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As a kid, I used to wear a watch, with my parents buying me a (probably fake) Casio calculator watch for me to use at school and like, it was nice be able to know what time it was, but it also sucked because I would be constantly reminded about the time, as well as how long stuff took back then. As a kid, school was such a fucking slog man, it took forever to finish and then you’d have to do it all over again the next day. Math was always the worst subject, because I sucked at math and I was so bad at it, it seemed that I just could not wrap my head around the fucking concept of multiplications. And the worst part, my elementary school would have a second recess a couple hours after lunch, but my teacher would only allow kids that were able to finish this stupid fucking math quiz to take that recess, and since I sucked at math, I would take for fucking ever to finish the miserable sheet, which kinda sucked, lmao, and well, I was pretty much forced to sit in the classroom for 30 minutes while the rest of the students had their fun outside. Anyways, the watch I had at the time had a calculator on it, but I never really figured out how to use it. Like, I tried pressing the buttons and nothing worked, and well I would end up giving up on that. And I don’t remember my teachers telling me anything back then, so I assume they just allowed me to suffer with my inability to use a watch calculator, lmao.

It seemed I always had a watch on my wrist back then. Phones weren’t allowed at school, and with my parents not willing to get me a phone of any sort, this meant that the only way to tell the time was via watch (or asking someone, but that was lame anyways lmao). Eventually, I would end up breaking that one watch I mentioned somehow, and well, I never replaced it with another one, but by then, I already had my first cellphone. Note the fact I called it a “cellphone”. It wasn’t a smart device at all, instead, it was nothing but a feature phone that had a query keyboard bolted on to it.1 It was pretty much what you’d expect for a phone that would cost something like 20 dollars back then. It had no apps, and the only way to access the internet on that thing was via mobile data, and mobile data back then was expensive as fucking shit back then, which meant that you can only search a couple pages until your mobile data run out. And any sort of complex websites would never work, since it didn’t had any sort of flash capability. This phone could also tell the time, which pretty much negated any need for a watch at all. As I eventually upgraded to smart devices later, I would pretty much forget about the idea of the watch, until much later.

Fast forward to 2017-18 when I really started to want a watch again. This time, I was interested in the concept of the smartwatch, which was a thing that was starting to show up and get popular at this time. These were pretty cool in concept, but they were pretty much unobtanium back then. Apple Watches were wayy too expensive for me to just buy one (not to mention that I didn’t owned a iPhone back then), and the Android Wear watches of the time kinda sucked ass sadly (and also very expensive as well). I was so tempted to buy a second hand Moto 360, but fortunately I didn’t buy into the smartwatch hype. For now, at least.

So back in 2021, I made a stupid mistake. I bought a smartwatch. And the model that I ended up getting was the TicWatch E3. In reality, I got myself some smart band from Xiaomi first2, but then I found it was pretty slow and kinda sucked, so I returned the smart band and decided to buy myself a full smartwatch. And I saw on Amazon that this specific watch was being sold with a pretty hefty discount, so I bought it. And a day later, I finally had my hands on this watch. My first opinions on the watch was that I liked the features that it had, I liked that it can measure the heartbeat and measure stress or whatever, I really liked the stopwatch and timer features, which were pretty useful to manage time from someone who has trouble managing it. I liked the fact I can change the watch face to whatever the fuck I want. I like the fact that I can change my music from the watch, and the cover art would also show, and I thought that was pretty cool too.

behold, a horrible mistake

Yet the more I used the watch, I kinda started to realize that I barely used most of the features it had on offer. Those exercise modes that the watch had? Literally never used them. I also never used the watch for notifications, nor did I used it for music control that often (because I am still self conscious about the music I listen to and the watch will just display the cover art of anything that you were listening to), or anything of the sort. I seemed to just, got the smartwatch just to have a watch for watch stuff, and I used timers and the stopwatch very extensively, but like, I could’ve used a regular watch like that. And I started to think to myself, what is the fucking point? I bought myself a watch that is essentially disposable (because lithium battery + the whole thing is sealed to keep water out) and that would probably last no more than 5 years at best. And there are no screw holes, which means any repairs would essentially be just you pointing a heat gun to the thing and hoping it opens up, eventually.

