Smartwatches: For fitness freaks and tech geeks only?

I don't have to reboot my normal watch. It lasts for 10+ yrs.

I am a tech nerd, but never saw the use in a watch connected to anything else. Perhaps if it did dictation with 99% accuracy, it would be useful. Plus, I'm not interested in any device that requires internet connectivity to work.

I completely agree with theFu. I love tech gadgets but the main reason I have stayed away from smartwatches is because of the battery life. I just don't see a time when a smartwatch can last as long as a regular watch, but if it ever did I can see them becoming popular.

Right now, they are in their infancy. I am looking forward to seeing them several years from now. Perhaps someone will make a breakthrough, but I strongly suspect that it will take much longer than a few years.

solution looking for a problem = dud

I got an Apple Watch when they first came out. It was fun for a month or so. Now I never wear it out and about. Although I've never been a watch-wearer in the first place, so I may have some bias.

I found the instant notifications of everything to be more distracting and annoying than anything.

They are good for exercise though, that's the only thing I use it for these days.

They can't be improved on by a device that needs almost daily off-wrist mains-based recharging to stop the display going out.

I didn't actually find that to be a problem/issue. Whenever I have worn a watch, I've always taken it off when I get home anyways, so the Apple Watch was no different. And with the wireless charging, it's easy - just drop it on the charger, which is magnetic, so it sticks easy.

I just didn't find that I didn't find it made my phone life any easier, and the constant notifications were annoying.

200 years ago, a stopped watch could be returned to action with a few seconds of winding.

200 years ago we didn't have electricity piped directly into your house. We didn't have cars with chargers in them. Black people were slaves, and women had no rights.

Who cares about 200 years ago?

As I said, the charging of the watch is no big deal, and I say this as someone who isn't into the watch itself so much. But of all the things to not like or to criticize, being an owner, I can't say that the charging issue fits into that category.

And it lasts about two days by the way.

As a device, I don't think smartwatches should even be considered watches.

It goes on your wrist and tells the time. It fits the definition as much as a smartphone fits the definition of a phone.

too inconvenient for the things conventional watches already do perfectly

You look at it, and it tells you the time. How is that different from a conventional watch, much less inconvenient?

People who bought them and abandoned them did so for those reasons

I'm someone who bought one, and mostly abandoned it, and it wasn't for the reasons you seem to think.

Well obviously me, when I went on to make the point that when a modern product called a watch can't do what a watch 200 years ago could (i.e. be fully powered quickly instead of over a matter of hours), it is, in that respect, inferior. It is also inferior, again in that respect, to every other watch on the market today.

Well, sure. And if that's your hangup on them, then yeah, a smartwatch is not going to be your thing.

But again, as I've said, as someone who actually owns one, the charging thing is not an issue at all. If the other things I didn't like it didn't exist, the necessity of charging it wouldn't make me not like it.

The fact that if the battery has run out, it doesn't tell you the time.

You mean like every phone that has a battery?

The fact that every day it's literally racing you to run out of charge and it will be that way until they develop a (dream of it) two-day or three-day smartwatch.

Maybe you haven't heard, you can do this little thing called 'charging'. You just drop it on the magnet, and it charges itself up.

The fact that when it runs out, full charging takes at least of couple of hours: far longer than regular watches (to wind or put in a new battery), and then only securing one further not-quite-full-day of use.

I have no idea where you're getting your information from, but a full charge basically works for me from morning one day, until evening the next. Not two full days, but well more than one.

1) I work 16 or 25 miles away from home so when my smartwatch runs out, it stays stopped until I get home again and put it in the charger.

Easy enough to get another charger to drop on your desk or whatever. Same thing I've done with my phone.

2) I stay out late from time to time with friends, but my smartwatch seems unable to hold a charge past 10 pm.

Again, in my experience this is incorrect. I can wear mine right through to the next evening.

Unless you're totally unselfconscious, you have to wear either a smartwatch or a conventional watch because wearing both on the arm at the same time would make you look a bit of a tit.

Or, you can wear a smartwatch, and those times when your battery dies, you can do this other thing, I know it's a HUGE PIA, but you can pull out your phone and look at the time.