I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about what features she used - which were pretty much step counter and payment. He somewhat dismissively sneered, "Well, you're not exactly a power user, are you?"
I'm trying to imagine what being a "power user" of a watch is like. Can anyone enlighten me?
I think smart-watches are much like Alexa. What the user wants to do with it is almost totally at odds with what the company is selling. Alexii are mostly kitchen timers, song players, and light switches. No one is a "power user" constantly installing skills and using it for anything which increases the product team's engagement metrics.
The same is probably true of watches. Alerts are nifty - but cumbersome for replies. The health stuff is useful - but only for a subset of users. Seeing the time is great - but if the battery lasts less than a week, who wants to keep that screen on?
I would say I'm quite a power user usually. I very carefully explored every feature my apple watch has and tried to incorporate as many of them as I could. Very, very few features stuck because they were genuinely helpful. Almost everything being pushed is a gimmick or a feature bullet point from some product manager.
The actual good stuff:
Time
Workouts
Payments
The occasionally useful stuff:
Notifications
Noise DB levels to see if I need to put on ear protection
Workoutdoors app for on-device maps and path breadcrumbs
The once in a blue moon stuff:
Music controls and on device playlists
On device audiobooks
Weather complication
Voice memos
Alarm
Shortcut to call my husband
The feature I tried to get working but gave up on:
Tap to talk to ChatGPT and get a 100 word or less reply
Interesting that the alarm is such a far down feature for you. I use a galaxy watch 4, and i dont think i can ever go back from a silent alarm. Nicer to wake up to, and doesn't wake up everyone in the house as well
Silent alarm is an awesome feature. But it scales with battery life: on a watch with ~48 hours of battery you want to charge daily. And the most convenient time for that is in the night, which kills the silent alarm feature
Once you get to a week of battery life like a Garmin or those cheap armbands without screen that becomes a much better feature
I tried it a few times when I absolutely needed a silent wakeup. It’s very occasionally useful. But then you have to charge the watch for awhile before bed, wear it overnight, then charge it again in the morning. Not something I’m going to do for my regular alarm.
Can't speak for the OP, but I, for one, don't wear a watch while sleeping. I use a Junghans alarm clock from 1989.
I use my watch for time, step counting, and ringing/vibrating. Having my phone on silent and not missing calls (not messages, messenger are not allowed to send notifications to my watch) is such a step up for me :)
Payments should be the obvious feature. The commercials for various smart watches show the same thing: somebody buying a coffee with just their watch.
But the reality is different. On my smartwatch (an older Samsung, but same Google OS merged with Tizen) there's a PIN required if you enable payments on the watch. I understand why, the secure element requires it. But it makes every other feature of the watch useless to me. I don't have any secrets I want a watch to protect. I want to be able to time workouts while standing on a treadmill.
They could solve this, only have large amounts require the code while letting me buy a coffee without it, but I'm sure there's some line in an agreement between Google and the banks prohibiting this. The risk has to be transferred to the customer, even if the likelyhood of somebody buying a coffee with my watch is low.
Product design should consider all of these things, but getting out the next smartwatch without thinking it through is more inline with quarterly objectives. There isn't even a Steve around to piss off enough to do something about it.
>But it makes every other feature of the watch useless to me
How exactly? Samsung watches only require the pin to be enabled if you want payments enabled. You only have to enter the pin if you have taken the watch off. As long as it can detect that it remains on your wrist then payments continue to be enabled no pin required...
Truth! I bought my Apple Watch so I could skateboard with my AirPods in and not lose connection. But the connection is a pain to make happen, not intuitive, and sometimes just doesn’t work. I like the watch for trying to keep me reminded to stay fit and active, but I have been considering just not ever buying another one and going without. I turned off all notifications on it because it’s useless.
This, but the music and podcast functionality is just frustrating. In my more than 5 years of being an Apple Watch user, I have been let down too many times
It seems just unwilling to sync anything to the watch, so there’s nothing to listen to when I go for a run without my phone
It’s just baffling, the watch has like 32 GB of storage?
I would happily ditch my phone entirely if i could have ms authenticator (needed for work), signal and my train ticket app working on it, alas no. Maybe someday.
MS Authenticator used to dispense codes on the watch app, but since about ~2022 MS decided that they would disable this feature.
No reason was ever given, especially as they actively removed an otherwise working feature, so I can only assume “user hostility” and/or “classic incompetence”. Probably both, being Microsoft.
I’ve had multiple instances of my Mac unlocking while I was more than 5-6 meters away. At some point I decided not to trust the time of flight calculation and disable it.
It wasn’t obvious to me! And I’m kind of not even joking. The time has always been on my phone. The watch seemed unnecessary. But having a clock in your face does change your perception of time so it is a killer app after all.
