Biometrics, heart rate and sleep tracking are huge, like 95% of the reason I own a smart watch. It's a sensor, not a UI. Everything else can be done better on a phone.

I turn off notifications (because if I get a message on my watch, what am I going to do with it? watch is basically read-only)

One use that comes up a lot: setting a timer. Being able to ad hoc set timers with your voice is huge - without it, my coffee would get cold, my laundry would stay wet, and my kid would be late because dad got distracted by a HN comment.

Apple Series 3 owner for about 9 years.

1. Notifications. Most useful in noisy environments such as grocery stores, airports, shop floors, or any place you may be wearing hearing protection. Also great while working with your hands, like car work or cooking and directions while driving. It’s best to limit them to the apps that matter, and only when you need them.

2. Biometrics.

However, after this watch finally dies, I don’t think I will be going back. Big reason is smart watches are not stylish at all. For men watches are our only fashion accessory that we can freely wear in all occasions. No matter what band or watch face you use you are stuck with a black square attached to your wrist. Also smart watch battery life is a bit of a bummer, it’s hard to beat self winding or solar powered watches that you never think about changing as long as you wear them.

I run every day. Started doing it for multiple reasons, some of them being health. The watch tells me my pulse, speed, cadence, calories burned. I doubt the numbers are very accurate, but they are consistent, and, probably, not too far off outside of cases of obvious misreading. It also has a way of collecting some data about swimming (which I don't understand, like what is swolf? I know, I could look it up, but I'm a terrible swimmer, so I don't bother).

For people who like to leave their phone in random places around the house, the watch can help in locating it. You can also almost always turn off the alarm on your phone w/o getting out of bed (provided you sleep with your watch on and the phone's bluetooth didn't decide to randomly disconnect).

All this said, I think that smartphones, in general, provide very marginal utility. A little bit of convenience here and there but nothing groundbreaking. If phones had better GPS antennas and a framework to attach devices like pulseox or sphygmomanometer they'd be preferable to the watch because the display is bigger and the input is (slightly) more convenient.

I stopped wearing my Apple Watch because notifications were too distracting when trying to work (even with Work Focus, I want some notifications, but I don’t want my wrist buzzing and lighting up all the time). I don’t miss it. The only real use I ever got was GPS directions when riding a bike or electronic scooter. I guess I also tracked my runs with it. But I don’t use those often enough, and I can wear the watch for those situations if needed.

I do also love the idea, though. I think part of the limiting factor is that you can’t attach sensors or peripherals to it. Even with a hackable watch like in TFA, there’s only so much you could add without it getting bulky. And the screen is too small to do much with.

I switched from Apple Watch to a Garmin Fenix 7, for much longer battery life (advertised as ~14 days, in practice 10-12), durability (they're very tough), better biometrics, and stuff like built-in maps/GPS (I camp/hike/hunt/etc a lot). I just didn't use any watchOS features, and I use an MVNO that doesn't support sim cloning so cellular's a wash. In short even with reduced features I am considering just going back to an old analog Timex Explorer and using a dedicated GPS device, because even the more limited feature set of the Garmin seems like I'm barely using what it's capable of.

Don’t have one capable of it, but listening to music whilst running without a clumsy phone to hold/strap to my arm/put in a silly belt would be awesome.

Same here, loved the idea since I was a kid and I spend a lot more money on gadgets than I probably should but somehow managed to avoid getting a smartwatch because it doesn’t do anything a smartphone does better. I just wear a simple casio solar powered watch I got for about $100 which I never have to charge. I still like the idea of something programmable though, but this watch in OP is a bit too DIY for my tastes.

They're great for doing phone stuff without pulling your phone out of your pocket and unlocking it. I can check if a notification is important, get GPS directions, snooze alarms, get OTP/2FA codes, or check the weather. None of it it is critical but it's collectively a quality of life improvement.

Just two things for me: telling time, same as yourself, and notifying me that my watch has a text message I might want to attend to. If I could replace the notification feature somehow I’d do that.

I used to use it for running but it performs that job very poorly compared to my $200 Garmin.

Lately the only useful thing I get out of it is Auto Unlock my phone when I’m wearing a helmet and gloves.

Some applications that we use in smartphones are very useful, like the alarm clock. I have begrudgingly adapted to their quirks and privacy implications. I'd rather program my own versions, same for smartwatches.

I like your hpdl watch better than the LilyGo watch. As a lover of analog and casio watches I can tell you that your watch can soon build you a loyal following in its current form if you only build 3 such watches and put them on Amazon, etc. and price them at 50$. Next batch of 3 you could try at 100$. Don't worry about glass cover, our local watch repair guy can easily slap one in it

Ok, we'll make the title say programmable instead.

Love it, especially your choice of digit display. Very nice hack! I'd wear that.

Where you can buy pinetine for 40$?

The Sensor Watch circuit board [1] inside the case of a Casio F91-W / A158W / A159W satisfies 2, 4, 5, and 6. Accelerometer or thermometer available as daughterboard. Battery life measured in months, if not years. Although the simple LED backlight and the segmented LCD leaves a bit to be desired, and there is no wireless connectivity for notifications. Open source firmware.

