I bought an $80 Seiko because it doesn’t require electricity at all. Can’t read my emails on it though.
Can’t read my emails on it though.
Great feature!!
I keep looking weird at people who say phones give you cancer and that you should never sleep with one next to you. Same people wear smartwatch with sensors pressing against your skin 24/7
The joys of not understanding ionising radiation
I really like my Amazfit Neo. Okay, it doesn’t charge with USB-C but I appreciate its “always on” display and retro aesthetic. Can’t believe they don’t make 'em anymore!
Is there a worthy successor or can anybody recommend a similar minimalist smartwatch that won’t break the bank?
I’ve had my Amazfit Bip (the original) for 6 or 7 years and the only complaint I have is the shitty original non-breathing silicon strap. After I replaced it with nylon strap, it was pretty much perfect.
The battery still lasts over three weeks. The display glass only has a few tiny scratches on it, despite that I’ve worn the watch basically 24/7 all these years.
It has all the basic functionalities I need built in and the not-so-important-but-nice ones I can get via Tasker.
And it was really cheap, I originally bought it just to see what the fuss about smartwatches was all about. But it’s been so damn useful and trustworthy that I won’t even consider upgrading until it fails someday.
Garmin instinct. Used they are often pretty cheap. They look like an old 80s retro digital but have a bunch of smart features. I love mine.
I got a cheapo Xiaomi one a few years back.
Pretty sure it just makes the heart rate up and infers it from how many steps you’re doing.
When it gets wet, it randomly skips songs on Spotify.
The water thing is just a quirk of capacitive touchscreens. The same happens on the most expensive watches too, which is why there is usually a water mode that you can put the watch into. It sorta locks the touchscreen until you disable it using one of the physical buttons.
I think you need to pay extra for physical buttons.
This one sometimes has a “lockscreen” that needs a swipe up to unlock, but the rain can do that.
Interestingly it doesn’t always have a lockscreen. Sometimes it just switches it on and off depending on how it feels.
the rain falling down can swipe up on the watch?
what a backwards ass world we live inRain comes down. Rain goes up. You can’t explain that.
Pretty wild that the author didn’t set up app notifications. Getting specific notifications from specific people on my wrist is a big part of the reason I use a smartwatch. But to each their own.
It’d be pretty cool to get a significant use case of my pricey pricey Garmin for ~CAD$40.
What do you mean, specific notifications? Like an allowlist or something? Where, in android, the companion app or GB?
I’m genuinely confused.
Yeah. GadgetBridge allows me to set up an allow-list / block-list for notifications. So I can get SMS on my wrist but ignore social media pings.
Sure, but the allow/block list in GB is for app level notifications, where does “from specific people” (indicating a sender filter) come in?
On Android you can designate certain notifications to be high priority.
Or, in GB, on the notifications app list you can click the cog next to an app and use those filters. I haven’t played much with it yet though.
I’m the author. I’ve now set up notifications on the advice of just about everyone. It’s pretty cool!
Nice!
I enjoyed reading your blog. It’s been a while since I looked at an honest to goodness enthusiast blog. Thanks for writing it!
You like breakfast? Anywhere near Massachusetts?
I’ve been working on a super simple blog about breakfast in all 351 cities/towns. I’m at 133.
Can throw a link if you wanna look.
I had flashbacks to Parks and Rec breakfast scenes and I believe Leslie Knope would support your cause.
Ha, yep, she would.
I’m nowhere near Massachusetts but I am a huge fan of breakfast food so I applaud your efforts.
Mmmm… eggs bene 😁
Shakshuka is my novel breakfast these days
Okie dokie
East Brookfield has got a pretty mean breakfast game.
Oh yeah… I need that on my list.
Whatcha got?
Only requirement is it must be a sit down establishment.
Also, I hate “cash only” spots. They’re an automatic “Nay!” on my: yay or nay blog.
Charlie’s has the hash brown encrusted omelet. Trolly stop is very cheap and simple. Good views in the back… Kostas is absolutely professional with some advanced breakfasts.
If you visit Toronto hit up The White Lily Diner for breakfast—best Southern breakfast up North!
I’ll keep it in mind. I went to Toronto in 1985 for an international High School Jazz competition.
I was suppose to pop into a Toronto brewery the week of the total eclipse a couple Aprils ago, but, we kept driving East for a reason that I don’t recall.
Some day again, I’m sure. Ty.
A phone for the price of a couple of pints? £16? Two pints? Very London of him to assume that’s the price of a couple of pints. Actually unreadable.
How much are pints actually?
Not in London; about a fiver. Depends on the establishment and the drink itself, ranges from £3-4 ish to £6. The usual cooking lager to Guinness range.
Heh, of course it has a knock-off UI too.
Please check in with an update after 6 months.
This article was right up my alley. I’ve been considering buying a cheapo smartwatch. I suppose this one couldn’t be used as a mp3 player for jogging though.
It doesn’t have storage or a headphone port. But it will stream music over Bluetooth. So if you want to annoy everyone you job with, you can listen to its tinny speaker :-)
Should I Buy One?
That’s up to you, champ. I’m not your real dad and I’m not trying to take his place. But I’m here for you if you need me.
