To Smart Watch or Not?

[08221]

I've got a Huawei band 9, cheap and cheerful but it less me see who is calling or messaging me as I work in a school and we aren't allowed phones with us for obvious reasons.

Battery life is excellent, recharge it once every 3 to 4 weeks.

 

[JohnMcL7]

I've had a smartwatch since the original Garmin Vivoactive and currently have a Garmin Fenix 7 and wouldn't be without one. The most basic function is to show notifications from the phone and it's what I find particularly useful because it means when I get a notification I can just have a quick glance at my wrist and see if it's something I need to respond to or not rather than having to take my phone out each time. I also like that I can set my phone to silent because I don't miss any notifications on the watch but I can miss vibrations on the phone when it's silent. I listen to music through the phone and the watch can show the track and artist along with basic controls which I like too. My first smartwatch pretty much only did this as it didn't even have an optical HR sensor but I still found it really handy.

Healthwise there's a lot more to your heart than whether it's beating or not and it's not always useful being able to get a single HR reading at one moment plus heartrates are individual so what's very wrong for one person could be normal for someone else. The value of the data from the watch is that it gives a 24/7 view of what's going on and gives historical data so you can get idea if something is wrong or not. You hope it doesn't happen to you but you never know and a few years ago when my thyroid went haywire, the watch was remarkably useful because I had historical data showing what the HR should be and during recovery when I went from overactive to underactive I could track how it was doing. Going into covid I could no longer get blood tests but I was able to keep monitoring how it was going since the watch had accurately matched what the blood tests had shown.

The fitness features on the Fenix are largely what make it cost more and will have more of a niche benefit. For me it's useful because the watch can take data from a range of sports then combine it with sleep and resting data to give a useful picture on recovery time and the state of readiness for subsequent activities.

Plus it tells the time.

 

[Ken X]

Whilst it's not something I am interested in, I noticed a visiting engineer had one so I asked him why he found it useful.

His main use was so he could leave his phone locked up in his van safe from possible damage. Any messages could be checked on his watch whilst he was scrambling around, rather than having to stop and get his phone out to check each time.