As a cybersecurity nerd I've always found kinda sad that a lot of IoT devices seem actually useful or interesting but they're (intentionally or not) a hotspot for spyware and security vulnerabilities
Convenience usually means easier for the consumer. (Ex. Less Steps Needed) The inconvenience goes to the the company”s product. Therefore the steps that were taken out for the consumer are now in the hands of the company’s own agendas
Damn a pip boy would be really sick hahaha. Idk if it would be as practical to wear on an everyday basis but surely what it did do it would have the potential to do much better
Yeah, I remember about 10 years ago being so excited for the future when all this smart tech was being introduced. But then I learned just privacy invading and dystopian it all is, and I began to view it as if it’s literal poison. Still though, at least in recent years I’ve discovered all the open source projects that people have made, and it’s given me hope that I can have all the tech without the loss of privacy. But if a cool piece of tech has been invented, but it’s not open source yet, then I don’t even view as being fully invented yet tbh.
Spying on the citizens of individualistic ideas....same bastards you feds are....by the way you will never catch any Russian Spies....they are everywhere....check your department
its insane how quickly and silently we went from "free, but you pay with your data" to "not free, but you also pay with your data" The shadiness of spyware aside, at least originally you got something out of it, or you'd pay for something but keep your privacy. Now it just exists by default, you pay for the product twice.
I love how that ECG app has to ask for your birthdate just to even know if you're "allowed" to use the app. There is exactly one reason for this: if you're a child, it's illegal for them to harvest your data. With this prompt they're openly admitting that they do not give a fuck about your privacy.
it's actually not an option, they HAVE to ask you that, because they store it on THEIR servers, so THEY would get into trouble if they collected a child's data unwittingly, even if they're a perfectly good company that does nothing shady but also that's what you read the TOS and such stuff for, what do they say they can do with your data, like if they don't "share your personal information with select partners" or such, then it might be reasonably fine
@@jan_harald A perfectly good company that does nothing shady doesn't have to store that data on its servers. You can (and should be legally forced to) keep that kind of sensitive data local unless EXPLICITLY requested otherwise.
On the Apple Watch there is a like “system” DOB for core functionality that doesn’t get shared with the apps. Each individual app (EKG, blood oxygen, VO2 max exe) asks separately for your DOB (sometimes only for the year), and each individual app has a different age limit (IIRC EKG is 22+, but VO2 max? is 20+). You can give each app a contradictory DOB and it won’t care, so long as the DOB provided for each app is before the cutoff date in that app only. I know I have lied to one of the apps before and there is zero pushback, and you can just renter a new DOB if it says you are too young. Clearly it’s just covering their legal liability with the AF stuff, there is no reason for them to collect this specific DOB when you already have an iPhone and an Apple Watch and thus have agreed to 3? licence agreements (iTunes/Apple ID, iOS and WatchOS), and have probably provided a more specific date of birth in other places. Also you can opt out of having this stuff stored on the cloud by turning off iCloud sync for health in settings, and this data is (according to Apple) stored with end to end encryption. I’m actually pretty sure this specific DOB is completely local as moving to a new watch you need to explicitly opt back in to ECG and renter your DOB here. I agree it’s not ideal but it’s pretty standard for Apple, which is basically just barely better than Google and sketchy android but not as good as full libre stuff.
The gadgetbridge project allows you to connect a smartwatch without going through its native spyware setup. Most of the native features that you would have had with the app from whatever vender the watch was from work. There are also a lot of forks for in development dsvices, I think you could probably find most of the major company's watcher there. Documentation is pretty good for if you feel the need to add a device for yourself. Its also on fdroid, so that's always a plus.
@@dani1999n You need to know that some Smartwatches which are supported by gadgetbride need to obtain a token for communication. Some of them rely on extracting the token from the proprietary App such as for Xiaomi Mi Band's from Version 3 upwards. That means, you have to make an account, log into it with internet access, pair the watch, use Termux (if Root is available) and extract the token from the Apps's data. You can find more info on their wiki under Huami devices or something. Take care on what type of watch you'd get to avoid this task.
