At the beginning of February I read about an Apple Watch look-alike with a 45 day battery life that was available for $99. When I checked Amazon, it was $89, so I figured it was fate and I bought it.
My experiences with smart watches is limited. In high school I had a calculator watch that also played games and could be an electronic piano, but once I started carrying a cellphone I stopped wearing a watch. Several years ago I had a Best Buy gift card and bought my first smart watch, a Pebble.
It was weird wearing a watch again, but two things stuck out. I enjoyed being able to quickly see what time it was and getting notifications was pretty nice. The Pebble is limited on interactions, I could answer the phone but not talk. Nor could I reply to messages. The most interacting I did with the watch was to use the Swarm app to check in on Foursquare.
What I wanted next in a smart watch was a heart rate monitor. After I read the article, I thought this could be a nice watch to use while running, and I get a heart rate monitor to boot.
In usage, it does pretty much what I expected it to do. It keeps time and tracks fitness. The steps seem to be a little off from what my Fitbit counts, but its close enough. It has GPS tracking, but I haven’t had a chance to tryy that yet. The best feature is the battery life. It has been ten days since I last charged the watch and the battery is at 75%. Using the GPS will affect this.
There are two minor issues that I can’t seem to solve. One, every watchface is in 24hr time, and two, the distances measured on in kilometers. No big deal, just a little annoying.