I have owned two smart watches: the Huawei W1 which had a physical flaw (charging port) that felled it within a couple of years, and more recently the first edition Samsung Galaxy Watch - a Christmas present to myself in 2019.

Maybe my father’s remarks about the planet having finite resources made more of an impression that I give him credit for, but I do like to make things last a decent number of years. And given that it spent much of the pandemic out of use, it’s disappointing that the Galaxy Watch hasn’t even made it to four years old without the battery life dropping to “less than a day’s normal usage”. Which as far as I’m concerned makes it worthless. The software also leaves much to be desired (maybe it would be smoother with a Galaxy phone, but I’m not shelling out for that).

So I had an epiphany and spent £35 on a Timex:

Timex

Honestly, I’ve not missed the smart watch. Most of the notifications were suppressed to avoid it being too interrupt-y, the step count was suspiciously tied to 6k per hour no matter the speed, and I rarely did anything else with it.

Maybe in a few years I might be tempted back, but for now, it’s been liberating not to have to lug another charger around. The Timex is light enough to wear when sleeping, and the good-old-fashioned blue backlight is all I need (mobile phones aren’t allowed in the bedroom in my house, so no, I can’t look at the time on that).