Thank you for your knowledge! I have a watch for 1 year (that was a gift) that I don't use because spyware app. Thanks to you and gadgetbridge (couldn't find it before without the name), I now have a working smartwatch that keeps my health datas for myself. as @timlpde said, it was a bit of pain to pair with the auth key needed, but after a few hours of pain I'm now happy.
@@kingdededelicious operation security It's said in the military that there's like 5 operations you always have to do to survive, and the most known and in common use outside the battlefield its that, opsec
Quickly becoming one of my favorite tech youtubers. Not only does your content interest me, and fit my needs, but it is also very informative and entertaining! Another video upload I've enjoyed. Thanks Outlaw, looking forward to more videos.
On the pipboy idea, no need for a new device, phones are already 90% there. I'm imagining something like a wrist phone hub that has extra sensors and charges your phone with it's own battery, with some slight UI changes to make it easier to use the phone in landscape mode. Might be a reason for smaller smartphones to make a comeback.
Pretty disturbing that there was spyware to begin with. Nothing out of the ordinary, though; just another day in this fucked-up world! :D Ah, yes, data collection, so amazing.
In case you don't know about it there's an amazing video by a guy who worked for IBM developing a pioneering Linux smartwatch back in the day. Although it didn't take off, a lot of the developments were used in later smartwatches.
IoT is actually a cool hobby if you are into tech. With something like Home Assistant on an Rasperry Pie you can do pretty cool stuff, and if you know React you can Build your own Dashboards. Paired with Shelly or similar devices you can make your home smart and be the only one with access to your data. You can even integrate your Smart Watch and write a script that emails you a personal health report every month.
I got a Huawei Watch and flashed Astroid on it. The process was actually pretty simple and has the advantage that I don't have to install crappy spyware from Huawei. I'm pretty happy the watch is fantastic for what I want from it. So mainly sports and as mp3 player when I run. For people who also do sports and do not want to be distracted or better want to track their progress I can only recommend it.
You can find the instructions on the website. It's really not a complicated process. Even I got it done, and I'm not the most technically savvy person by far. It basically just amounts to enabling developer options, changing a setting and running a few commands through your terminal. You can even keep Asteroid parallel to the original os if you want.
according to teclore you can use Garmin watches and download your data offline to a computer. Therefore, you don’t even have to use the Garmin services that track you
There are people still using their pebble smartwatches. There was a sleep tracking app available back when I used my Pebble Time. Unfortunately the only heart-rate enabled pebble watch had rubber side buttons that deteriorate and fall apart eventually.
Yeah, I had the first model of the Pebble. Loved it so much, I convinced a friend to get one even though it was already the age of Rebble. Only reason I didn't use Morpheuz more was because I never got used to wearing a watch to bed. I wish we saw more watches like it that focused on battery life and always-on displays.
I still use my pebble, got it in middle school. But I've always been mad that I cheaped out and didn't get the time steel. They were cheap asf brand new when I was buying, but I'm cheap asf too
Step tracking is spot on but the heart rate monitor wasn't all that accurate to begin with, they would have needed a few iterations possibly. Shame they fell through.
@@Camoceltic Sleep as Android is pretty stellar, but yeah, you have to be used to wearing it to bed. I got used to taking it off for 1 hour per week which is pretty awesome.
You mentioned a lot of the valuable parts of a smartwatch, but something that doesn't get acknowledged enough is how much more convenient notifications and speaker calls on the watch are. Being able to set up timers easily, use them to control my phone's camera, change music while working out, and have a full calculator, my calendar, and the forecast, I use my watch for basically everything I can do on my phone but reading or watching videos. I'm pretty excited about the resurgence of e-ink and the possibility I could use a cheap phone for reading and emails and have my watch for everything else (yes, I cant watch videos on e-ink, but I don't watch stuff outside the house anyways.)
Is it, though? Seems like doing all that stuff is a nightmare on a watch. Even phones can barely do it well, I don't see how they can get watches right. Take calendar for example. You can see, what? Today's events? No option for a 30 day view that's useful? A terrible user interface that takes forever, and you may as well use a phone or computer? I just don't see the use of the interface. I think good AR will be far better.