Maybe it’s niche, but if you do endurance sports like triathlon, you can easily become a power user. I think I did. You constantly look at your watch during workouts. It does navigation on trails, it measures your heart rate, tracks workouts, keeps pace during races. The metrics it gathers about hrv, sleep, rest hr etc are vital to adjusting the routine. It acts as a data recorder for multiple sensors: hr strap does a million running metrics, a separate strap does hydration, on a bike there’s a power meter. It supports my routine alerting me about the fast, timing my morning porrige (14 min). It’s my payment method on long rides when I need water and could play audio if I wanted to. I care about advanced features like multi-band gps and handover with my bike computer. It’s a vital tool, I need it for so many things. But vast majority of smartwatches do not cater for this crowd at all. Even the Apple Ultra feels like a toy. Garmin upper end stuff is where it is.
The Garmin stuff is so good at its niche (and passable at the other "nice to have" stuff) that the market is already segmented. If you're this kind of "power user" you're already in the Garmin ecosystem.
It's tough for me to imagine what a Pixel Watch could possibly do to win me over (and I say this as somebody who has a Pixel phone and even had an Android Wear device early on).
Tbqh, it's the problem for Garmin itself - they want to sell new Fenix every year but the old one is already very good so they are segmenting their own product by holding off updates on the old watches for now but it's only going to work for so long until there is either nothing to update or they push down their value under that of competition's. E.g. Google could give Garmin a scare of its life if they made a watch with a MIP display, ANT+ support and power profile to run GPS for 8-10 hours - I'd buy such a watch from Google instead of Garmin just because Google is going to support it for longer (not that Google is known for longevity of its support but it's still better than Garmin's).
I've got a pixel watch and would love to use it for navigation while running but (admittedly without much in the way of trying) haven't stumbled across a way to do this. What do you use to make it do that? Strava?
I assume you could set up a "walking" journey with multiple stops as waypoints on your phone then when you press start your watch should pick it up and give you the direct route between each waypoint. Not sure if that would sufficiently provide what you were hoping for.
Listening to power users is the product management equivalent of armoring the places on the fighter plane where you find bullet holes. You should of course be looking for where the planes that didn't come back have damage.
Smart watches become shelfware pretty easily. Especially when you don't have the Apple Watch cachet.
Great analogy - This phenomenon irks me, and I would never have thought of using survivorship bias as an apt description. Some of the most valuable feedback you will ever receive is from people that don't use your product/feature.
But if you go too far in that direction, you end up at the Mozilla school of design. Alienating your core users, and designing a product for users that aren't there. Look at them now.
The killer feature of modern watches is the vibration alarm - you can wake up even if you use earplugs/headphones/noise machine and you won't wake up anyone else along with you. Health stuff like sleep tracking is likely useful for the vast majority of population, at least to everyone who needs time and thus lives on a schedule of some sort, without the possibility to fall asleep and wake up whenever one feels like it.
I too don't see how the ability to run apps is of any value so I use "sports" watch instead of a "smart" watch, which gives me better screen and better battery life in exchange of a smaller number of apps I won't ever run. Though the battery life is not an issue and smartwatch users I know charge their watch while in the shower.
> The killer feature of modern watches is the vibration alarm - you can wake up even if you use earplugs/headphones/noise machine and you won't wake up anyone else along with you.
Probably depends a lot on the person. A phone already does that for me, and doesn't have the associated uncomfortableness of wearing a watch while I sleep.
Indeed, I didn't see studies so my theory is that most people find sleeping with a phone in the bed much more uncomfortable than with a watch on the wrist.
If it's not in the bed then its vibrating not going to reach you, what wakes you up is the noise it makes while vibrating on some surface and this noise is heard by others just as well.
> The killer feature of modern watches is the vibration alarm - you can wake up even if you use earplugs/headphones/noise machine and you won't wake up anyone else along with you.
I came here to say exactly this. That's not the reason I bought a smart watch in the first place (I didn't even know that was a feature), but it's the only reason I still use a smart watch now over my old Seiko.
It's a lot of why I got a Coros watch (the other reason is for running/health tracking). I stay in hostel dorms pretty regularly, and being able to wake up for that 6am flight without waking up the whole room is so nice.
> What the user wants to do with it is almost totally at odds with what the company is selling. Alexii are mostly kitchen timers, song players, and light switches. No one is a "power user" constantly installing skills and using it for anything which increases the product team's engagement metrics.
There is IMO a design flaw that tanked adoption of not just Alexa, but also on-phone voice assistants.
People would want to use reliable equivalent of "computer, play music" or any kind of "computer, do X". But what is on offer by all major companies is, "${brand name}, do X on ${brand name} with ${brand name}". No thanks.
More broadly, I think this is rarely noted explicitly - user interfaces are ultimate marketing platforms, because you get to inject your marketing literally between the user and the task they're doing. Whether purposefully or intuitively, companies understand that, and the UX goes to shit as they design the product to also be a marketing platform.
