@phendrick I bought a Martian watch from meh that worked decently but looked just ok. I bought martian’s final Kickstarter watch but it
Didn’t work properly. Then they went bankrupt, sigh. Too bad, I liked their approach.
I got fooled by the ad copy about the olio. Maybe it was useful with Android? Nice hardware though. I just found the band the other day, going to put it on my Apple Watch.
Fitbit Inspire 2, which I detest. The very limited information it will display is absolutely unreadable in sunlight, it takes for effing ever to sync with the app in the morning, the original band was as comfortable as an LAPD handcuff, the replacement third-party bands all have their own ways of annoying me, and it takes overnight to charge it. More often than not, I actually wear an el-cheapo Zewa 21200 instead. My insurance company sent it unbidden last month. I can read its display outdoors, the plastic band doesn’t annoy me, and it’s actually reasonably useful. I also have a Virmee that I avoid because it’s huge, but it was more useful than the Fitbit.
@werehatrack Several years ago I had the big Fitbit that wasn’t a “smart” watch… and I hated it. I still wore it (until the horrid band broke) because I paid for it, but it didn’t bring me much utility. And even though it claimed it could go “up to 7 days” (or something) on one charge, I don’t think it could actually make it 3 without charging. (one time I turned on the GPS for a more accurate measure of distance traveled, and that cut the battery life down to just a couple hours)
Anyway, Fitbit did not win me over. And it turns out I like not having a bulky watch on my wrist.
@werehatrack@xobzoo When a company in their ad copy touts their product delivers “up to” some level of performance, I always take that as their guarantee that it will perform somewhere (maybe significantly) below that.
I bought the Martian off Meh years ago. Liked it at first so got a second of a different colour.
Quickly got tired of them. One… Yet another thing to keep charging every night or two, and instead of helping me focus by not making me check phone every son often… I found it as distracting as hell.
For a month or so loved the smart watch but quickly got annoyed having them and stopped wearing them.
@OnionSoup I have thought I might possibly like a smart watch, if it integrated correctly with my phone, but I’ve been too skeptical to drop the money on one.
Your mention of it being distracting sounds likely to apply to me, too. I think I’ll continue to sit it out until someone I know and trust can convince me they’re worth getting.
I tried a Fitbit chip. But it was not that good. So I ended up getting an Open Box iWatch series 2, then had to replace it several years later with another iWatch, series 7, open box. I love it!
Samsung Gear S3. I really loved it when I was a Samsung phone user, but we switched to iPhones, and while it is “compatible,” it only sort of works most of the time. It was rather a disappointment. Now I’m casually looking for an iWatch since those are definitely compatible, but really expensive.
Apple Watch Series 7. I really like it, though I find the oximeter to be inaccurate. Kind of annoying, since that function was why I upgraded from the series 5. But otherwise it’s great.
@Kyeh That’s the one i started with! My friend gave me her spare one, then it died on me, so i replaced it with the Charge 3, which i had almost a year when the screen started going (a common problem with that model, i discovered). You’re smart to stick with the Alta till the wheels fall off!
I didn’t make it in time for the warranty, so i decided to give them one more chance & got the Charge 5, due to a couple of additional health functions that i thought would be useful. So far, it’s held up in the hardware department, but the software issues are piling up. This might be my last one, if they don’t get their act together!
@Kyeh I almost forgot, there was one more problem with the Charge 5 that shouldn’t be an issue with any product over $100. Or, anywhere near $100, for that matter. The soft silicone band it comes with (nice design, at least) was making a lot of people break out in rashes, including me. I’ve never had a problem with any other silicone band I’ve tried, weird. Luckily, you can get decent replacement bands dirt cheap online, so that’s what i did, but i wasn’t exactly thrilled.