@@O1OO1O1 Before you read: I am talking about my experience with stock Samsung watch and phone if you have no interest save yourself some time. Most people use calendar to check current day events, you can create new ones with voice commands, but the 30 day view doesn't show your future appointments. Yet it is good enough to keep track of your day and you may do your planning and checking of future appointments once or twice a day in the computer and focus on the day with the smartwatch. Answering or denying calls is a breeze, just a quick swipe or even a gesture using the accelerometer and I'm talking. Speak to text is quite decent for longer answers, there are preprogrammed quick replies and the qwerty keyboard with swipe typing is good enough for the edge cases.
I agree. Aside from normal watch functions, I use my gear s2 primarily for calendar, weather, and email reading purposes. It's great for when I'm walking somewhere and want a quick, small dashboard of what I have going on.
For many of my activities even a phone is bare bones. But yeah, everyone has different need and wants. Yet there still are open software solutions that grant you your features without the privacy concerns
gatekeeping features on the device you payed for with DRM is already a thing. Some of the sensors are just broken without a subscription to fitbit. Others may be censored by region, like Samsung features turning off outside of South Korea.
For me, its the G-SHOCK GBD200-1. Classic square g-shock with some basic fitness tracking that displays right on the watch. Sure, you can connect it to an app on your phone, but you don't have to.
For me it's the GW-M5610U, the fact that it perfectly syncs the time with a radio signal is "smart" enough for me. It tells me the time, it has a few time alerts available, it has a stopwatch, it has a timer, it has world time, it's solar powered, it's shock resistant and water resistant, what more do you want from your watch?
@@kalgonzo148 The only model that can rival it is the GW-9400 with the sensor. However 1) it's way more expensive and 2) it's way more bulkier. The GW-M5610U is probably the cheapest daily driver that just runs itself.
My watch has 3 little hands, that spin around in circles, over and over and over. I look down at it, and suddenly I know the time. This is as technology advanced as I want my watch.
I bought both a sealed and an unsealed PineTime last year, and the TLDR is that the software Pine put on (infinitime) pretty much sucks, although it is getting better every few months. There is a lot more development happening however on other OSs for the PineTime, like Wasp-os and the OS from the Zephr watch also runs on PineTime. Personally, given Pine64's pretty good reputation in the opensource / openhardware space, which is a space where many companies just take your cash and run let alone keep supporting software for real products, I think the PineTime is the perfect watch for the privacy-concious to rally around. These watch OS' are small and easy to reason about, and they can even run a python REPL.
The only good smart watch I've ever owned was a Pebble, nothing else has really gotten the point of the smart watch aside from pebble. My checklist: Needs a battery that lasts a minimum of a week, needs an always on display as a gesture to turn on the display prevents easy casual time/stat tracking, needs an app store thats open to third party developers, finally fitness tracking is nice but it should be secondary to checking and responding to notifications, and features relating to time keeping and schedule management. I don't mind the watch being reliant on a phone, it's just gotta have features that reduce the need to pull out my phone
A couple things I've seen current smartwatches are alike to the pebble are in price and battery life. What matters to me is that it lacks a touch screen. No real replacement for the Pebble yet, how long has it been again? A decade?!
I got a Fitbit after years of refusing to get a 24/7 tracker. It helped me fix my sleep and stuff but now I am pretty sure there is a digital me being sold by Fitbit somewhere
Some time ago, I had the opportunity to try a Xiaomi MI band. I liked the experience, I realized how good it is for checking the time without taking out my phone. It convinced me to think about buying a $20 Casio in the future.
While it probably isn't the most secure strictly speaking, I use Garmin devices. Particularly those in their fitness tracker category rather than anything labelled as a "smart watch", all the fitness tracking, but limited options for connectivity with various phone apps to the fitness tracker. Phone Notifications is about as much as you can hope for and honestly that is more than I need.
I built my own device but mostly cause I cannot wear a normal watch while wearing an orthotic device. So I embedded the sensor in orthotic for SpO² and pulse and have magnets and pogopins to clip on the watch I made. So it's an add on for my orthotics. I have SpO² sensors on forhead and legs to calculate orthostatic differences. Not something watches can do and I needed the extra feedback.
I agree with the last pip-boy comment. I've had for the last couple of years a mighty need to make my own smart watch, kinda like the ZSWatch. After some months tho, I thought that I'd be better to just go full-on cyberpunk and make a bigger wearable. Maybe something that could fit the entire foremarm, put a keyboard, a linux distro, make it like a tiny pc, maybe something crazier. It'd be fun and I'd get a cool device (and some bragging rights) in the end.