Pebble is the ultimate smartwatch because it knows what it is. Its a watch first and foremost, readable in any lighting conditions, waterproof, battery lasts for weeks. They made a watch first then added only the QOL features that most people need.
I've been really enjoying the reboot of Pebble with their new Time 2 for a few months now. I'm using ForecastWatch 2 watch face which crams calendar, watch and weather data into one screen and it's perfect. Lasts weeks on charge too. For apps their built-in workout apps etc are perfectly fine and I built some of my own apps quite easily.
My only complaint is that app limitation are apollo moon lander level of bad, like 128KB code and 256kb resources. I'm not particularly versed in optimizations patterns in here, but building fun stuff is really hard with these limitations. So what you have to do is roll a "companion app" android app that does all compute on the phone and streams it to the watch but that sucks.
One obvious app I tried to build here is a calendar with a daily message and I've tried to include a little graphic emoji with each day. You can't do that because you can only fit around 100 emoji graphics and the font on Pebble Time 2 only has 50 emojis. So at best you can get 150 icons which is not enough for unique icon for each day. This is kinda sad in 2026 ngl.
This practically means you can't ship any runtimes, standard libraries, nor any big libraries with your app. Your app has to be just the business code and all the extras has to be stuff already on the watch. Crucially, size requirements like this doesn't mean you can't write slow python apps or whatever, so long as the watch ships with a python interpreter.
I suspect 10MB might be more friendly in the current day and age.
It already comes with a standard library, but, since the drawing algos left a lot to be desired, my watchface ships with its own image format and rendering code to allow for handling of transparency and blending modes (since you can not only use the integrated render utilities, but simply draw directly to buffer with whatever you bring)
So all in all: it has been done.
That being said: you mention python, and I'm not sure where this is coming from. When in rome, you don't drag your favourite language throught the streets unless it is roman latin.
I assure you it's most certainly not waterproof in any reasonable sense of the word. The seals and glue on that thing is nowhere up to the standard of modern smartwatches.
I can dismiss/decline/silence popped up on my Pebble without breaking eye contact with the real life human I'm talking to.
In a car, I've handed my watch to my kids in the backseat so they can control music playback. There's no accidentally closing the media app because they fat fingered a stupid teeny tiny touchscreen. Nope. Just regular buttons that anyone with functioning hand-eye coordination can use.
And unlike the Garmin Instinct, the buttons are actually ergonomic. The Instinct was literally painful as you had to contort your hand. And on top of that, the UI was totally insane. I was never quite sure how to interact with it and frequently had to experiment to do basic actions. Nothing was consistent.
I love my Apple Watch. Alerts mean I don’t look at my phone which means I don’t unlock it and get sidetracked. I have plenty of ways to tell the time so it’s actually kind of useless for that. It’s a passable golf watch, a passable fitness tracker for running and it pairs with earphones so I can not bring my phone with me. I’ve occasionally used Apple Pay with it but that novelty wore off pretty quickly.
I don’t care that the battery doesn’t last, I’ve got a wireless charger at my desk and at home and 30 minutes on that a few times a week keeps it alive for my usage.
> I love my Apple Watch. Alerts mean I don’t look at my phone which means I don’t unlock it and get sidetracked.
I've noticed and interesting social shift in recent years: friends who get distracted mid-sentence by an Apple Watch notification, pause the conversation to check the alert, and then continue the conversation afterwards without realizing they had paused/were momentarily not present. It's fascinating because these people will not realize they were momentarily sidetracked, and remain convinced a watch keeps them more present than their hone.
There's a term waiting to be coined for this concept, but I'm not clever enough to come up with one...
I think it depends on the alternative. Compared to no interruptions, this kind of behavior is annoying. But if the alternative would be pausing to pull out their phone and look to see why it just buzzed/dinged, the watch glance may be the lesser evil.
More important to me, in either case, is to tame the notifications no matter where they go. It is your choice what gets to the phone screen or the watch, and if you are pausing a conversation to glance at the watch and then it does not cause you to need to do something else urgently, this is a strong indication that you should have that notification turned off. Let it go to a low priority queue you can look at later when you have time, not something that buzzes or dings at you.
I started noticing this with smartwatches in 2019-2020, with my coworkers. They would just stop mid convo, check watch, and resume talking.
It's only about 5 seconds but it feels so weird on the other side. Like, sure, I'll wait for you. But it feels really rude when you do it 3 times in 5 minutes.
My reaction: I'll stop speaking once they are looking at their phone/watch. And I actually wait to start speaking again until they prompt me with a "what were you just saying," or similar. This awkward feeling of "oops, I stopped the conversation, so now it is I who must get it going again" works well. And if they don't "prompt" to continue the conversation? They weren't listening in the first place, or don't realize they were being kinda rude.
