200. It still works too! The Bip in particular seemed so ahead of what the average person expected from a smartwatch due to state of Android and Apple offerings at the time.
- killingtime74 1y agoIt would be great if this review had a bit more pixels. Bit hard to tell how good the screen is
- mancerayder 1y agoAs someone who loathes jewelry on myself and has no interest in the watch culture, nonetheless I have an interest in smart watches I can monitor things with. I'm turned off by big ugly blocks with childish straps.. is there anything remotely attractive?
- scblock 1y agoGarmin is my typical recommendation for decent fitness watches with good battery life. The venue and vivoactive have bright high res screens with raise to wake or always on (with a big battery life hit). There are also things like the lily or the vivomove. The straps are usually standard watch straps and easily changed.
- FredrikSE 1y agoI have the Forerunner 965 with the screen always on. Still manage about a week with several hours of gps tracking.
- tky 1y agoWithings makes smartwatches that do not scream Apple Watch
- MrJohz 1y agoLook into hybrid smart watches. Withings are fairly good, but there are a handful of alternatives. They're watches that use mechanical hands like a normal watch, but also include smart components like health tracking and notifications and things. They tend to be less powerful than other smart watches (in particular, you won't be able to download arbitrary apps to the watch or deeply configure it), and if you want a dedicated health tracker, you're probably better off with a minimalist Fitbit or something similar, but I really like them. They strike a nice balance between providing me with useful things, and still looking like a decent looking watch. The main companies in this space are Withings and Garmin.
- throwanem 1y agoI'd really love to see a hybrid Amazfit! The line's programmability is really delightful, and having mechanical hands above the face would clear up really my last regret about wearing a smartwatch at all.
- incone123 1y agoI have a Garmin with a monochrome LCD face. Ok, it can't compete on price but battery life is a couple of weeks (and can top up with solar) so the proprietary cable is not a big problem.
- KORraN 1y agoI was also a happy Garmin Instinct Solar user. It is until after two years it started to turn off whenever it vibrates. I disabled vibrations, but it's reduced to an expensive step counter now.
- vladvasiliu 1y agoWere the vibrations actually useful? I have an old Garmin something or other on my wrist right now, and I disabled vibrations because unless I'm sitting around doing nothing and I can hear them, I'd never notice them.
- KORraN 1y agoThey were for me, i.e. at work in the office where definitely I don't want to have sound notifications on. And since my phone usually lies on a desk, I don't want vibrations there either.
- denysvitali 1y agoSeems like a battery issue. Probably the vibration draws too much current and the battery just drops its voltage. Have you tried changing the battery?
- KORraN 1y agoNo, I didn't. Maybe it's not a bad idea. I read about the issue on the internet and it seems pretty common issue that sooner or later hits most of Instincts Solar gen 1. I contacted Garmin support since I've seen that in some of the cases they offered generous discounts for newer models or even gave them for free, but in my case they offered me to pay almost a full price for refurbished Instinct Solar gen 1, that most probably would have the same issue after some time.
- jonathanlydall 1y agoEven includes a screen protector on a GBP16 item! Not sure what it’s like in other countries, but here in South Africa you struggle to find a smart phone cover for much less than that. If you’re at the shops of the local scumbag company with a monopoly on legally distributing Apple products, they don’t offer a cover for less than USD25. Apple Watch covers cost a bit less at only like USD15. For screen protectors typical prices are around USD10, but you can point out the lunacy of what they’re charging for a single sheet of plastic and you can get that down to 7.5. It’s super annoying how much we get ripped off here, having covers and protectors is basically essential and all the sellers here seem to have a secret pact to not charge anything less than completely outrageous prices.
- KeplerBoy 1y agoOrder the stuff from china instead of paying your local distributor a convenience tax. You can have it cheap or fast.
- jonathanlydall 1y agoWith shipping cost on an overall small item cost, it’s unlikely to be much cheaper. We also have the problem here where if the shipper doesn’t use a courier service and tries to rely on the local postal service, it’s a bit of a gamble you’ll get the item at all, and if you do, it tends to take months.
