The smart watch I’d wear, Part 2

Hint… I found something that isn’t a square brick!

A couple years ago I doodled my first ever Medium post — not because I planned to post anything intellectually stimulating (as my posting history clearly demonstrates) — but to see what all the fuss was about over Medium. So I wrote about the first thing that (apparently) happened to be on my mind.

The Apple Watch rumors were in full swing and there were a number of smart watches on the market. They all looked big, clunky, and generally ugly (in my opinion). Personally, I wanted a small, round, thin watch that just happened to also do some stuff a traditional watch can’t do. And I think I’ve found it, the Pebble Time Round.

I’ve had my Pebble for a little over a month now and I really like it. It is a watch. First and foremost, it tells the time. Which is what I wanted. Here are the “smart watch” features I use with it:

1. The “You forgot your phone, knucklehead!” feature. This feature allows me to wander off from my desk or hop in the car without my phone and it will vibrate to say “Lost Bluetooth Connection, Captain!”. This is not a feature I see anywhere in the literature, but it is one of my favorites so far. Although this says more that I should publicly admit about my absentmindedness…
2. The “Why is someone calling you?” feature. My phone is permanently on vibrate. I just don’t use ringtones. My phone is also generally in a pocket or face down on a desk. Nice to be able to see if I should pick up or not.
3. The “Should I grab my coat?” feature. Having the current temperature on my wrist is nice. I still go to the phone for the all day forecast though.
4. The “I’m going to interrupt you now…” feature. Notifications. I use iOS and unlike the Android Pebble app, iOS notifications are an all or nothing deal, which seems to cause problems with some people. I have my iOS notifications turned way down — I only get 10 notifications or so a day from a very select few apps, so it works for me.
5. The “What do I feel like today” feature. I think this is likely still because it is “new”, but I do like switching around the watch faces for no reason at all. I even went to far as to pay for some. I can’t tell if this is just novelty or if I will continue to do this.

Features I don’t use:

1. Music. Apparently you can do something with music from the watch. Never bothered to find out. My biggest complaint is I can’t remove it, so it takes up space in my apps/timeline.
2. Health. I don’t know what to do with it. I have it hooked into the Apple Health app and I occasionally compare how many steps the watch thinks I took vs. the FitBit I wear on the other wrist, but that’s about it. (FYI — Somebody is lying. Between the watch and the FitBit, they are rarely within 20% of each other.)
3. Calendar. At least not in the “timeline” sense. All my calendar events trigger notifications (#4 above), so I don’t use the calendar timeline view as designed.
4. Alarms. I don’t sleep with the watch on, so its not waking me up. I’ve tried it a couple times, but generally haven’t found much use for it.
5. Apps. I loaded the ESPN app — maybe when we get to baseball season and I can follow the Giants I might find it useful, but then again, that’s where notifications come into play for me. We’ll see. I also tried out Tiny Bird (the Flappy Bird clone for the Pebble) just to see gameplay. My kids enjoyed it more than I, but for a game on a watch, it was surprisingly effective. I tried a couple other apps but deleted them.

So there you have it. I use 3 out of the 7 native features of the watch and no additional apps. Not sure what that says, but the short answer is, I like my Pebble Time Round.