> I think smart-watches are much like Alexa. What the user wants to do with it is almost totally at odds with what the company is selling. Alexii are mostly kitchen timers, song players, and light switches. No one is a "power user" constantly installing skills and using it for anything which increases the product team's engagement metrics.
Nothing new here, but I have several friends who do this with their phones, and I honestly wish they had a watch instead, so they'd be absorbed for 3 seconds instead of 30 seconds.
I worked with a woman who, in 1-on-1 meetings no less, would stop mid-sentence when she received text messages and reply via her Apple Watch. It was maddening. I finally had to kindly ask her to be present and stop playing with her watch.
Is that really new compared to the friend who will look at their phone every time it pings, or my parents who will stop mid conversation and answer a phone call?
I loved my Apple Watch at first but due to exactly these sort of distractions no longer wear it and have more recently turned off most of the notifications on my phone. I am sick of my attention being stolen away by everything around me.
Why not just turn off the notifications on the watch, so you can enjoy it for what it's good at? I won't give up the functionality, but I am extremely selective about what it notifications it can put in front of me.
Because it's ultimately not very useful. Sleep tracking - I've become convinced this is actually a bad idea, and since I stopped I stress less about sleep and ultimately sleep better. Step tracking? Phone does that adequately.
I do wear it for workouts, but once it's closer to end of life will replace it with something dedicated for workouts like a Garmin that holds a charge for 14+ days.
I’ll add that if you care about working out with a watch to track heart rate, the Apple Watch is pretty dismal. I moved to pairing mine with a Polar H10 strap so that I could get much faster feedback on heart rate recovery post sprint. In addition to using an optical sensor, the Apple Watch may also be doing something to smooth out the signal. I just know that the Polar seems much more responsive and matches how I am feeling.
Chest straps work with ECG, so they're hard to beat for heart rate tracking. That said, Apple watches are some of the best wrist wearables for heart rate tracking. Most other brands aren't as accurate and many don't come even close.
Check out the Quantified Scientist on YouTube, he does some interesting testing on health devices.
Agreed on the sleep tracking, I don’t bother with that. I use it primarily for time, timers, outdoor temperature, workouts, Apple Pay, Tesla key card, and EKG. I have started leaving my phone at home fairly often. Which then leads somewhat regularly to me needing to use another feature of the watch - find my iphone.
The novelty of Apple Pay on watch wore off? I use this all the time but it’s not noteworthy or interesting, just a great feature that’s seamless and doesn’t require pulling out my phone.
You know the other killer feature of the Apple Watch?
Find my phone!
See someone with an Apple Watch on frantically looking for something, just say "Hey you know your watch knows where it is". Just press the button, DING.
It does give you the option to change cards when you double tap, before you pay.
But I think the real reason is that people would walk around with card readers and scan peoples watches to collect cash. I can only guess it doesn't happen in Japan for cultural reasons. You could try and do that with purses/wallets too, but since most people are carrying multiple cards, they interfere and largely prevent RFID skimming.
This is one of those things I thought would be great and never use. When I see people do it (very rarely) it gives 'glasshole' vibes (no offence). I can't bring myself to do it and I've been using Apple Pay on my phone since day one. It's a me problem obviously but given how people use phone payments for everything and so many people I see wear Apple Watches I'm surprised how infrequently I see people use it for payments.
I found it was even better to turn off all the notifications entirely, then you don’t get distracted by the watch interrupting you either. There are very few things I actually need to know about right now.
I'm really interested by what notifications people have toggled. I only ever have text messages and whatsapp (urgh, I know!) enabled and don't get a huge amount of notifications during the day to distract me.
Do other people have more notifications enabled? More friends messaging them? Or just a lower threshold for what counts as too many?
Messages and weather are basically the only things I allow to ping/vibrate, anything else only appears on the phone and I get it when I look at notifications. Email is pull only, have to open the Mail app to get messages.
The annoying apps are the ones I have to toggle permissions on and off for like eBay and Uber because occasionally they have time sensitive important info, but 99% of the time are bombarding me with useless spam.
"Power user?" Having a Pixel Watch 2 (or 3), I keep thinking no one working on this device really uses it. It's supposed to be a sports and health device but the stopwatch app doesn't even support laps.
I think you're mostly right. I use it for a few extra things though. Stuff I can think of:
* Timers
* Alerts
* Step counter/fitness tracker
* My fitness app for weight training - I can start a workout on my phone and enter my set/rep/weight counts without needing to pull my phone out
* Phone calls when I'm on walks and do not want to the "full phone" experience, but also cannot be totally disconnected. This paired with Airpods is a pretty nice balance
* Ditto the above but for podcasts/music streaming - especially if wearing workout clothing and I don't have a comfortable place to carry my phone along.
