Smartish Watch

The smartwatch movement doesn’t work for me, as it is today.

The displays are too small to be useful (especially with my aging eyesight) and their presence chews through the battery meaning regular charging.

I can cope with daily charging of my smartphone and not much else. I even stopped using the Bluetooth headset because of its charging needs.

In my opinion the smartwatch should ditch the OLED or LCD screen or any other pixel-addressable display.

My ideal watch would just display the quartz-movement generated analog time – hours and minutes hands only.

Since second hands are the best way of telling you that the thing hasn’t run out of battery it needs to be there too. But the second hand would be a continuous movement only approximately associated with seconds and not connected to the quartz movement. The continuous movement makes it look expensive.

In addition all the smart watch functions (which are very optional if you ask me) such as biosensors can be built in to the thing so long as they are super low power (at least a year’s battery life is required) and this data can then be communicated to the smartphone for processing.

I can’t see the need for a return comms channel. I argue against alerts in the smartwatch – they require power, add bulk and duplicate smartphone functionality that works just fine.

And the watch needs an electroluminescent night light activated by a button push. This capability inexplicably doesn’t exist on an analog watch. If you want a night light you either get always-on optical radiation on mechanical watches (glow in the dark madness even when you don’t want it) or a nice button push, but only on a digital or analog-digital watch.

What I would like to see is a slightly over-sized watchband buckle (on the inside of the wrist) that incorporates a normal digital watch. A larger version of the one below, taking up the whole buckle surface area.

This way the buckle will be where you read the time during daylight hours and the analog top watch would be just for it’s fashion value, night time light function and its smart watch biosensors if present.

Oh, and I wouldn’t put a brand name or symbol on it – it’s much more fun if people can’t estimate the value of the thing.