@ircon96 I started with a Flex that someone gave me; got an Alta when the Flex died; bought an AltraHR to keep in reserve when they were on sale one year (and that’s what I’m using now.) I also had a One, the little clip-on, but didn’t use it much. I like them well enough for counting steps and recording sleep; I’ve never used it for much of anything else. I asked a couple of questions in their forum way back and found it to be incredibly annoying - full of braggy show-offs and incredibly arbitrary mods . So it serves as a watch/pedometer/sleep tracker and nothing more! (Sorry, that turned out to be a lot of verbiage!)
I had a slight problem with the band but just made it loose so it slides around like a bracelet. I didn’t know they’d been bought by Google but I’m annoyed at how the dashboard’s gotten more and more boring and minimal. The oldest one had a balloon smiley face that delighted me to a ridiculous degree; but I guess it was too much trouble for them somehow.
@Kyeh Yep, Alphabet/Google sure know how to screw things up. They come from the school of, “If it ain’t broke, let’s tweak it.” Oy.
Re: Herman’s accent, i know what you mean, they make the Beatles sound like they’re from Ohio! Some of my favorite British series are set in northern England & those accents are thick! He mentioned in an interview awhile back that he intentionally played up the accents to be different from all the other British bands that were singing in American accents, and he would change his, depending on the song. I always thought it was just because he had an especially heavy one! Lol
@ircon96 Oh, interesting - I never knew that!
“a luvely dotta…” It worked, didn’t it! With some of the British mysteries set in places like Yorkshire I need subtitles, especially if they mumble.
@Ziggie I have one that I liked, but the battery died and I have not had the dogged determination needed (IIRC) to replace the battery. I liked it, too.
@Ziggie I wish all of these watches, etc, made replacement practical. The battery in my Wahoo Elemnt bike computer died and the company does not replace them. Online guides said you can replace it but will probably break the screen while doing it! I bought a Karoo which will probably have the same issue.
Fitbit charge 5. Not sure why. Also not sure this is a watch. Went 25 years with no watch then the world (work) started sending me hundreds of communications via my phone. Tried it to keep from looking at my phone every 3 minutes. Life has slowed a bit or I have. Only use it for the time a few times a day. Hmmm
I have one like this from Morningsave that I don’t wear often as most of the features are not that important to me, and it is big. My favorite watch is an LL Bean watch with hands you can see in the dark with no buttons to press, etc. It has a subtle glow from self-illuminating hands and numbers so it does not disturb your neighbors in a play.
Garmin Venu 2 Plus. The Google Assistant integration is hot garbage on toast, but the fitness features work great and I like that it can broadcast my heart rate to my Garmin bike computer.
Yes. Just wore out a hand-me-down really old Apple. Loved it. The exercise program nagged me every day until I got those rings complete. Now have a refurbished Apple SE. It is more complex and I’m just getting to figuring it out, but think the relationship will be successful eventually.
I had a Garmin, but my wife gifted me an Apple. SO much more, but all the apps keep reminding me of stuff that isn’t that necessary. I guess I’ll have to remove some of them, but I’m lazy.
I have a Casio with a built in weather station. It does stuff no smart watch can do, and has none of the irritating drawbacks and dubious features of a smart watch.
Garmin makes one with a GPS receiver and ballistic calculator and none of the other annoying smart watch features. I’d wear that. But I’d also forget to charge it all the time.
But seriously, I’ve had a Fitbit Charge 5 for awhile, because it’s not one of the huge chunky ones & it has the basic functions that i actually use. I don’t need to handle emails & texts with it, just mainly heart rate & sleep.
Well, once Google took over the company, it seems to have gone downhill. They made some changes to the app that outraged a lot of users, but the thing that’s annoying me is that it’s no longer tracking sleep data fully. I realize that these watches don’t have the greatest accuracy, especially with sleep, but it used to give me a general idea that seemed to be reasonably on point. Now it only seems to track short periods, not even long enough to record the stages most of the time. Very unimpressed, Google. These things aren’t cheap!