* Basic replies to my "important people" texts - via Siri dictation mostly
* My "RFID" security badge to get into my home/office/etc. using Apple Pay
* Apple Pay
* Quick glance to check the weather w/ a main screen widget
* Quick glance to check calendar
I liken it to having a mini iPhone 4 strapped to my wrist. Useful here and there, and very nice for when I want to get away from my phone or it's too bulky to bring somewhere. Essentially a basic flip-phone for comms, and a connected streaming media player.
Got my PebbleTime 2 about two months ago. I like it for tracking my exercise, heart rate, calendar, and time. My favorite is the alarm which is capable of vibrating when the watch suspects you are not at the deepest point in your sleep.
I feel people like that are unpleasant to be around. Sorry for you friend.
Is anything with the pebble time able to capture heart rate for historical data analysis? Anything that can show graphs that you know of?
I've got the pixel watch and I'm using Fitbit for this currently, but it's way too expensive for all I'm using it for. I really just want historical heart rate at the moment plus basic exercise tracking, and of course being able to tell the time. Media controls are a huge plus as well.
> He was quizzing her at a party about what features she used - which were pretty much step counter and payment. He somewhat dismissively sneered, "Well, you're not exactly a power user, are you?"
If everyone on the Pixel Watch team was like that, that could explain why they haven't found any success breaking out from the crowd. Smart watches should discreetly enhance one's life, not be a list of features to be built and used all the time.
I've been an Apple Watch user since Series 5, and I mostly use the watch as a normal-ish smart watch, with silent alarms, iPhone music control, and two-finger-tap to feel the time discreetly as the "power user" features I'd use most often. I barely use any of the apps, and still have trouble navigating the grid.
- Phone calls while the phone is in a different room
- controlling Home devices
- automatic tracking of hikes or walks
Charging has never been an issue for me. I put it on the charger while I sit at the computer or game console in the evening and when I go to bed later, it's fully charged and ready for the night and the next day.
Some of this lack of features is self-imposed by Google.
Until they allow Gemini to use MCP servers directly, it's hard to be a power user with a Google Watch. I still dream, thwarted by Google, of being able to actually talk to my watch to have it do useful things. But since "do useful things" for me mostly requires triggering actions outside of the Google ecosystem and their very small approved list of integrated partners, it's pretty useless for anything more advanced than setting a timer.
This is the core of why I've enjoyed my Garmin watch. It tells time, displays texts, has a quick and easy flashlight, tracks workouts, even acts as a dive computer. I get minimum two weeks of usage between charges. It's not something I have to think about on the daily. Now, on the rare occasion I'm not wearing it, I notice its absence.
Yes exactly, what i regularly use are: track workouts, steps, sleep, card payments (sometimes a backup), flashlight, hiking navigation (convenient than checking phone), alarm and camera remote. I cant stand anything with less a week battery life. so far Garmin works fine for me
The more power user things I do would be to change the complications on my Apple Watch to keep it in context such as AQI and or something like an ETF I want to look at or setup a world time. I frequently use the timer function on my watch and read my email and reply to emails on my watch. Less obvious is the synergy with the ecosystem such as iPhone and Mac unlocking and keeping track of the weather and using Apple Music on my watch instead of my iPhone to keep tracking my battery and flight tracking.
I also use it to keep track of ChatGPT and Claude and I think one of them I can approve tasks with.
I used to consider myself a watch power user. I've started with LG G Watch in 2014 and had almost every generation in between, and from a lot of different manufcaturers Huawei, Skagen, Samsung, etc. I've even wrote and published a couple of Android Wear apps back in the day. I love the idea of having a computer on the wrist that I can program.
But in the end, what I'm using it for is notifications, time, timer or stopwatch, and glanceable weather forecast. (And I don't like the weather forecast on android/google wear)
Everything else, like sleep tracking, exercise, heart rate tracking, is a nice to have that I would look at from time to time and then do nothing with that information.
Anyways, a month or so ago I bought an amoled esp32c6 watch devkit for ~30 EUR, wrote firmware in rust, wrote a small android app to sync notifications, time and weather forecast, and I'm good. It's buggy and I need to polish it up, but it's exactly what I need. And if I ever need something else, I can just add it. Of course this is an extreme approach. It would be much easier to buy a cheap fitness tracker that does all this and has much longer battery life. I just like to be able to tinker with things.
Yeah it is quite fun, I've also replaced the speaker that the devkit comes with, with a little vibration motor, which adds a small soldering adventure to the whole process, but it wasn't that hard.
I didn't write it up anywhere, I might at some point, but free time/willpower I have to spend on it is minimal. Although I have an itch to make a v2 with a combo of rp2350 and nrf52840
I have a Galaxy Watch 7 that I keep on silent ("Mute all sounds"). I think I'd be considered a heavy user. I don't use it to do a lot, but I've come to rely on the things I do use it for and I use it frequently.
