Can you recommend a smartwatch to me?

[andrewducker]

I currently use a Huawei Watch 2, which works really well. I don't care about any of the health tracking stuff, but it displays notifications well (which is what I do care about), and allows me to set timers (which is also handy). The bad thing about it is that the battery is slowly dying, and it's no longer lasting past about 5pm.

There are plenty of modern smartwatches that have much longer batter lives. But the cheaper end seem to deal with notifications badly. So I can have a Huawei Watch GT 2, with 14 days battery life (yay!) for £90 (yay!) but it uses their own watch OS that is nowhere near as fully featured. Or I can have a Ticwatch Pro 3, with 3 days of battery life (good enough, to be honest, as it means that even if the battery life halves after a few years it'll still last the day), that deals with notifications well, but costs £200 (boo!).

So I'm basically wondering if anyone has experiences with smartwatches, and can recommend a current one that's cheap, handles notifications well, and has at least a 3 day battery life.

Comments

[rhythmaning]

No, but I've been thinking of getting one myself - I was looking at the Huawei GT whatever, but was put off by the US sanctions - so I'd be interested in what gets recommended!

[andrewducker]

It looks good!

[dreema]

i've been using the samsung s3 frontier for a couple years now. Battery life is in the 'few' days mark. I've had no issues with it doing notifications, you can set the apps that are allowed and it'll buzz and pop up a screen alert with the message on. It also has limited support for responding, i've found having a pre-typed 'I'm driving, back soon' message quite useful. There is a t9 style keyboard available but given the screen size and my finger size this was rather fiddly.
One downside is you're tied to the samsung 'store' for everything - new screens, app updates, etc.

[dreema]

So having just taken mine off charge, battery remaining with standard usage 3 days, 22 hours, 49 mins. On power saving that's 9 days,8 hours, 2 mins and on watch only 41 days, 11 hours and 11 mins.
Obvs that'll change on usage, etc.

[andrewducker]

Thanks!

[threemeninaboat]

I have Samsung GUESS and the battery lasts till the end of the day LOL

Guess doesn't even make smartwatches for women anymore.

[agoodwinsmith]

Rule about purchases for which you have decide opinions: buy the one that has the features you want, no matter the price. If you buy the not-great-but-okay, you will ultimately buy the one you wanted to buy in the first place. *nods*

[andrewducker]

This is definitely generally true.

But I'm not sure there's a *right* answer here, because of all the compromises.

[andrewducker]

Update: I've pretty much done this.

[agoodwinsmith]

Good. I can't/won't tell you how much money I've wasted learning this rule.

[birguslatro]

If you want a fun one that you might be able wrangle into doing what you want, try the Banglejs...

https://banglejs.com/

The 2 would probably be the more practical one, as 1 is huge. And the 2 should be available soon, as its Kickstarter versions are currently being shipped.

[andrewducker]

That looks very cool! I shall wait for it to be generally available and see what the reviews are like.

[birguslatro]

A couple of early reviews...

https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/comments/r94o9q/my_banglejs_2_review/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbl-h2Gtolg

And it looks like they'll be available to buy in January.

I've had the Banglejs 1 for a few weeks now, and it is fun to program. You can program it here (in Chrome) https://www.espruino.com/ide/ and it sends your code to the watch for testing via bluetooth. Works well and seems rock-solid.

[andrewducker]

I liked the Reddit one. Not for me at the moment (I don't have time to spend on playing with tech at the moment), but give it 6 months and it'll probably be where I want it to be.