Tag: smartwatch

In which I cave

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

Dammit.

You might remember a few months ago where I went back and forth endlessly for a little while about watches. My existing Apple Watch was starting to have battery issues and I was getting tired of constantly having to pay attention to my wrist. So I ordered a nice analog watch and committed to a less connected life. Or at least I tried to.

So, yeah, I went and bought a new Apple Watch today. I’m not, like, throwing the old watch away, or anything like that, and I think I’ll continue to wear it on days where I need to dress up a little bit, but I’m going back to the Apple Watch for daily wear.

Why? Turns out the Apple Watch was useful for way more than just notifications, and part of it is definitely my fault for picking the wrong watch if I was going to walk away from a smartwatch. For example, I went super minimalistic on the new one– no visible numbers, no date, no complications at all.

I don’t think I realized, at the time, just how many times I look at my watch in a typical day, and just how often I am capable of forgetting the date in any given day. I am, as it turns out, not very bright! And I also write, with no fear of exaggeration, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30 hall passes each and every day, all of which must have the current time and the date on them. And that means that 20-30 times a day I’m forgetting the date and needing to look at my wall clock.

And I probably should be embarrassed about this part, but with no numbers at all it takes a second or two to parse the exact correct time on an analog watch. I’m not sure if “a second or two” makes me slow or not, but when it happens over and over again over the course of every single day it makes me regret at least not buying a watch with numbers around the outside. I didn’t think it would make a difference at the time– I can tell time on a clock– but if I’m writing a pass I want to be done writing the pass immediately because I have more important shit to be doing. Even just a couple of seconds each time adds up.

The analog watch had no light on it, and it turns out that I frequently want to look at my watch in the dark.

(I am not buying a digital watch that isn’t a smartwatch, by the way. I realize that a number of those issues could have been solved with the same kind of digital watches that have been available since I was in fourth or fifth grade. I just don’t want one of them.)

I use a data-heavy watch face, too, and it turns out that I frequently want to know what the temperature outside is. That image to the right there is my current watch face, and I genuinely after four months was unable to check my urge to look at my wrist every time I wondered what the temperature was. The Spotify song-identification app comes in handy a hell of a lot, and that’s my calendar in the top left. I feel like I had one more piece of information on the old Apple watch– my activity circles, maybe– and I might go back to that after a while, maybe instead of the Messages icon, since I’m supposed to get notifications anyway. I don’t need that on there all the time.

Driving and using a map app with the watch on is significantly easier and safer than using the phone, and my car isn’t new enough for CarPlay or something similar.

But yeah. I feel like four months with an analog watch should have been enough to cure me of my bad habits, and it wasn’t, and on top of that I was constantly missing notifications that I wanted to get– like texts from my wife to come help her with something, for example. I kept my phone muted because I can’t stand getting a beep or a chime all the Goddamn time, and the vibrate on the actual phone itself wasn’t strong enough (and hasn’t been on any phone I’ve owned for probably a decade or more) to consistently make me notice it if it was anywhere other than on a hard surface or in the pocket of a pair of jeans. I’ve had comfy pants on for most of the last several days. I haven’t noticed a single damn notification through the pockets of those pants.

So yeah. Back to being tethered to technology, I suppose. If I get annoyed with my wrist buzzing at me all the goddamn time I’ll figure out what apps don’t need to ping the phone and go with that. But the analog watch experiment is done, unfortunately.

RIP

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

Pebble went under today, which makes me very sad.  How long until I have an Apple Watch?  Do you think I’ll even last through my weekend?  Will I last through tomorrow?  Who knows!

(I almost forgot to blog today.  I was seriously a minute or two away from going to bed.  Sorry, this is all you get.  Hugs!)

In which I like things

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews3 Comments

You knew this already: I bought a Pebble smartwatch, intending to let it and the Fitbit Force battle it out for wrist supremacy and then to decide to keep one of them. The battle was swift and decisive; the Pebble won.

