I wrote this initially as some placeholder text for a blog theme I was creating at the time, but since it's relevant to the article I'm actually writing today, I figured I'd post it as a bonus for anyone who's crazy enough to be interested. I wrote it back in September, but even by then some of the text was outdated, and you'll see why in the other article.
Dumb Watches
When I was a kid, I had an $11 Wal-Mart watch that I was quite fond of. It really was nothing special, but I had tried to replace it many times over the course of many years, and every replacement ended up wearing out or getting lost, but this one stuck around. Part of that was that I could never get myself to wear a watch regularly. It always seemed like a good idea, but a good idea isn't very useful if you don't act on it. So, it sat in random places for years, not really gathering dust at all because I would move it out of the way of other things.
Enter the Smartwatch
I was a big believer in smartwatches by the time 2014 rolled around. When I first heard about the Pebble, I thought about all of the things I could use it for, and I had no shortage. I had some classmates who would badger me with questions and "hey u there?" over and over again, so I felt it would be nice to see their texts on screen. I also listened to music a lot, and having a pause button on my wrist would be nice. I also liked the idea of changeable watch faces, something that we don't really have anywhere else.
So, I took the plunge. I bought a first generation Pebble, and I loved it. Up until 2016, anyhow, when the screen delaminated and I could no longer use it. However, I got so much use out of it. When I was driving with my phone plugged into my car's AUX jack, I could safely adjust my music (as in no looking at a screen(!)), I could reply "In class, talk later" to all of those pesky texts I would get mid-day. When the Time update came out, I could even make it vibrate on the hour, rather than beep! All of this in a small, lightweight package that took 2 hours to charge and lasted over a week per.
I eventually whacked it too hard to get the display back, and it's never worked since. Initially it boot looped, now it's cold dead.
Android Wear
So, it's 2016, and Pebble either doesn't exist or is in big trouble, I'm not sure which it was. I was in college, and the smartwatch was pretty much the thing that got me to class on time, since the calendar would buzz my wrist and snap me out of whatever it was I was doing. Obviously, I didn't want to just leave it at that, I wanted another smartwatch. Fortunately it broke between semesters.
I had been researching for a bit, keeping an eye on the market since I knew that the Pebble was having problems long before it actually died. So, after some consideration, I ordered an Asus ZenWatch 2. It wasn't fancy by any means, but it wasn't super expensive and seemed to have a good set of features.
Let's just say it was fine, but I was pretty let down.
First of all, it has a touchscreen. Why is this a thing? The menu interface on the Pebble did all I wanted it to and then some, and I could reliably pause the music in the car with a button combo that stayed the same every time I used it. The touchscreen worked fine, but it wasn't nearly as reliable, and it didn't actually provide a single benefit over the buttons on the Pebble. Sure, it's able to run a calculator app (which you have to install from the Play Store) and it has a "functional" keyboard, but neither was really all that useful. Most of the good apps available for the watch used maybe two buttons, total. There'd be a left-side button and a right-side button, and that's it. Two of the swipe directions were used by the OS, too, so gestures were awkward at best.
Secondly, it lasted a day on charge, sometimes two if I was very lucky. This isn't such a big deal, since I can't sleep with something on my wrist for some reason, so I would take it off anyhow and just plug it in overnight, but this severely limits my options when I'm camping, for instance.
It was also quite heavy. Generally, I believe a watch shouldn't be something that you feel when you're going through your day. It's a simple tool that's there when you need to look at it, and simply invisible when you're not interested in the time. Plus, I use my left hand a lot, so it got caught on all sorts of things.
As if all of that wasn't bad enough, it was tied to the Google app. WTF!?!? What business does a timepiece (no matter how complicated) have with the Google app on my phone? I'm trying to get my calendar to buzz my wrist, not be able to do Google searches from there. I need my phone to do those anyhow, wouldn't it be much easier to use that? Or hey, I studied computer science, so I more often than not had a laptop on me, probably the single greatest portable research tool mankind has ever invented. Admittedly the watch would function if I disabled/uninstalled the Google app, but Android Wear really didn't like it and would bug me to turn it back on.
The function I probably thought was most clever from the Pebble was the vibrate-on-the-hour feature they had. I realize this was probably a case of necessity being the mother of invention, but it was wonderful to have that signal every hour so that I wouldn't become too hyper-focused and lose track of time. It was great not having to disturb people around me in the process. I could get an hourly beep on the ZenWatch, again with an app, but it wasn't super reliable. If I hadn't touched the watch in a while, the OS would suspend the beep app and it would miss an hour when it rolled over. To make matters even worse, the next time I would wake the watch the app would come back and beep. While it's good that it didn't beep over and over for every hour missed, just once, it was annoying having it beep at 12:37 instead of 11 and then 12.
I could mention the fact that the vibration motor was weaker, or the fact that it has a microphone and speaker, or the insanely awkward gestures to change watch faces, or the health tracker I couldn't disable, but honestly those things didn't bother me as much. The health tracker part should have in hindsight, but at the time it didn't.
Moving On
I switched to i3 from KDE on pretty much all of my computers at some point in there. What that meant was that I had an insane amount of control over parts of my workspace that I just plain didn't before. i3 is built for power users and it makes you a power user if you try to use it for anything other than light computing. Did I mention I was studying computer science? Eventually, I integrated Calcurse into my status line. There's a neat feature of Calcurse where you can query it on the CLI and it will print out your next calendar event and how much time until it starts. Naturally, I started putting my class schedule in there, too, and then I added the text to my status line. I had it available at a glance. Eventually, I found that to be so much better of a tool for planning out what I was going to do each day that I started to become annoyed when my wrist would buzz for the next class.
It was around this time that a friend of mine showed up with a new toy.
1980's Smarty McSmartwatch
He had bought a CA-53W.
Actually, it was perfect timing, too, since I had landed on my ZenWatch a couple of times while riding my skateboard, and it was in pretty rough shape. To be clear, it still works to this day, but there's a small crack in the top corner of the glass bezel, so it's not in perfect shape anymore. So, hearing it was only $15 rather than $150, and realizing that I was using it almost as much to lazily calculate tips at the local brewery as any other "smartwatch" feature, I opted to put the ZenWatch away and buy myself a Casio.
I opted to buy 3 of them, one F-91W (the cheap resin non-calculator watch), one A153W (the steel band version of the same, just in case I needed to look a little fancier), and the CA-53W. I daily drove that watch more or less until the pandemic hit. You would be surprised how nice they can be when you're working in embedded systems. I had to do conversions to and from hex for addressing and many other things, but if I wanted to calculate how much memory space I had to squeeze in another struct, my watch had my back and I didn't even have to reach across my desk for the desk calculator (by coincidence, also a Casio).
This fit my needs almost perfectly, and there's still only one gripe I have with it to this day, and this applies to the others, it can't vibrate on the hour, only beep.
Pandemic and Beyond
Right before the pandemic hit, I bought another $10 watch. This time, it was an analog with a nylon weave strap. This one looked nicer (as if that was hard), and had all of the advantages of an analog watch in terms of gauging time relative to another time. It's like wearing a time pie chart. I wore this until it broke (maybe don't buy no-name with the intention of it lasting years?) and after that I started daily driving the A153W, since the steel is surprisingly sturdy, and I already have it.
So, in a funny way, the advent of the smartwatch put an 80's designed digital watch on my wrist, and it's probably not going anywhere any time soon.