- jpc0 1y agoTakealot brother, or visit your closest shopping center, there will be a store there with a man of asian decent willing to sell you whatever you need at a reasonable price. Screen protector for R89 on takealot right now, that’s what 5 dollars? And was the first result, did not even need to look hard.
- dmoreno 1y agoAnybody know if there is some effort for an open source firmware? It would be so cool to have a watch like that with the pinetime firmware...
- dcreater 1y agoWhy not the software itself? https://github.com/google/pebble https://github.com/google/pebble Or the whole stack: https://open-smartwatch.github.io/ https://open-smartwatch.github.io/
- fsflover 1y agoYou may like Pinetime smartwatch, which is cheap and runs free software.
- squarefoot 1y agoI would totally support the Pine64 folks as I already did with the PineCil (really good iron btw, and I have also Wellers), but the PineTime price going from $26.99 in the US to €66.25 if bought in the EU is simply an invite to shop from Aliexpress.
- fsflover 1y agoAFAIK you don't have to buy it in their EU shop. You can order it from China.
- floren 1y agoThanks to tariffs, the PineTime is $26 plus $25 shipping+duty now, so you're in good company. If a few people in the bay area wanted to do a group buy, you can get up to 5 watches for that same $25 shipping fee...
- 6581 1y agohttps://banglejs.com/ https://banglejs.com/
- lmpdev 1y agoUnironically this was one of the reasons I bought an iPhone 15 I was exhausted with keeping up with Android, but was not buying n-number of Lightning cables until they released it on USB-C
- ustad 1y agoThe colmi p8 (p80 i don’t know) can run micropython. https://github.com/wasp-os/wasp-os https://github.com/wasp-os/wasp-os
- ACCount36 1y ago[dead]
- LarMachinarum 1y agoThe Colmi P8, which is older, long replaced by myriads of newer china watches and now hard to even find, was one of the last cheap smartwatches to be based on the nRF52832 microcontroller/SOC which had the advantage (for that purpose) of being both well documented and yet not locked down. The successor SOC, the nRF52840, already had a flash securing feature that (except for devices that wouldn't use it or that would have exploitable vulns) made it easy for the manufacturer to lock the device down and to prevent the install of alternative firmwares. Also about that time, cheaper chinese SOCs came out and cheapo china smartwatches switched to using those instead of nRF. Trouble being: most of those chinese SOCs for smartwatches, aside from probably also having the lockdown problem, don't have much in terms of openly accessible documentation or developer tools. Consequently, pretty much all open source projects for cheapo china smartwatches apparently only support devices that are so old that you don't even find them anymore on aliexpress or other such shops. I'd be interested to know for what currently easily available cheap (i.e. not in a much higher price category) china smart watches there is an open source alternative firmware that does not miss half of the features.
- ustad 1y agoI’ve started playing with esp32/rp2350 based boards that have everything in the same form factor. The only thing missing is a fully waterproof enclosure (they expose the back pcb). And vibration motor.
- LarMachinarum 1y agothat could indeed be an option depending on your use case. The problem with those (aside from finding a suitable enclosure) is that while more powerful, they aren't at all optimized for use in really low-power conditions and that their energy consumption is consequently enormously higher than that of e.g. an nRF52 (e.g. nRF52832 or nRF52840), so that the battery time would likely be significantly shorter.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tehlike 1y agoPeople get surprised how cheap things really can be when they see aliexpress, and the assumption is crap. I bought a ton of stuff from aliexpress, and very rarely-if any- was crappy.
- globular-toast 1y agoWhat I've learnt from BigClive on YouTube is don't buy anything that plugs into the wall. If it's low voltage then you should be fine. I'd still be wary of large lithium ion batteries, though.
- Kerbiter 1y agoI dunno mate, I've bought a very popular 60W soldering iron for like 2.5 USD. It has a ceramic heater and a knob to adjust the temperature, the default tip it came with is great, and it's also easily disassemblable. It's far better in quality than anything I could've bought locally for the same price.