Here is what a Pebble does: 1) It is a watch, which displays the date. It has a variety of watch faces that you can choose from or switch on the fly by pushing a button. This last feature is pointless but kind of fun. 2) It has a backlight activated by an accelerometer; I flick my wrist and the backlight comes on. The time is displayed constantly, like a regular watch, unlike on the Fitbit, where you have to push a button to get the time to display. 3) It does silent vibrating alarms; in this it is more or less exactly like the Fitbit. Implementation for this is better (you can do it from the watch instead of having to use a separate app) but it’s still kinda gimped; unlike the Fitbit, however, the Pebble people are aware that their alarm is gimped and are vocally and repeatedly promising to fix it up soon. 4) When I get a notification on my phone, I get a vibration on my wrist and the notification displayed. In the case of text messages, it generally displays the whole thing; everything else is truncated a bit.

I cannot really express how much I enjoy these latter two features, folks. I don’t like alarms in general; I don’t like being woken up by loud noise and my phone beeping constantly gets on my nerves. Now, I’m fully aware that I could just keep my phone on silent and check it periodically (or, God forbid, ignore it) but I’m a bit too tied into my little digital world for that. Silent wrist alarms are perfect– my phone hasn’t made a sound since I put this thing on, because I put it on silent and am relying instead on all my alerts getting piped to my wrist. It’s subtle and me “checking my phone” is no longer as disruptive to things going on around me as pulling my phone out might be. I love it. The only way it could be better is if it had a microphone built in so that I could do voice texts as responses.

Two more things, actually: it also has 5) apps (supposedly; I haven’t actually checked this feature out) and 6) it can remote-control all the music apps on my phone– which sounded useless at first but comes in surprisingly handy when I’m driving; I can check my wrist to see what song is playing (much less disruptive than looking at the phone) and I can pause when I want to, which is actually easier than fiddling with the volume button on my dashboard.

Drawbacks: it’s clearly first-gen tech in a couple of ways; the display isn’t great (but the battery life is) and it’s dropped connection with my phone once in the couple of weeks I’ve had it, for no clear reason. They make a big deal about watch apps; they don’t seem terribly useful or I’d have downloaded it by now. And I had thought it was capable of duplicating the functionality of the Fitbit– counting steps and sleep tracking– and it doesn’t, at least not without one of those apps I haven’t downloaded yet.

That said? Once I figured out that I walk a good 8000-9000 steps a day during the week (about 3.5-4 miles, if I remember right) and substantially less than that on the weekends, the Force kinda stopped being useful. If I want to walk more, I need to… walk more. I’ve got a baseline, which is useful, but beyond that it’s not good for much. Sleep tracking, too, is neat at first until you realize that you already know how much sleep you get or don’t get and quantifying that isn’t terribly helpful.

Winner: Pebble. No damn contest.

Also: I hooked up the PS3 yesterday, and The Last of Us, or at least the first couple of hours of it, is fucking amazing; if it keeps up this level of excellence it will be easily worth the cost of the system. Since I also got a code for a free month of PlayStation Plus, and can therefore get Shadows of the Colossus for free (I’ve never played it; something I’ve been wanting to fix for years) I think I can safely feel good about this purchase even before getting to the Batman game, which I won’t like as much as many others have but will be well worth the initial cost of free.

See, I’m not negative all the time!

On the Fitbit

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews1 Comment

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You may remember that I have a Fitbit Force, and I have been threatening to post a review of the thing.  Here’s the short version: it has made me want a Pebble.  Which is disappointing, because I don’t really like the idea that I spent $130 so that I could figure out that I actually wanted to spend $150.