I don’t even have a dumb watch. Sometime 2004-ish(?) I realized I was looking at my wrist many times per day. And I really didn’t need to know the time - it was just a habit. I realized I spend most of the day in front of a screen that has a clock in the corner. And when I wasn’t in front of the screen, I was in my car … with a clock on the dash. In the rare time I wasn’t somewhere with a clock, I could pull out my cell phone. So I quit wearing a watch and have never seen a reason to change that.
@smyle I had the same epiphany (at about the same time).
But after constantly wearing a wristwatch since I was 8 years old, I can still make out the spot they used to occupy on my left wrist.
Still rocking the Samsung Frontier Gear S3 because it does NFC payments for Android pay and samsung pay and supports MST payment to pay on readers that only have magentic strips (no chip). Had an original Sony Ericsson Live View back in the day, the Martian or 2, and a pebble all before the Samsung.
Samsung Galaxy 4. Most of the times I like it sometimes it annoys me but that’s like everything else in life
Fitbit Versa 3
I don’t even like my step tracker, but I wear it anyway.
Anything more would be a effin’ nuisance!
Apple Watch Series 6
Several bought from Meh. None seem to work.
(Coincidence? I think not.)
@phendrick I bought a Martian watch from meh that worked decently but looked just ok. I bought martian’s final Kickstarter watch but it
Didn’t work properly. Then they went bankrupt, sigh. Too bad, I liked their approach.
I got fooled by the ad copy about the olio. Maybe it was useful with Android? Nice hardware though. I just found the band the other day, going to put it on my Apple Watch.
Fitbit Inspire 2, which I detest. The very limited information it will display is absolutely unreadable in sunlight, it takes for effing ever to sync with the app in the morning, the original band was as comfortable as an LAPD handcuff, the replacement third-party bands all have their own ways of annoying me, and it takes overnight to charge it. More often than not, I actually wear an el-cheapo Zewa 21200 instead. My insurance company sent it unbidden last month. I can read its display outdoors, the plastic band doesn’t annoy me, and it’s actually reasonably useful. I also have a Virmee that I avoid because it’s huge, but it was more useful than the Fitbit.
@werehatrack Several years ago I had the big Fitbit that wasn’t a “smart” watch… and I hated it. I still wore it (until the horrid band broke) because I paid for it, but it didn’t bring me much utility. And even though it claimed it could go “up to 7 days” (or something) on one charge, I don’t think it could actually make it 3 without charging. (one time I turned on the GPS for a more accurate measure of distance traveled, and that cut the battery life down to just a couple hours)
Anyway, Fitbit did not win me over. And it turns out I like not having a bulky watch on my wrist.
@werehatrack @xobzoo When a company in their ad copy touts their product delivers “up to” some level of performance, I always take that as their guarantee that it will perform somewhere (maybe significantly) below that.
I bought the Martian off Meh years ago. Liked it at first so got a second of a different colour.
Quickly got tired of them. One… Yet another thing to keep charging every night or two, and instead of helping me focus by not making me check phone every son often… I found it as distracting as hell.
For a month or so loved the smart watch but quickly got annoyed having them and stopped wearing them.
@OnionSoup I have thought I might possibly like a smart watch, if it integrated correctly with my phone, but I’ve been too skeptical to drop the money on one.
Your mention of it being distracting sounds likely to apply to me, too. I think I’ll continue to sit it out until someone I know and trust can convince me they’re worth getting.
Apple Watch 7. I had a 4, but my daughter got me the 7 for Christmas last year. I like it, but wish it had a longer battery life.
I tried a Fitbit chip. But it was not that good. So I ended up getting an Open Box iWatch series 2, then had to replace it several years later with another iWatch, series 7, open box. I love it!
Samsung Gear S3. I really loved it when I was a Samsung phone user, but we switched to iPhones, and while it is “compatible,” it only sort of works most of the time. It was rather a disappointment. Now I’m casually looking for an iWatch since those are definitely compatible, but really expensive.
Apple Watch Series 7. I really like it, though I find the oximeter to be inaccurate. Kind of annoying, since that function was why I upgraded from the series 5. But otherwise it’s great.