I've wanted to put together my own pip-boy with a raspi, still working on figuring out how to aquire the internal hardware to work on it. I do have an idea on how to make the buttons and dials work though, since QMK is pretty customizable.
I have a Garmin instinct 2. It has everything the other watches have just in black and white with a battery that last weeks! What really makes me love it is the stealth mode that stops the watch from sending out signals that could cause you to be tracked. Another is a kill switch that will let you wipe your data off the watch.
You can connect a watch to ADB easily! Just enable developer options the same way you would on a phone, and use wireless debugging to connect it to ADB. How did you think developers test their apps :P
Does it accept a wireless connection with no Internet? Not to mention, iirc, Google Watch devices force you to go through the Google Watch app on your phone for first-time setup. That means phoning home to Google and all.
@@3lH4ck3rC0mf0r7 No. You have to enable wireless debugging, and then run "adb connect [ip]" to connect to it like you would any phone. There is also wireless debugging over bluetooth, but I never used that. It's just easier to connect directly through WiFi. I'm pretty sure you would need to have it set up so you can access the watch's settings page, like you said. I don't know if rooting/bootloader unlocking is even possible through ADB, though. I'm more into programming than hacking lol.
@@imaperson1060 I meant connecting both the phone and watch to a Wi-Fi router that lacked access to the Internet. It also hasn't been easy to find if WearOS watches can be setup offline (that is, going offline after the wearos app has been downloaded to the phone) and skip transferring Google accounts to it. It appears they can though, but I don't know for sure. I barely trust Google after I found out how unusable basic Chromecasts are without 24/7 Internet access and a Google account. Those things just become bricks.
That would seem possible for the same reason you can print on your local network even if there's no internet. The only problem would be, as you said, with setting up without internet. It's possible and likely that you'll just be blocked from setup entirely. Tbf though not that much data is being collected on setup except that you _have_ a watch. I don't think you're required to do anything past link your Google account, and even on the Pixel Watch iirc Fitbit is optional (you just won't be able to track health stuff without signing in).
@@imaperson1060 Meh. I can still just make a new Google account on a spare, rooted, freshly-wiped phone w/ spoofed bluetooth address at a coffee shop, move the pairing key and app data to my daily driver phone and firewall the app out of the Internet forever after the deed is done. But I'd still rather avoid that hurdle entirely if I can. Not to mention, as a person that uninstalled Google Play Services, I know I'll find obstacles on that front, too. People have been succesful pairing on those phones, but it takes some... extra steps. And I don't know what features might be unavailable.
I use the open-source app Gadgetbridge with a Fossil Hybrid watch. It's a good compromise (some smart features, notifications, HR tracking, etc - but all data stays on my device, I don't have the closed-source manufacturer app installed, and the watch has no connectivity apart from bluetooth to my phone). It also works with Mi Fit / AmazFit bands, etc.
I use a band watch. But I never use it for fitness traking. The most useful features for me are the music controls, timer and alarm. It's also useful for call warning, as I work in a very noisy environment and arent always able to hear my ringtone. But the band vibrating never fails getting my attention. Everything else may as well not exist.
I have the pinetime watch and it's great imo but mostly just for notifications and timer. Still "beta" and not in competition with Samsung apple or Google yet for fitness and many other features. Heart rate tracker has been unreliable in my experience.
I loved my pinetime but after about a year of use the wrist strap broke. And it's real pain to get a new one since any in person stores only care about apple watches. I tried to order a replacement strap from Barton Watch bands online and the material was too thick to slot into the groove so I ended up having to sand it down to make it fit. I really wish pine would just sell replacement watch bands. I'd just order a couple sets and I wouldn't have any other complaints with them.