- bmsleight_ 1y agoGot a link to a it ? I love to replace my under power USB soldering iron
- tehlike 1y agoYou probably meant anything that plugs & stays plugged for extended periods of time. I probably would hesitate to buy large-battery-powered things from them, for now. Like e-bike etc. Also would hesitate to replace my circuit breakers with zigbee circuit breakers that can also measure power real time, for example. But there are a lot of good quality stuff that doesn't fit into the dangerous category. I bought a lot of sensors/smart home stuff, small home stuff like drip irrigation tubes/drip heads, apple find-my compatible trackers, poe cameras, 80x80 fans, label maker tape, poe extender etc.
- oezi 1y agoI am surprised they can break even with such a product. Considering 25% of the cost go to selling/fulfillment/etc., maybe 8 Pounds for the BOM (?) they might earn 3-4 Pounds per item sold. To offset the cost of development (maybe 20-30 man years at 20k USD for Chinese engineers), would imply the want to sell at least 100.000 units just to break even. Is there enough market for this? All numbers spit-balled.
- maxglute 1y agoHoping for open source watch OS some day, so many OEM / white label cheap smartwatch/fitness bands. Already exists for cheap cloud cameras. Could be the F91W of our time. Also I'd gladly ditch USB C for a few programmable media buttons. Standardize on some sort of bogo pins and buy 20 adapters or split cables to keep the water proofing.
- jama211 1y agoOne thing I wonder though is why they’d need to charge a watch on the bus when battery life on smart watches is typically way more than 1 day and you can charge it overnight? I mean each to their own but I would haaate the hassle of charging anything on a bus…
- Aachen 1y agoThe post mentions it does sleep tracking
- jama211 1y agoThat’s fair I suppose. That being said, modern smart watches charge so fast there’s surely another way. I also just personally use an old smart watch I have lying around for sleep tracking. I’d still rather buy two $16 smart watches than have to charge one on the bus haha.
- Arech 1y agoTBH, such a low price for so many working (!) features is an amazing achievement if not subsidized! What bothers me here, however, is...a provenance. Let me guess, it asks from your smartphone access to your location, contacts, calendar, SMS archive, email, medical records and political views and attitude towards CCP and then does some shady syncs with .cn servers "just to keep you data safe in case a meteor hits you"... Sad. ADDED: Oh, seems like some people like to pretend that the results of "some other" companies getting this information are totally, totally the same.
- rvnx 1y agoSounds like any Samsung or Google watch
- Arech 1y agoPlease don't pretend you don't understand that risks of Google/Apple maybe even Samsung getting the information is just "a tiny bit different".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ewidar 1y agoTo non Americans, and given the current political climate imposed by the American government, no it's not very different.
- sfjailbird 1y agoYes, it's worse. Seven eyes almost certainly snoop on me, in partnership with those companies. CCP might, but even if they did, idgaf.
- floren 1y agoFive Eyes. Seven Eyes is a band, SevenEves is a book by Neil Stephenson.
- graemep 1y agoWhy does anyone need to charge a smartwatch on a bus? They charge very quickly and last for days. A Pine64 is not much more expensive, and works with the Gadgetbridge app, and is open (there is even a choice of two OSes). It works with Gadgetbridge so the app does not have all the same functionality and also has rough edges (but so does any cheap smartwatch). I even prefer the charger as its a magnetic cradle so the watch snaps into place when placed on it.
- card_zero 1y agoNot only the smart watch, but a hundred other gadgets including a toothbrush. Presumably this process involves bringing a USB hub onto the bus, or else the bus is not the main point here. I think it's like I want to be able to charge my watch on the bus if I feel like it.
- davidgerard 1y agoLotta electric buses in the UK have a USB-A charging port at every seat. Carrying a cable with you can pay off!
- edent 1y agoWhy do you charge your phone on the bus? You've never left the house and realised you're running low on battery?
- pacifika 1y agoI’m concerned about all privacy angle of this personal information vacuum device category. What are the recommended privacy focused alternatives? Also a smart watch without firmware updates seems like an infection spreader?