The Ollee watch circuit board [2] is similar, better backlight but closed-source firmware and configuration over BLE in a smartphone app. Still no notifications over BLE though.

I'd think combining 1 and 6 (O₂ monitoring and waterproofing) would be difficult.

[1]: https://www.sensorwatch.net/

[2]: https://www.olleewatch.com/

Well as a pebble evangelist I have great news! The heartrate sensor on the PT2 can also do O2 monitoring, they’re planning on implementing it in the future :)

You'd barely pick up anything with a lora antenna that small

It had a Bosch motion sensor with AI abilities it says in the description.

There's an older "Plus" model available on Amazon.[1] Surprisingly cheap, at US$66. This new model is the "Ultra".

It's amazing that the market is big enough to get the price that low.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/LILYGO-T-Watch-S3-Development-SX1280-...

the same for me, however I can imagine that creating a good sleep analysing software based on the hypothethical HRM and accelerometer is mission impossible. I find the best software is Garmin at the moment of writing, or at least suits me well, and it blocks me from buying any opensource watch, unless I want to have two watches on my hands

September 18, 2020. That's when Apple released their Watch Series 6, which has an always on color display, and enough battery to last all day.

A Garmin memory-in-pixel eInk (MIP) watch? Lots of choices there, since about 2015. Modern versions (MIP not AMOLED, the category is getting confusing) last about 10 days on a charge.

Watches with color memory-in-pixel displays have existed since Pebble.

Bad.

I would consider a DIY mechanical/analog watch to be far bigger news/more impressive than a smartwatch.

Watchy fits the bill:

https://watchy.sqfmi.com/

I have one, its a bit bulkier than I'd thought it would be, but its a fine piece of timekeeping ..

The peripherals are great until you realize there's a dirth of software to use with them .. like, GPS is fun and everything, but not if all you've got is the coordinates ..

I really love the idea of LoRA in a watch though, so I hope that once this gets shipped, the software makes some leaps and bounds ..

That stood out to me, too. Garmin should take a hint.

Several Garmin watches last for weeks (24 days full charge, actual 1-2 weeks with heavy gps and fitness tracking), and I struggle to understand why consumers accept anything less. It seems like consumers don't realize what's available.

I'm not sure if my Pixel Watch 3 is much more efficient than your 4 or if by "constant use" you literally mean scrolling through it actively for hours at a time, but I only charge mine maybe twice a week. It's on at all times, connected to my phone via Bluetooth and to my Wi-Fi network when I'm home, and I actively manage any push notifications I get from it, but otherwise it seems to idle fairly efficiently.

I’ll need to check my notes on power consumption. I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying out different modes and configurations… it’s not great. I would not expect years at all. You gotta be very careful about what has to stay on and off.

Furthermore, bugs. To this time there’s random crashes that happen with sleep which limits their use

Galaxy watch 7 (I think) weather here. Also about 30 hours. It's a charge every day thing, but allowing for some forgetfulness. It's not ideal, but it's manageable and certainly functional.

Nordic Semi, or maybe ST Micro. I've got an STM32WB on my bench at the moment with sensitive coulomb counting and it looks very promising but without all those radios. Of course with all those radios (ie, if you need LoRa on a watch... which is a design decision I'm also skeptical of) then Nordic has a good track record.

For an application using bluetooth low energy, a Nordic NRF52840 turned out to be the winner.

Not natively. It's not a supported architecture and lacks an MMU. Those who have run Linux on it have done so through a RISC-V emulator or similar.

I for one like it is ESP-IDF with FreeRTOS, at least we get some variation.

I'm very excited about this. GPS was the final piece of the puzzle.

I love(d) my bangle.js. Such a true hacker device. Really fun to use WebUSB and push JavaScript files as apps.

But the GPS on that device was a mess, honestly. I know this is a complicated problem but having to synchronize to satellites and recalibrate all the time was beyond me.

I really wanted it to work because I built my own toy run tracker visualization tool.

I am curious about this new lilygo device because it sounds like it has an alternative location sensor: "A u-blox MIA-M10Q GNSS module provides accurate location tracking..."

I'll need to look that up. Anyone have a summary on what's the difference between that and regular GPS?

Oh nice, didn't realize they were doing a second one. Loved the original but I took mine rock climbing and cracked it :(

The underlying Garmin platform is so old that it predates iPhone/Android. I think you can plug in many Garmins via USB without any special software and simply copy activities and data off the watch.

They had a segment of customers who wouldn't have or be allowed to connect a phone - triathletes, long-distance hikers, military. But it's been slowly changing as users want more modern features and the company wants to increase sales.

not sure if this will help you but there is a neat website that allows you to build free maps for older Garmin models that didn't have them at first like Fenix5

https://garmin.bbbike.org/

1990s is going way back though, they didn't even have mass-storage mode then, it was their proprietary "garmin mode" for usb which only things like BaseCamp can talk to