@@theodis8134 I have family who own the Samsung watch and with some experimenting learned that 20 mm watchbands work for the pinetime. This sort of information should be on their website, a mistake on their part. I got a few replacement bands off Amazon. The one that comes with it definitely sucks.
correct me if I'm wrong but, couldn't you use a Garmin watch for these? I know about the Garmin app and that it's proprietary but I think that in some models (or maybe most of them) you can just connect it to your computer and transfer the files of your training for the day and analyze it over some other program that can read the type of file etc. imo this is the best option (unless someone has a counter) and I'm highly considering getting a Forerunner here myself
I've been looking into buying a Pinetime recently and I remember reading that Sleep for Android supports the Pinetime, and is a great sleep tracking app. I have yet to try it but I sure am excited to
Modifying or repairing your device does not void your warranty (in most countries). Manufacturers like to claim so and some will actually refuse service, but by law the manufacturer has to actually prove that your modification damaged the device. Also, no device will claim to be waterproof. They are water resistant.
An always on display is important for it to function as a watch IMO, I wonder if one will pop up in a nice case, waterproof and heart monitoring with an eink display.
If I am to design and build a smartwatch from zero I would definitely add a NFC and 125kHz module, a 300-900MHz general purpose modem and a infrared interface. I would definitely want to use it in conjunction with access control systems.
I like my Casio, has a BT App to set the time ( used it practically once for that, with internet to the app disabled, because apparently you could do geolocation with BT ), but otherwise dump as eff... Sometimes, just sometimes, life needs to be a bit easier.
the problem with apple devices like the Apple Watch is that they’re actually miles cooler the the competition, it’s hard to look for competitors when that’s so appealing
if youre looking for a pipboy style watch, garmin has something very similar. they have some pretty cool stuff as far as wearables go i just havent done enough research on them or been able to audit one myself to see whats all going on under the hood.
afaik you don't need to connect it bluetooth to your phone app or anything and you can just transfer the files of your training to a computer and open them with another app etc so issues with spyware don't seem to really exist on it if you just wanna use it for basic stuff like monitoring training/sleeping
You could also buy some chinese fitness tracker from aliexpress that only uses bluetooth and write your own android app to sync the data with your phone. Theres a communication standard for Bluetooth health devices, as long as the device uses it you can do it and protect your privacy. A fair warning tho, bluetooth can be quite frustrating, and please use kotlin instead of java.
My favorite brand of sport watches are Suunto which directly compete with garmin but dont have unecessary things like wifi and just handles the sport things greatly, though they are pretty expensive since they are hand assembled in Finland, but overall much more secure than the orher brands.
As a powerlifter I can attest that the Apple Watch is pretty accurate at tracking calories while lifting weight, has made bulking and cutting a lot easier
I am absolutely looking for someone, one day, giving the possibility to push WearOs on my Huawei Watch GT Pro 2. I very much like the jewelry aspect of a watch, the women model with or witouth a custom strap gives much character, I had several compliments. I own several normals watches but it's really useful not having to do the math for how much I slept, especially after having only 6-7 hours where I'm a bit hazy. Having notifications is also very basic but is definitely feeling liberating from having my phone in my pocket all the time. I don't like the sound of notifications or the vibrations (which can be too loud when on desk or not enough when you're walking) I'm sure to be alerted when my wrist is shaked. I'm not that hopeful because Huawei had a history of not giving the possibility to unlock the bootloader. But it's just for kicks yknow, I'd like to add more than the 20 apps the Huawei shop disposes. All of my needs are definitely set, it's not that bad (notifs, sleep, steps, heartrate, chrono, alarm, meteo, lots of watchfaces, body temperature even) It have 5-6 days of battery But having other possible shops or a way to import apks would be great nonetheless Have a happy new year full of beauty y'all
The ZSWatch looks pretty nice! 4 buttons, round display, I'm curious what the upcoming version will look like! Sadly it looks like it doesn't have a transflective MIP LCD but needs backlight to be visible. I used to wear a Pebble until a year ago, and I don't want to miss full button operation, always-on sunlight-visible screen and several days of battery life. I can live without health/activity tracking, touch screen and things like phone calls on the watch. So last year I replaced my Pebble Steel with a Garmin fenix 6S Pro which comes pretty close. But now I miss the Pebble's open ecosystem, and somehow also its geekiness...
garmin vivosmart 4 would be nice without the cloud data thru the Android. Size is small but not readable at my age. Buzzes for "new goal reached" should be blocked too. Nice video.