- hopelite 1y agoI’ve never understood the value proposition of a smart watch for that reason. It seems mostly a fantasy thing based on having been conditioned by movies all their lives. Even the primary use case as a fitness tracker does not make any real sense; because as a beginner through novice, you don’t need to track minute details, it’s about simply getting to a consistent habit, and as an advanced person, you get nothing more from what a watch can track than you would from simply performing your routine and maybe timing yourself and journaling, which has its own separate benefits that are lost with a “smart watch”. Given all the negatives (to users, not to the corporations you become a harvested product to), it simply does not make sense to have a smart watch, aka a tracking bracelet.
- edent 1y agoYou can use this with GadgetBridge if you're concerned about your privacy. Given the small amount of memory and its inability to run 3rd party code, I'd be staggered if this could be used as a vector for anything. What's it going to do, spam ignorable BLE messages?
- eagleal 1y agoThere's a category which is unbelievable it doesn't have as much popularity on open protocols/oss support which is a killer feature for these kind of wearables: glucose levels tracking with reverse engineered vendor lock-ins (think of Abbott sensors, etc).
- Hilift 1y agoThis is the oldest trick in the book. In 1946 a guy named Diet Smith invented the 2-Way Wrist Radio: - In June 1954, the radio was upgraded to increase the range from 500 miles to 1,000 miles, then again in 1956 to 2,500 miles. - In 1964, the 2-Way Wrist Radio was upgraded to the 2-Way Wrist TV. - Tracy gave his young son Joe an obsolete Wrist Radio, which Joe was able to use to call for help when he was abducted and held hostage by dognappers. We've been falling for this stuff for 80 years! https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_Radio https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_Radio
- Reason077 1y ago> "I plugged it until fully charged, then wore it conti> nuously. After 24 hours of use, even with all my fiddling, that battery was at 80%. After four days, it still had 40% left"* So if a £16 generic competitor can last 4 days, what's Apple doing wrong? Why can't a £450 Apple Watch (non-Ultra) last a full 24 hours on a charge?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- oezi 1y agoApple just put in a more capable processor, wifi and cellular, a brighter display and more sensors. They are just consuming the entire battery over a day because it is not such a big deal for customers.
- berkes 1y agoIs it not a big deal? Or do customers lack the choice? If Apple had two lines of smartwatches, one for city/work crowd with the WiFi, Bright screen, NFC, powerful processor etc. but with tiny battery life. And another for hike/off-grid/travel/festival crowd without wifi, a slower, blander screen, slower hardware, less features but over a week)weeks on one charge. Would people not buy the second option?
- ramses0 1y agoIt wouldn't fly and/or would be "one more SKU" to support with expensive software development. They've seriously stuck themselves in a pickle with their WatchOS offering. They can't move away from touch-screen b/c they've committed to "being able to enter a PIN" from the device (so they can offer AND PROTECT on-watch payment capabilities). They can't move away from touch-screen b/c they've duped all the uber's and door-dash's, and big-bank.com into writing "watch apps" that assume a touch screen. The Garmin Fenix has the best response to this that I've seen so far, a "pinch-to-activate" touch screen on some of their watches with "enough" buttons (Up, Down, OK, Back, "light"). You can use the watch normally without fear of accidental activations and when you start up the map-type-stuff, it'll either auto-activate a twiddly touchscreen or you can "pinch to activate" (hold two diagonal buttons for 2-3 seconds) and then start messing with it (or are able to turn it off w/o issue). They can't move away from bright color screens because then people can't have pictures of their kids on their watch, and at that point it's no longer an "Apple" product.
- m00dy 1y agowell, ehm, China is unstoppable.
- izzydata 1y agoI can see usb-c being convenient for a smartwatch, but for a fitness watch they you are going to wear while hiking, swimming or any type of rugged outdoor activity it is important to not be a hole that can get a bunch of stuff stuck in it. Unlike proprietary cables for smartphones of the past the connector on high end smartwatches aren't there because they are trying to sell you a bunch of expensive cables and accessories that use that port.
- edent 1y agoAs I mention in the post, there's an integrated rubber lug which protects the port.
