Smartwatch advice

So, my much better half and I have agreed to purchase smartwatches for each other for December celebrations (in addition to Christmas we both have birthdays in the month).

Given the myriad of reviews that rate most smartwatches in my price range (I’m not dropping £200+ on a wearable) as middling and focus on stuff I’m not interested in I thought I’d seek any advice here. I have a OnePlus 10 Pro smartphone, which is why I’m cheaping put on this

Looking for

  • sub-£200
  • NFC for payments
  • Able to integrate WhatsApp and texting

Useful

  • Calling features
  • long battery life

Not important

  • Fitness, O2 tracking and whatnot. I know I’m unfit and don’t need a watch to tell me.
  • Voice activated gubbins, I don’t have any voice activated stuff in my house.

Any advice Tekili’ers?

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Don’t buy anything wearOS. I’ve had a wearOS watch right near the start that got destroyed by Google’s updates. Then I got a gen 5 fossil a few years later with the re-release and once again Google’s updates have rendered it virtually non-functional. This is not isolated to my ones, it’s across the whole product range. They broke the assistant on the gen 5 about 8 weeks after it launched and have left it broken for years. Their current bug fix is to remove the assistant from the watch and claim that solves it. Avoid Fitbit too as they own them. Money down the toilet.

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I don‘t have a smartwatch but a fitness watch (less smart more fit) from Garmin (Venu2S) that has been working out quite nicely and is on the cheaper side of Garmin devices. I have not used it for payments but turning on my app shows that I could in theory use „Garmin Pay“ (I just learned that only a small number of Visa/Mastercards are supported in each country, mine isn‘t so I cannot use it. There is a list on their website.)

For me the watch is dual-purpose: a) provide some fitness tracking and b) help me not miss calls from my always-silent phone and assist me avoiding constant checking my phone when one of my messaging groups grows verbose. Edit: I never used it but it has a set of somewhat configurable canned responses for messaging (and calls I think). I might actually use some of those in the future now that I figured out there is more than yes/no there :smiley:

It has a decent enough battery life when I turn off the oxi sensor. Several of my friends have this or similar models. Period tracking is surprisingly helpful (if that is something your wife might be interested in).

In theory I can listen to music directly on the watch in practice I tried once and it took forever to sync to the watch. I‘d rather put my phone in some pocket when running.

Now that I got used to the device, I feel like something is missing when I take it off. Battery life/charging is sufficiently hassle free that it doesn‘t put an additional burden on me while traveling etc. Just a small cable and it charges quite fast.

I‘ll definitely recommend my watch but as you said you are not interested in the fitness aspect, this is probably not the one for you. I still think it might help give you a better overview of existing devices.

I have had the watch for a year. One of my friends had his for several before it broke and he bought the latest model to replace it: want to say, everyone I know that has this (a total of me and 3 others) is quite happy with it and I‘ve been badgering my partner to get one, too, as he tends to miss messages and calls. Yet another addition: we each bought our watches independently of each other and later figured out that we all had the same one :slight_smile:

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Hot damn, most of the ones I’m interesting in use WearOS. As it fits with Google Pay.

@Yashima One of my banks is on the list for Garmin, so I’ll take a look.

I’m currently looking at the Ticwatch E3 and Skagen Falster Gen 6. The latter has the same guts as a Fossil one.

In theory the new pixel watch (and anything released in future using the (yet again) re-launched and redesigned wearOS and the Samsung processors) should be better, but I trust the wearOS team about as far as I can throw gloomhaven.

Non iOS wearables are in a sorry state thanks to Google (and qualcomm’s neglect of the processor development).

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If I’m prepared to ditch contactless payments options for non WearOS things do open up.

Unfortunately, I’m not ready to get into bed with Apple for a watch.

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That Skagen is about 60% off at the moment

Yeah, exactly.

Binned all my ideas and got a OnePlus watch for £130.

Losing contactless (I’ll have to drag my phone out, sigh) was a compromise for a week long battery. Proprietary OS makes the battery life so, but should play pretty nice with my phone.

As a side note, I hate looking at this stuff but I kept looping back to this one.

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I’ve heard decent things if you mainly want notifications and a few other toys as a bonus.

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