I was dabbling in smart watches for quite some time - jumping between Huawei and Samsung watches mainly. They are very cool, but after a while I switched back to my vintage seiko automatics and Oris mechanicals for two main reasons:
1. The current crop of smart watches felt bulky. I know the newer apple watches are quite slim but they don't suit my tech ecosystem, but the android/etc offerings just feel 'big'. I know this will improve as time goes on of course.
(I do have a gshock which I love, but that's another matter)
2. (And this is the main point,) the smart watches made me feel like it was increasing my anxiety. Even though you can disconnect the watch from notifications, having various alerts and things happening all the time with haptic feedback was making me look at the watch more often, fidget with it, and use it as that kind of social escape thing that you do with phones. Once you disable the 'smart' features, it becomes nothing more than a gimmick, and when using the features it seemed to equally help my productivity the same amount that it hindered it.
I don't want to knock anyone who uses a smart watch though, because I do think they're cool. They just so far haven't worked for me.
They’re really not. I’ve owned three different Apple Watches (including the current model), and even the most recent models are heaps thicker than even my old Citizen Eco-Drive watch, which already seemed absurdly massive on my wrist when I bought it.
I’m still using Apple’s smart watches for just one reason:
As thick as they still are relative to regular watches, they’re heaps smaller than phones. And if all you want to do is basic phone functionality (check the weather, make/receive calls and text messages, listen to music, set timers, etc), you can do all of that from a cellular-enabled watch+wireless earbuds, without carrying the bulk of a phone around with you at all.
For those of us who feel like phones are getting too large to reasonably carry around all the time, having all the critical functionality in something that just sits on your wrist until you need it is kind of amazing. If it wasn’t necessary to have an up-to-date phone in order to configure the watch, I’m not certain I’d still own a phone at all.
I really loved my Moto 360, didn't feel bulky at all to me. I really lost track of the current smartwatch market though, did they really get bigger? That'd be... disappointing.
Funny about that social anxiety thing. On my end it was actually better - as I could just swipe stuff away instead of having the incentive to click on it and get lost in whatever application I ended up in, I was able to get rid of most of the noise with a swipe without even picking up my phone, and only picked it up for stuff I actually cared for.
1. The current crop of smart watches felt bulky. I know the newer apple watches are quite slim but they don't suit my tech ecosystem, but the android/etc offerings just feel 'big'. I know this will improve as time goes on of course. (I do have a gshock which I love, but that's another matter)
2. (And this is the main point,) the smart watches made me feel like it was increasing my anxiety. Even though you can disconnect the watch from notifications, having various alerts and things happening all the time with haptic feedback was making me look at the watch more often, fidget with it, and use it as that kind of social escape thing that you do with phones. Once you disable the 'smart' features, it becomes nothing more than a gimmick, and when using the features it seemed to equally help my productivity the same amount that it hindered it.
I don't want to knock anyone who uses a smart watch though, because I do think they're cool. They just so far haven't worked for me.