So I bought a smart watch.
I’ve worn a watch for about forty years, and when my last one broke a few months ago, I thought I’d see what it would be like not to have one. The first few days without it, I glanced at my wrist at least a dozen times a day to see the time. Then I’d have to pull my phone out of my pocket to check, and tuck it back in. It was kind of irritating. The weeks passed, and it became a bit more of a habit, but I still felt like a watch would be so much better.
At Christmas, Kyra bought Zack a (relatively) cheap smart watch. It was some weird brand no one’s ever heard of, but it had some cool features. He’d fuss with it and show us some of the features, and I became interested. I already knew I didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a smart watch; my budget was around fifty bucks or less. After all, that’s about how much the various Timex watches I’ve worn for the past few decades have cost.
After poking around eBay, I found a used older Samsung watch for $35. Brand new a few years ago, it retailed for about ten times that. I figured it was within my budget, and worth a gander. I bought it, and now I’m wearing it. As it turns out, it’s pretty cool. I can select from hundreds of different watch faces (for now I’m sticking with something simple), and load a few smallish apps onto it. It tracks my steps, heart rate, blood-oxygen level, and even my sleep patterns (although cursory research indicates sleep tracking with wrist devices is pretty questionable). It tells me when I’ve been sitting too long and should get up and move around, and then it congratulates me when I’ve taken a few thousand steps. I can pay for things at stores by waving my watch over the credit-card reader. I can pull up a map of the local area and get directions. I can read text messages, and even send them (it’s kind of painful though).
All in all, it was definitely worth $35. I’m having fun with it, and most importantly I don’t have to drag my phone out whenever I want to know the time.