- Aachen 1y agoDoes it require the manufacturer's servers to be available to function? I find it strange that in this whole, cool, nerdy review there's no mention of whether the device is fully yours and works on your phone, or if the app is (like in most smartwatches) just a glorified browser tab for your health data stored plaintext on a free service
- edent 1y agoAs I say in the post: > You can always uninstall the app once done setting it up. So no need to rely on 3rd party servers. I also mention that you can use GadgetBridge if you want to store your own data locally.
- Aachen 1y agoOh nice, I missed that bit, thank you! Saw the mention of Gadgetbridge but didn't know that meant it's usable offline. I've only ever used it for upgrading Pinetime firmware iirc That makes this a seriously good option, I was looking for this a while ago but didn't find anything besides Pinetime, so I ordered a Pinetime and found out the heartbeat sensor is about as accurate on my wrist as tarot cards (I know it works for a few people, but most seemed to have the same issue). Everything else I could find back then was cloud-based or didn't do health tracking (or, n=1, didn't support Android)
- mk_stjames 1y ago> Anything you buy from AliExpress for the cost of a couple of pints is bound to be a bit crap. This line kinda got me down, because, well, last night I went out for a few pints and paid €16 for two drinks; Here we have a miracle of modern technology available shipped to your door for about the same price of what it now costs to just go out and do the thing people have done when socializing for the last 1500 years. We're subsidizing the costs of all this modern tech by heavily taxing ourselves on the things once taken as nearly the bare minimum lifestyle.
- octo888 1y agoI heard it summarised recently as: In the past goods were expensive; living was cheap. Now goods are cheap; living is expensive.
- ajmurmann 1y agoI think the mistake is seeing the beer to watch ratio and assuming that beers are hard to afford now. One primary reason beer in a pub is expensive is because of cost of labor scaling badly in the pub but extremely well for the watch. It's Baumol Cost Disease. The beer only costs more because the other work the pub staff is doing could be more productive now elsewhere. So in the end of the day, unless you are an alcoholic, you can likely afford more beers just because everything else has gotten so much cheaper. One caveat I want to call out though is of course the skyrocketing housing cost which also impact rent (or opportunity cost of they own) for the pub and thus the beer price as well. This is where I really don't understand how NIMBYs continue to get their way.
- KnuthIsGod 1y agoTime for USB - D
- phreeza 1y agoWhat I would love is a watch like this where I can fetch the raw HR and O2 data and run my own analysis. Last time I checked there wasn't much in that direction, outside of super expensive "research grade" equipment, and a single model of polar HR strap (I want a watch).
- hoppp 1y agoI would buy it to try to deploy code on it, just cuz I can connect via usbc
- rurban 1y agoI hate those watches with direct USB ports, I prefer those magnetic connectors via USB-C. Can also charge them in the bus, if needed. You get such watches from Ali for ~20€, with all the sensors. With gadgetbridge.org you got a proper Software app without phoning home to China, only to the NSA via Google. My favorite is still the Huawei/Honor Smart Watch 2, but the GT5 comes close. Still have to try the HarmonyOS watches, which should be better than Android. And a GPS routing connector to Google Maps
- sdk16420 1y agoI used to have a similarly priced Withings smartwatch clone; worked very well for years until I switched to a new phone and the app turned out to be gone from the store and the log in servers were offline. Without the app you can't get notifications or even sync the time and the watch is useless. Yes, well-known brands also discontinue software, but with a cheap watch like this, it's almost guaranteed to become a paperweight in a few years. Now I have a real Withings, at 10 times the price of the fake, it honestly offers only a marginally better experience.
- Zak 1y agoI will try very hard not to buy any product that requires a companion app for major functionality unless it's based on an open protocol (e.g. Matter), the app is open source (e.g. Pebble), or it's well-supported by a third-party open source solution (e.g. gadgetbridge.org).
- pvtmert 1y agonot really watch related but > cost of a couple of pints in 2025, I guess it can be a maximum of 2.5 pints. Because in Luxembourg, the price of a pint became 6-8 euros...
- xk3 1y agoI misread this as "I bought a £16 _sandwich_ just because it used USB-C" so I await that future blog post...