Love it. 🤣🤣🤣
I was able to pair it with GadgetBridge by pretending it was a Colmi V79. Most of the functionality worked - I was able to see heart rate, steps, change some settings etc. I’ve requested GadgetBridge support which should make it possible to get notifications etc.
Proper GB support and this is seriously attractive.
Happy to say the latest nightly does support notifications. My wrist is buzzing with action!
Oh, your user name. Now I get it.
Does this mean it’s basically fully supported with the core features, including hands-free? Thanks for being the type of person that adds device requests to the repo, I only browse for devices already fully supported. 😔
Is there a dedicated profile in GB or are you still spoofing the 79?
And for the most important question of then all - Does 2048 come with the standard 4x4 grid only or is there optional sizes for those long, chill games of
cookie clickermath swiper?
On a side note I wish hybrid smartwatches were still a thing. Most of the product lines are discontinued, but I liked the idea of it.
I feel like withings cornered the market on hybrids. They are a little pricey but they are built very well.
Yea they’re pretty much the only brand still.
I liked my garmin vivomove, it was pretty nice despite some clunkiness (the one I bought was early on)
I’d like to try one, but I feel like I might end up not using it often or just not liking it
I really really like my Garmin Instinct 2. It a kind of hybrid but between old digital clock and smartwatch, instead of analog.
It has strong Casio Pro Trek vibes. One color, no touch LCD screen. Solar charging, more than 3 weeks battery life, GPS, all health sensors and smart stuff.Garmin makes excellent watches
Honestly, it’s baffling how good some of the stuff you can get off of AliExpress is, especially when taking the low price into account.
My ~$100 N100 server is a testament to that. Just need to score some additional storage for it
I just ordered a shitload of little soldering projects for $1-4 to practice soldering and have been quite satisfied. The instructions are only in Chinese and minimal, but easy enough to translate with a phone camera and the lack of hand holding sorta encourages learning.
I wouldn’t say aliexpress stuff is good, but rather that amazon stooped down to aliexpress-levels of quality, to which we got ourselves used to.
Without an appropriate price drop
You’d be surprised, actually. You have to be careful, yes - the default option is that you get crap - but all of the high-quality cycling gear/running gear/variety consumer electronics I’ve scored is a testament to the possibility of getting great stuff.
I’m familiar with it, I’ve ordered more than 100 items off aliexpress.
And I feel like the modern amazon experience got worse and is closer to the intense searching required to find the good stuff at the right price from aliexpress.
I suppose I never actually had a good experience with Amazon to be able to compare against.
It was pretty good 10+ years ago I’d say, then it slowly got worse and worse
It’s more that AliExpress is all over the place, which is probably because manufacturing in China is itself all over the place (small and pretty much amateur-hour cottage factories doing plastic molded stuff or pretty simple electronics right next to much bigger professional companies designing their own smartphones and computers) plus there is very little in the way of established brands and without a brand to defend, manufacturers don’t really care if customers get a bad impression of whatever product name they’re using today for their, at best, badly made stuff.
It also doesn’t help that in a lot of domains competition in China is mainly on price: the manufacturers might even know how to do a good product, but they have to use inferior parts and cut corners on their designs to stay competitive on price.
(At some point I looked into importing LED light bulbs into Europe from China and got and evaluated several samples and then went back to the manufacturers and at least one e-mail exchange was very enlightening on this and on just how little extra money it actually costs to provide a much better product, but to compete they have to advertise - this was in Alibaba, the B2B site that gave birth to Aliexpress - the cheapest product they have which is kinda crap but only a domain expert doing a teardown of their product will spot it).
Also the fraud prevention in AliExpress is pretty much non-existent and anti-fraud there is entirelly reactive, so product listings with fradulent claims which are hard for customers to validate just stay there forever (for example, almost all powerbank storage claims or solar power bank supply claims are complete total bollocks, insanelly so at times - I’ve seen listings for small powerbanks claiming more power storage than actual EV cars have).
So for some things you can get really decent stuff at a good price - best place to buy switches or push-buttons for Electronics and as the above poster mentioned mini-PCs, to which I will also add Single Board Computers - whilst in other areas it’s a bit of a crap shoot if you’ll get something decently made or not - for example clothing - and in yet others the scams are more than the honest listings - such as external digital storage, solar power or power storage.
I’ve had the same experience you did but didn’t feel like writing it all out. Thanks !
I meant to steer the conversation on amazon being worse quality than it used to, not quite to aliexpress…
I get the impression that Amazon has become the same ever since it openned the store to the same kind of salesmen, at that’s for likelly the same reason.
Then again I’ve been boycotting Amazon for a decade so I wouldn’t know for sure.
Which one do you use/have?
I got a GMKtec G3.
I really like the Interactive Relationship Graph on your site. Reminds me of when I used to work with graph databases and could visualize all the information in the database as a handy graph of nodes and relationships.
Thank you 😄
I wrote about it at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/01/graphing-the-connections-between-my-blog-posts/
For what it’s worth there are smartwatches with good battery life too, my Garmin Venu 2 lasts at least a week with sleep tracking, workout tracking, and some GPS use through the week.
I had no idea USB C charging was such a rarity for smart watches