I use it:
- To tell the time
- Set one-off timers/alarms
- Recurring silent/vibration alarms throughout the day
Wake up, start work, mid-morning break/checkpoint, lunch, end lunch, mid-day break/checkpoint, 30 minutes before "clock out", end of work day, and medication reminders
- For silent/vibration notifications (HEAVILY filtered. Mostly messages from VIPs, security camera notifications, reminders, "rain in 15 minutes")
- Set reminders "Remind me tomorrow morning to schedule a vet appointment"
- Add things to different shopping lists (grocery list, shopping list, etc)
- Quick, short-term notes ("10 M4x20mm screws")
- Casual health tracking: sleep, step count, activity minutes, etc
Almost every one of my interactions with it is via voice/Gemini.
I love my analog watches too dearly to give them up for a smart watch.
However, I just realized that analog watches also have "power users", and I am definitely not one of them.
My favorite watch (excuse me, "chronograph") has a stopwatch with lap memory, a tachymeter, support for multiple time zones, and a bunch of other features I have not thought about since the week I purchased it.
I don't really know how to use it all. I just like the watch.
Was going to reply that I would probably consider myself a power user of my Casio W-736. Features I use:
- Check the time (many times daily)
- Count-down timer (many times daily)
- Stop watch (weekly)
- Check date (a few times per month)
- Secondary time zone (rarely, since the people I care about are in the same time zone or 6h behind and easy enough to convert in my head)
I've had a fitbit in the past but had a hard time with having to charge it regularly, which often resulted in forgetting it at home. The added features did not outweigh the risk of being without it every now and then.
I don't have a Pixel Watch, but I do have a Garmin one which I use for:
- Watch stuff (alarms, etc.)
- Health stats tracking (HRV, sleep, steps, training readiness)
- Offline navigation when hiking in the mountains (its really nice to have a route available right there on your wrist)
- Workout tracking - the watch can receive accurate HR data from my strap during swimming or other activities.
- Scuba diving - the Descent is a diving computer tracking nitrogen loading and making sure I don't get decompression sickness. It also receives tank pressure information from the air tank and calculates consumption and air time left. It can send messages to other divers and show their air status as well.
- I can read notifications so my phone is permanently set to silent.
- On the new models (sadly my Descent doesn't support that yet) you can call for help through Garmin's satellite network if you get hurt away from coverage.
I don't think these features are gimmicks - they make my sports activities safer, help me communicate with folks in dangerous environments and prod me to do more sports.
Garmin Fenix 8. Love it. It’s for trail running, payments in a pinch. Love the industrial design, far more than Apple Watch Ultra or certainly any Android watch.
I’m a power user given its narrow focus, but no, I don’t expect it to have my airline pass or auto download ABetterRoutePlanner. I’m happy it doesn’t or can’t.
I would have agreed on instinct but everyone replying with which features they actually use seems like it pretty much makes up all the major available features. Maybe having all these features is necessary to appeal to every individual’s needs rather than one power user who uses them all?
My Garmin instinct is kind of the perfect dumb smart watch, it has a very simple calculator style rendering and the simplest speaker possible. Alarms are vibrations and water proof to a reasonable depth, battery lasts 2 weeks. Really have no reason to upgrade
This is why I bought a Casio G-shock smartwatch. I use my watch primarily as a watch: I like to track my workouts, and it is nice to get important notifications to my watch when I'm busy / trying to focus
Same here. I wore the Apple Watch for about 6 years. It helped me get excited about exercising and swimming on the daily, but the notifications and "focus modes" made it feel like a chore. I switched to the GShock GW-5000 and never looked back.
I have a Garmin Fenix 8, but if it would not have a flashlight, vibration alarm and sleep tracking, I'd happily swap it for a mechanical watch as a daily driver.
How do you like the AMOLED screen? I have a Fenix 6, which has the old screen. While it doesn't have a flashlight, I'm very happy with the ability to toggle the backlight on with a single button, which is more than enough for me to see in the dark where I'm going.
I feel that I'm lucky as my Fenix 6 still works as I would not want to switch to an AMOLED screen, which draws too much power to be kept on 24/7.
I would have preferred the old one because of battery life. I wear watch to know the time by just glancing on it, so always on is a must for me. It looks nice though.
Still, even with always on, I do 4-5 days between charges with normal use. I recommend watch face 'portal hybrid', which seems to have a slightly lower refresh rate (who cares), but you gain a day of battery compared to stock.
Kinda curious why You didn't go for the Fenix 7 / 7Pro line? AFAIK the "big" addition on the 8 was phonecalls/microphone on the watch and some increased water resistance for diving. All that for maybe 200-300USD price hike.
I actually had Fenix 6 before and did and impulsive upgrade to Fenix 8 while diving on holidays. I'm very happy with it, including the microphone, sometimes even use it to take calls, it is surprisingly handy when e.g. holding a kid in one hand.
The most important thing I bought it for was Health Tracking. Although I still don't understand why it ask me to do tacking sessions when I am simply walking faster.