Ultimately, that watch ended up dying. Cause of death? A drop towards the ground, face down, on concrete. And the glass screen itself was intact, but it was clear something inside broke in a way that pretty much made the touch portion of the screen very unresponsive, which kinda killed the watch, since 99% of the actions that you do with the watch, is with the touch screen. And the watch itself started to heat up when turned on, and it would end up in an endless cycle of bootlooping. This kinda convinced me to never buy another smartwatch again, even if it was cheap.

Another reason why I never tried using a smartwatch again is because of the privacy implications of using one. Wearing a watch that records your heartbeat, stress levels, has a GPS, and knows where you are at all times is kinda freaky, isn’t it? Like, Google says they keep this data safe, but do you really believe them? If it was true, why can’t I use this watch on a phone without Google Play Services? Why do I need your spyware to use the watch that I own? Because of all this, I been wanting to find a watch that was compatible with Gadgetbridge, that one project that is trying to make smart devices less closed off and more usable without the official apps, but the project mostly supports older devices, which are pretty hard to find used, really. Another thing is that a lot of devices require this really strange process of first setting up the device with the official app, then, getting the tokens that it created when it connected to the app (either with root or ADB), and then finally, you can import these to Gadgetbridge. This works, but it kinda defeats the purpose of it, right? Cool, yeah, you now can connect to the smart device now, but like you had to give your sign-in information to even access the watch, right? What is the point, anyways? And the final nail in the coffin? A lot of devices listed often have missing features, which is unfortunate.

I been thinking a lot about getting a Pebble smartwatch, because these are really neat smartwatches, have fully open source firmware on them, and just generally look pretty awesome, tbh. Like, using e-paper as the screen is pretty genius really, and it probably would work pretty well for using under the sunlight (something that the TicWatch E3 generally sucked ass at). Another smartwatch I am kinda interested is the PineTime watch, but like, it looks like a cheap ass generic smartwatch, and the fitness tracking part of the watch (like heart rate monitoring and step counting) kinda suck according to many reviews, lmao.

Recently I decided to get another watch, and the specific watch that I decided to get was just a regular Casio watch (specifically, the W800-H model), which is nothing special, really. I really like this watch quite a lot, since it isn’t trying to be 300 things mixed into a single shitty device. It is truly a single purpose device, built specifically and intentionally to be used as a watch and nothing more. It tells the time and date, it has a stop watch, it also has a pretty neat-o second clock thing that allows you to set a clock in another time zone, and of course, alarms. It really is a very simple device, which for some reason, I really came to love it a lot.

behold, it's peak. That acrylic screen does attract scratches like a fucking magnet, however lmao.

I really like the design of the thing. It is peak Casio, nothing but utility, along with the silly taglines on the watch itself that describe the features of the watch, like “WATER RESIST”, and “10 YEAR BATTERY”, and “ILLUMINATOR”, which kinda go well together with the watch’s very utilitarian design. The buttons on the watch are metal, and pretty chunky, but unfortunately not clicky at all. They’re pretty mushy, in fact, but at least the watch beeps to indicate that you actually did something on the watch. I like the fact it shows the date in YYYY-MM-DD, which is the best date format, like actually. I like how visible the watch is under sunlight, and the fact I can perfectly see the time at all times, regardless of like the time of day or the amount of light available. And if it’s dark, you have the option of pressing that good ol’ light button, which will light up the display with a green LED, so you’re able to see what time it is.

And I really do think that this watch will last a long ass while. The battery says it will last 10 years, and unlike that smartwatch I used for a while, there is very little that can actually go wrong, and if it goes wrong, you’d can probably fix it as well. And I guess that is why these watches are great.

page updates:

  1. i think the phone I had back then was this awful thing right here lmao↩︎

  2. I think the specific smart band was the Xiaomi Band 6, and it had a very gorgeous AMOLED display, yet sadly, the software ran at like 20 FPS and was pretty very slow.↩︎