Two things In need in a smartwatch: long battery life (at least 5 days), and copious music storage space. I mean, I also need a clock, sleep and heartrate sensors, step monitoring, etc, but they’re stuff most normal smartwatches have already.
I’m currently using a Hauwei GT2 which I don’t connect to the internet except when unavoidable, such as when transferring music from my phone to the watch, but I would gladly prefer an open source solution.
If the watch battery doesn’t last at least 12 months, count me out. I have too many things to worry about charging. The only reason I have a watch is because its a thing that tells time and sets alarms that I never have to worry about dying (OK, maybe a few times per decade)
If you want to monitor sleep with it charging at night isn’t possible, and remembering to charge every single day during the day is annoying in my opinion. Not everyone wants sleep monitoring though, or likes to sleep with a watch on, so I get why there’s some division on the subject.
My pebble 2 hr lasts about 5 days and I’m very happy with that frequency of charging. I think it was a bit better when new but that was a long time ago.
That may be fine for ordinary gadgets, but many people wear their smartwatch at night for sleep quality and HRV tracking. With my Garmin for instance, I usually wear it almost all week for continuous health tracking, and only take it off for a short while on the weekend for charging. It would really suck going from that, to having to charge my watch every day.
I mean, I get a full week from my coros pace 2, with 5-6h of GPS cardio tracking (running) and 24h metrics (steps, stress, sleep, etc.) on a 310mAh battery. It takes a whopping 2h to recharge back to full, I would hate having to manage a tiny extra battery to save those 2h of not wearing my watch.
Every device with extra swappable batteries that I’ve used has a charging station that you can just keep the extra battery in. Not really anything to “manage”, it just effectively removes charging time from the equation.
These watches typically come with charging cables, not a docking style station that you put them in. And keeping devices at a perpetual full charge for expended periods of time is a surefire way to kill the capacity quickly.
I don't see how that should be much of an issue. a tight seal since the connector would face each other and basically be internal or just right out induction.
As long as they can solve the waterproofness problem, I’m all for having multiple removable batteries! (Especially since that helps solve my other major concern particular to this type of device, not having gaps in the logged health data.)
Nice, as someone who has done some product research for specialized smartwatches, these specs are pretty much the go-to standard for generic chinese mid-range smartwatches.
Definitely a great base for an open source smart watch. You can do a lot with that!
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