Fitbit Alta. So not very smart but smart enough for my purposes.
@Kyeh That’s the one i started with! My friend gave me her spare one, then it died on me, so i replaced it with the Charge 3, which i had almost a year when the screen started going (a common problem with that model, i discovered). You’re smart to stick with the Alta till the wheels fall off!
I didn’t make it in time for the warranty, so i decided to give them one more chance & got the Charge 5, due to a couple of additional health functions that i thought would be useful. So far, it’s held up in the hardware department, but the software issues are piling up. This might be my last one, if they don’t get their act together!
@Kyeh I almost forgot, there was one more problem with the Charge 5 that shouldn’t be an issue with any product over $100. Or, anywhere near $100, for that matter.
The soft silicone band it comes with (nice design, at least) was making a lot of people break out in rashes, including me. I’ve never had a problem with any other silicone band I’ve tried, weird. Luckily, you can get decent replacement bands dirt cheap online, so that’s what i did, but i wasn’t exactly thrilled. 
@ircon96 I started with a Flex that someone gave me; got an Alta when the Flex died; bought an AltraHR to keep in reserve when they were on sale one year (and that’s what I’m using now.) I also had a One, the little clip-on, but didn’t use it much. I like them well enough for counting steps and recording sleep; I’ve never used it for much of anything else. I asked a couple of questions in their forum way back and found it to be incredibly annoying - full of braggy show-offs and incredibly arbitrary mods
. So it serves as a watch/pedometer/sleep tracker and nothing more! (Sorry, that turned out to be a lot of verbiage!)
I had a slight problem with the band but just made it loose so it slides around like a bracelet. I didn’t know they’d been bought by Google but I’m annoyed at how the dashboard’s gotten more and more boring and minimal. The oldest one had a balloon smiley face that delighted me to a ridiculous degree; but I guess it was too much trouble for them somehow.
@ircon96 You said about “Mrs. Brown You’ve got a Lovely Daughter” (Driving Game thread is too full for me to answer you there)
I always loved Herman’s Hermits, with their strong Brit accents!
@Kyeh Yep, Alphabet/Google sure know how to screw things up. They come from the school of, “If it ain’t broke, let’s tweak it.”
Oy.
Re: Herman’s accent, i know what you mean, they make the Beatles sound like they’re from Ohio!
Some of my favorite British series are set in northern England & those accents are thick! He mentioned in an interview awhile back that he intentionally played up the accents to be different from all the other British bands that were singing in American accents, and he would change his, depending on the song. I always thought it was just because he had an especially heavy one! Lol
@ircon96 Oh, interesting - I never knew that!
“a luvely dotta…” It worked, didn’t it! With some of the British mysteries set in places like Yorkshire I need subtitles, especially if they mumble.
@Kyeh Heck yeah to the subtitles! They make it SO much easier, that’s for sure.
Apple. Just works, which I can’t say about anything else I tried.
Not a huge fan of the looks but it’s Not actively bad when paired with a decent band.
Worth it for the 2fa support alone.
Garmin. It has smart-ish features but I don’t really use them aside from the sporty ones.
Pebble Time.
I have yet to find a replacement that replicates the simplicity of this watch.
@Ziggie I have one that I liked, but the battery died and I have not had the dogged determination needed (IIRC) to replace the battery. I liked it, too.
@andyw I’m not looking forward to having to replace the battery. I still get two days out of a full charge so I’m not there yet!
@Ziggie I wish all of these watches, etc, made replacement practical. The battery in my Wahoo Elemnt bike computer died and the company does not replace them. Online guides said you can replace it but will probably break the screen while doing it! I bought a Karoo which will probably have the same issue.
Hand me down from my computer geek son which I can barely operate… I think he’s keeping tabs on me.