2nd most useful feature is vibrate alarm.
Telling time not even that important on my list.
I don't do payment with watch. Since I think the motion of making my wrist to the counter is awkward. Since we are always on our phone it doesn't make it much simpler.
The ii plural is for Latin words. Alexas is perfectly fine in English. And so is octopuses, where you probably first heard about it. No need to over complicate things.
They might just get a stroke if they'll hear what I use my smartwatch for. Hop on my bike, press start, and at the end of the ride press stop, then look at the result on my phone (sometimes). And if I don't forget to put it on I read the time. I have navigated with it once in the first week. But luckily it's not a Pixel Watch.
IME this is the best use case. My wife uses her Apple Watch for this throughout the evening while she's cooking dinner or feeding our 1yo. For a couple years now, she's been doing this bc her job comes home with her since she's kind of a big deal at her large institution, so text messages all the time.
Im still giving myself the illusion that tracking my sleep is doing anything relevant.
I sleep bad -> buy watch -> watch tells me I sleep bad -> win/win?
In the gym, i use the timer. But is it worth it to carry a watch all the time, keep it charged etc. for a timer? I'm considering buying a timer for the gym.
Yeah, I agree - I think smart watches haven't yet evolved out of just being a fun tech gadget. If you just want a timer, I'd recommend just getting a cheap digital watch - you can get a casio for like 20 euros/dollars/pounds/etc and it'll give you a timer and the time/date and not much else. No cool tech gadget, but it 'll stay charged for 10 years rather than 2 days.
Your observation is spot on. I wear my Apple watch all day everyday. Put it on charge every night without fail. Some years back I used to use it as step counter and for payment. These days I don't count my steps and use the phone for tap payment. I guess the watch is just an ornament or habit or ritual. I'm not sure.
I got a pixel 4 after some surgery basically for the fall detection. Otherwise it's mainly doing what the Fitbit I had 8(?) years ago did for me, with added GPS. Pulse, steps.
As an ADHD-haver it's good to get notifications to the watch so that I can avoid unlocking the phone and risk falling down a rabbit-hole. I think that's under-sold.
What I want is a decent (by which I mean SIMPLE) pomodoro app for it, and I'll probably have to write that myself. Does that make me a power user? I was surprised that finding such a thing would be difficult.
I tend not to use it for payment because the ergonomics are terrible. Someone needs to tell that team that having the face on the inside of your wrist is entirely valid (especially if you don't want to be whacking your shiny watch face into every passing door handle), but that makes you do contortions if you want to get it close to a card reader. Not only that but the way screen locking works is ungainly enough that the fact you need to use it more with the face towards your body makes it a constant annoyance. I've unknowingly reorganised my widget order far too often because of this.
My hot take is that the "killer feature" of a smartwatch is that it's quicker (and less disruptive in social contexts) for glancing at notifications. I can't look at my phone in a meeting (nor should I!), but I can spend literally a single second glancing at my watch without anyone batting an eye.
Some things are important enough that I don't want to have all notifications turned off (e.g. in the case of emergency), but I'm much more distracted by a lingering notification that I haven't been able to glance at, determine that it's not urgent, and then move on.
As for distractions, I think you're both underestimating how long I'll be distracted by glancing at my watch and overestimating how interesting something has to be for me to find it distracting.
(I'm sure some people reading this will have the urge to chime in with claims that the only reason I ever have trouble focusing is because of all the notifications and devices in my life. They're free to believe what they want, but unfortunately I don't think I'm going to be able to make myself available to them for diagnosis like I did for doctors who saw me for the 18 years of my life when I had no laptop, smartphone, or smartwatch and treated my ADHD)
Whether or not it disrupts anyone else isn't relevant to the point here. Your mind and focus are sacred, and surrendering to notifications is damaging to your brain. You have the right to damage your brain all you want, and I have the right to think less of anyone who does so thoughtlessly.
You're certainly welcome to whatever religious beliefs you want. Ultimately you have no clue how much I think about or don't think about anything, which means the only real thing you're describing here is a dogmatic view of how everyone else should live their life based on what you think is "sacred".
Personally, preaching and condescending to people about one's subjective worldview feels like a far worse thing than what we're talking about here.
A dear friend was one of the first people I knew to get an apple watch, that mf will stop midsentence (his or anyone else's) to stare at his fuckin watch like once a minute. Convenient, sure I guess. "Non disruptive" - nope.
Maybe I'm just less popular than your friend (or have better filters set up for my notifications), because on average I look at my watch maybe three or four times an hour. On the other hand, even with no phone or watch around, I will break eye contact in a conversation several times a minute, as do plenty of other people I know. At least for me, life is always full of potential distractions regardless of whether there are devices around, so focus is something that requires energy, which means I plan around when I have it for spending time with people. I'm skeptical that if I got transported back to medieval times or whatever that I'd be able to spend all day interacting with people without being similarly "disruptive".