Here’s the longer version:  As a device for the very specific purpose that the Fitbit Force is created for, it works well enough.  It keeps track of how much I walk every day.  This is useful information– I’m a data nerd by nature, and I like the idea of keeping track of my activity.  It appears to keep a reasonably accurate count of my steps given that it’s attached to my wrist; I’ve driven places and noted that bumps or whatever have incremented the steps by a couple, but by and large hand/wrist/arm movements don’t appear to ever trigger it.  I’ve also walked around my house watching the display change, and it adds steps as I walk.  It’s not great about stairs– I live in a house without stairs (well, more or less, as I never enter the basement without good reason) and my school doesn’t have any either, so basically if it’s registered any stairs at all at the end of the day something’s gone wrong.  Right now, for example, it’s telling me I’ve climbed two flights of stairs today, and I’ve literally not climbed a single step.

I assume that the calorie counts work, although it took a minute to adjust to the idea that it’s literally trying to calculate every calorie that I burn– waking up in the morning and discovering that it thought I’d burned 400-some-odd calories while sleeping was sorta odd.

It also serves as a watch and a sleep tracker; I believe it tracks sleep just by noting how often it moves over the course of the night, and when I wake up in the morning I can check a little readout that tracks “asleep” vs. “restless.”  I basically have to assume that “restless” really means “awake,” though, because short of getting out of bed and walking around it’s not going to process anything I do as me being awake– up to and including actually checking the time, which seems rather impossible to do if I’m asleep.

And… well, that’s it.

The best thing about it?  I can set an alarm, and it vibrates on my wrist rather than making noise.  Given that I’m supposed to be wearing the thing to bed anyway, that’s awesome, and I really don’t ever want to be awakened by noise again.  I love love love the vibrating alarm.

I don’t love having to use my phone to set it (which isn’t really avoidable, as the thing’s user interface on the watch itself is limited to a single button) and I despise the fact that there’s no snooze option.  This is implementable with a single button, mind you– a tap snoozes, a long-tap silences, or vice versa.

The catch is annoying; while it doesn’t seem to be wearing or anything like that, it’s difficult to snap closed tightly and I regularly knock it off my wrist while brushing stuff off my chest (TMI:  I have a bit of a beard dandruff issue, okay?  I brush my chest off quite a bit.)

The app’s functionality is… lacking.  I can get a sleep report, data on calories/steps/miles (although I never told it a stride length) and a couple of other things for that day, or I can scroll back through other dates– in other words, I can get a day’s worth of data at a time, and there’s no option to look at the last week or month or anything like that.  I can get more data from the website, but that’s stupid; the thing is attached to my wrist and bluetoothed to my phone; why the hell can’t I get a week’s worth of data from the app?  Given how detailed the stats on website visits that I can get through the WordPress app are, you’d think that a device whose sole purpose is keeping track of biometric data would have more robust data reporting available through its app.

Sleep reporting is cool, but ultimately useless.  I had four moments of restlessness last night: great!  And six hours and 32 minutes of “sleep.”  Okay.  What do I do with that information?  No idea.

It supposedly interfaces nicely with MyFitnessPal and a few other things; I haven’t had any good reason to use that functionality yet because I got burned out on calorie-tracking the last time I lost a bunch of weight and it got really annoying.  I haven’t gotten back on that particular horse yet.

It displays the time, and has a nice, bright display.  It does not display the date.  It has room to display the date– or at least could add it as another screen that you reach with an additional button press.  This omission is annoying.  I have to push a button to get it to tell me the time, which is… well, also moderately annoying, but it saves battery life so I can live with it.

Basically?  I want a smartwatch.  I want notifications beamed to my wrist, and I want to be notified of things by a vibration, not a beep or a tone.  I want to be able to see those notifications without getting my phone out, and when I do get my phone out I want the data that I see to be useful to me.

I am aware that this is not what a Fitbit Force is actually for, for the most part, although supposedly there are some firmware updates coming that will let it do notifications if it’s paired with iOS.  Which mine will be.

So, yeah.  I bought a Fitbit to figure out that I wanted a Pebble.

Dammit.