Fitbit charge 5. Not sure why. Also not sure this is a watch. Went 25 years with no watch then the world (work) started sending me hundreds of communications via my phone. Tried it to keep from looking at my phone every 3 minutes. Life has slowed a bit or I have. Only use it for the time a few times a day. Hmmm
I have one like this from Morningsave that I don’t wear often as most of the features are not that important to me, and it is big. My favorite watch is an LL Bean watch with hands you can see in the dark with no buttons to press, etc. It has a subtle glow from self-illuminating hands and numbers so it does not disturb your neighbors in a play.
Fossil Gen 6. Really like it but wish the battery life was better.
Garmin Venu 2 Plus. The Google Assistant integration is hot garbage on toast, but the fitness features work great and I like that it can broadcast my heart rate to my Garmin bike computer.
Yes. Just wore out a hand-me-down really old Apple. Loved it. The exercise program nagged me every day until I got those rings complete. Now have a refurbished Apple SE. It is more complex and I’m just getting to figuring it out, but think the relationship will be successful eventually.
I had a Garmin, but my wife gifted me an Apple. SO much more, but all the apps keep reminding me of stuff that isn’t that necessary. I guess I’ll have to remove some of them, but I’m lazy.
I have a Casio with a built in weather station. It does stuff no smart watch can do, and has none of the irritating drawbacks and dubious features of a smart watch.
Garmin makes one with a GPS receiver and ballistic calculator and none of the other annoying smart watch features. I’d wear that. But I’d also forget to charge it all the time.
Tarzan no shop here. Why you talk like that?
But seriously, I’ve had a Fitbit Charge 5 for awhile, because it’s not one of the huge chunky ones & it has the basic functions that i actually use. I don’t need to handle emails & texts with it, just mainly heart rate & sleep.
Well, once Google took over the company, it seems to have gone downhill. They made some changes to the app that outraged a lot of users, but the thing that’s annoying me is that it’s no longer tracking sleep data fully. I realize that these watches don’t have the greatest accuracy, especially with sleep, but it used to give me a general idea that seemed to be reasonably on point. Now it only seems to track short periods, not even long enough to record the stages most of the time. Very unimpressed, Google. These things aren’t cheap!
@ircon96 Agreed!
@ircon96 I was waiting to fix it until somebody noted the missing article. It bothered me, too.
Apple Watch 7
I don’t even have a dumb watch. Sometime 2004-ish(?) I realized I was looking at my wrist many times per day. And I really didn’t need to know the time - it was just a habit. I realized I spend most of the day in front of a screen that has a clock in the corner. And when I wasn’t in front of the screen, I was in my car … with a clock on the dash. In the rare time I wasn’t somewhere with a clock, I could pull out my cell phone. So I quit wearing a watch and have never seen a reason to change that.
@smyle I had the same epiphany (at about the same time).
But after constantly wearing a wristwatch since I was 8 years old, I can still make out the spot they used to occupy on my left wrist.
Yes, my wife! Not only will she tell me what time it is she will also tell what I should have done by now and what I should be doing next!
Oddly enough, one of Meh’s other sites, MorningSave, today has this watch for $15 ! Sorry, Meh. And why would you do that to yourself?
@andyw
/showme one hand not knowing what the other is doing
Edit: CRAP forgot it is top line only!
Samsung Galaxy 5, bought on Black Friday Sale. I wish it would stop teling me I am missing my health goals.
Apple Watch 5
Garmin running watch if that counts. I only use it while running though
Apple Watch Series 7.
/showme one hand not knowing what the other is doing
@andyw
in reply to the above:
@mediocrebot
probably should have quit while I was ahead…
@chienfou @mediocrebot Euwww!
Yup, but I forget to wear it all the time.
@UpbeatDuck Set an alarm to remind you?
Still rocking the Samsung Frontier Gear S3 because it does NFC payments for Android pay and samsung pay and supports MST payment to pay on readers that only have magentic strips (no chip). Had an original Sony Ericsson Live View back in the day, the Martian or 2, and a pebble all before the Samsung.