Surprised no one has mentioned Gemini. That's the highest value add feature for me. I have pixel watch 3, which I got cheap second hand. Gemini is a little laggy but still useful. If the experience was similar to the latest open AI voice model when used on a phone, it'd be incredibly useful
I had about 3 apple watches before i was smart enough to stop wearing them. i recognize the health needs for some people so no disrespect, but for myself and I am sure many others the S curve peaked on them pretty quick and it's not worth having another device you need to keep charged on you.
She's using it for payments, that's probably more than a lot of people! I set them up on mine but rarely bother, the phone is my payment device.
I wear my Apple Watch because it's a fancy health-monitor and I am anticipating atrial fibrillation in my medium-term future (thanks, dad's side of the family!). So it's nice to have a thing that is checking for signs of that and recording a few metrics. I might even upgrade to one with a newer sensor for BP etc before long.
Beyond that and checking the time though, I have almost no use for it. Plus I've had to turn off nearly every other feature and integration I could find because they were annoying.
Gestures which fire when I'm doing the garden, stopping the music I'm listening to. Button long-press actions which get activated by clothing. I eventually had to turn the watch over so the buttons don't get hit by glove-cuffs and cause random stuff to happen when I move around.
For me, showing the time, calendar notifications and turn-by-turn navigation with Google Maps is all the smartwatch has to offer. Sleep tracking is a good extra. That's it.
Pebble was great at providing that, with crazy good battery life.
to me main use case of a watchin is setting (cooking) timers. Maybe play 2048 if I'm bored and cant pick up my phone for some reason. Plus notifications about upcoming meetings.
I guess approve claude things. Plus regular fitness watch stuff that happens in the background. Idk what else can you do with it? I don't do payments because its awkward to tap wrist on the terminal, but I do have cards on it just in case.
I'm glad Pixel Watch got better since gen 1 because gen 1 sucked at being smart watch and at being a fitness tracker.
Having a Garmin, ruined me with awesome battery life, but after I melted it, I was using Amazfit ActiveEdge (can't find straps, the watch is still ok), which made me realize, I'm fine with it, both serves what I need, with over week of battery life. And, that matters the most at the end. Having ADHD, a smart watch is a life saver. But charging it everyday? Nope, who have time for that!?
Alarms are crucial, I have 8 alarms set, just to remind me of passing time.
Calendar is also very useful, for quick glance, externalizing of information is really important when you have a bad memory
Sleep tracking, at least I know how long I might have slept. Surprisingly, Amazfit detects going to sleep very consistently and reliably then Garmin (not counting, sleep level detection accuracy) which did surprise me a lot
Activity reminder, it reminds me I'm sitting for too long, and have a goal set. Which is really useful for me.
Steps, weather, notifications all are pretty important, to keep me off mobile. If I open the mobile, it's given I'll lose focus and lose a large chunk of time.
Well, from an ADHD book, do not remember the exact statement but goes like this, "But doctor, how do I remember to take the medicine that is supposed to help me remember things"
If I have to charge it every day, it will create another thing that I will forget to do, and make it ultimately useless for me.
And once you get used to 10-15 days of battery life, charging your watch every day feels absolutely absurd.
I agree with personal experience. I also noticed that many nurses were Apple watches. I guess they are more convenient for people who need to work with their hands.
As an owner of a Pixel Watch 4 with LTE, the killer feature is the ability to handle calls/texts without an actual phone. With a smart watch, I can maintain important communications without looking at a device with a screen large enough to show me an advertisement, large enough to be useful for doom-scrolling, large enough for consuming slop, etc.
I don't feel like power users are catered to either. Like if you have a Google workspace account (if you're not a company, that's a power user) then you can't do "remind me to X". That's reserved for non-power users.
> I'm trying to imagine what being a "power user" of a watch is like. Can anyone enlighten me?
When you're deep in a conversation with someone and suddenly their wrist vibrate, they lift their hand up slightly, tilt their head down, seem to stare in the void and keep saying "uhu, uhu hmm, uhu" while pretending to still listening to you.
That's my experience with smart watches power users
Yeah I sold my apple watch after about 6 months and got a good old F-91W instead. The most useful thing about it for me was having an animated memoji unicorn on my wrist to amuse people. Wasn’t really worth the trouble of charging it every night. I just want to know what time it is.
I'm trying to imagine what being a "power user" of a watch is like. Can anyone enlighten me?
I think smart-watches are much like Alexa. What the user wants to do with it is almost totally at odds with what the company is selling. Alexii are mostly kitchen timers, song players, and light switches. No one is a "power user" constantly installing skills and using it for anything which increases the product team's engagement metrics.
The same is probably true of watches. Alerts are nifty - but cumbersome for replies. The health stuff is useful - but only for a subset of users. Seeing the time is great - but if the battery lasts less than a week, who wants to keep that screen on?