Tom Cooks

Smartwatch

2025-10-02

My Garmin smartwatch is dying, this month has been off most of the time and today seems not to charge at all. It’s the first smartwatch I owned and has been surprisingly useful to me, mainly to track exercises, hiking, and runs; actually it’s the main reason why I got into running I think.

Currently watchless, I’m considering options with an eye on the price and on features; this led me to think about what I’m looking for in a smartwatch:

What i look for in a smartwatch

I really don’t care about:

Apart from telling me the time and having alarms I just need a smartwatch that excels at this:

Anything else I might desire (backlight, standard USB C port instead of one more retarded dongle, open source app instead of yet another cloud dashboard, etc.) would be a plus but I’m not picky at all; yet, this kind of product seems very difficult to find.

GPS

If i was willing to give up this option I could settle for a Pebble (if it will ever be available, one day, in the distant future), a square Casio G-Shocks like the DW-H5600, etc.

Do i NEED on-device tracking? No, but it’s nice to track my outdoor activities, especially hikes and runs; I could always opt for one of those watches that piggyback phone location, it’s not that I’m far from a phone most of the time.

HR

Tracking HR has been very useful when I ran every day for a year: I could notice how quickly my cardio improved with training, how to stay in certain “heart zones” (nonsense), and how nice and low my resting heartrate got after some months of exercising.

Could I do without HR? Yes, it’s a data point I can ignore or track more precisely with a chest heart rate monitor.

MIP display

This is, surprisingly, not only for the tacticool mall ninja look - it saves battery and is more readable outdoors. I SWEAR IT’S NOT FOR LARPING AS AN OPERATOR.

Stronk battery

I can easily do with recharging every 2 or so days but, in current year, I expect to have at least a week or so between charges for mixed use.

DIY

I’m considering building my own, and I wonder how terrible it would be (very).

I know there are some open source platforms but they all have problems in one or more of the five desiderata I listed.

I will begin collecting all the infos I can on the matter, until I can create a basic BOM. From there I would like to check if this project is actually doable battery-wise, it’s a subject I know NOTHING about and I should check if the math makes sense.

Let’s see, wearing my own smartwatch would be INSANE.