Pip Boy is the shit! In Fallout universe, the transistor was never invented,so miniature vacuum tubes on mobile info/combat device scare the FEV out of me ;)
I have a trusty old g-shock and if any watch is going to replace it on my wrist, it'll have to provide at least half the battery life and durability it does; smart watches may provide utility to people who go out trekking or walking a lot, but my watch doesn't need to be charged (solar ftw) and does one thing, which is telling the time, and does it well. As a UNIX autist, I love tools that do just their job and do it well.
I prefer Garmin watches. They are not as smart but can't talk to other services on their own. They work together with an app installed on the phone. It tracks heart rate and sleep. The data is sent to to the app via bluetooth. Display of notifications on the watch work the same but in the other direction (notifications from the phone are displayed on the watch)
I still wear an iPod Nano 6 from 2010 with a watch band attached to it. Its definitely outdated and only connects to a PC/mac over a wired connection, but lack of wireless connectivity other than fm radio, microphone or anything of that sort makes it pretty much impossible to use as a tracking device, and it still looks like a smartwatch despite technically not being one.
Actually you can disable most of the proprietary bloatware if not all, just by using adb commands. You can connect adb wifi and give some commands from your computer, for disabling stuff. Also, you can disable most manufacturer apps just by going into the settings, app info, and tapping disable. Problem is that those apps are often needed to get good tracking
I have a garmin instint and tbh I can't see why it would ever be e-waste. Unlikely to break and the features it has now will be just as good in 20 years. Only the more phone like smartwatches become ewaste.
I've been using a very basic xiaomi watch w/o connecting it to anything. It's locked down as hell, but it's cheap and lets me see all I need to see without having to be connected to any phone or network. I only have to connect it to a device every other month for it to sync the time, in which I just use some e-waste android tablet I have laying around that's never connected to my network either. It's a really stupid set-up, but it works
Dude, if you want a good tablet/laptop device, Microsoft Surface Pro series is awesome. I bought a used Surface Pro 7 last year for $600, and the minute I got it, I nuked Windows 11, and threw Arch on it. The only things that don't work, is battery optimization, the stylus, and the webcam. All things I couldn't care less about (I'm lying, I want the stylus). There's even a github repo for linux-surface kernal, and all that good stuff. Honestly, the only issue I've had was dumb shit with Pacman not being able to download some packages sometimes. Oh, and the keyring for the surface kernal gets fucky every now and then, and needs to be manually updated. For real though, a tablet with an i7, 16gb of ram, and a 4k HDR display? Yeah that's pretty dang decent. The only thing that bugs me is soldered SSD. But it's still pretty whatever, since I use the thing for diagnostics/reading schematics/word processing.
Gadget Bridge is a good alternative app that lets you use the main stream watches without using their tracking app. I have a fossil hybrid and it works better then the stock app with gadget bridge.
I just recently bricked my watch (for a dumb reason that I wont get into lol) while trying to root it and I gotta agree that there's less consequence than rooting phones, I can buy a replacement watch for like $60 online
I got the fossil hr hybrid watch I feel it's a compelling product. Battery last for about a month it is a traditional watch with hands but the face is eink and has productivity functions of a smart watch.
while normally I'd rather not share my data with Google, I think in this case it's worth it. It's worse than the ideal open-source solution, but it's still better than nothing I can host my own email, so there's no reason to allow spyware to read it. I can host my own NAS, so there's no reason to let companies mess with my files. This is different, as I can't do any of it myself. Google's ML-based heartrate monitoring and sleep tracking is really good, and there's no open source alternative that even comes close yet. If sharing my data is part of the cost of doing business, I think it's worth the price. We're a bit spoiled in that we have Free software for almost everything under the sun, but this is one area where we still really just have to pay.
u should make a video on how BrightVPN uses user's residential IP's as Brightdata Residential proxies and doesn't even clarify it on their main page, u have to click "How is it free?" to be told thats what they do
If you want a smartwatch to monitor your heart rate during workouts, just get a heart rate monitor. You’d be getting a better and more accurate monitor at a lower cost without spyware attached to your wrist.
I have a pinetime and it lasts maybe 5 days with it mostly on my desk, 3 or 4 days wearing it to work. The heartrate monitor is kind of trashy (sometimes saying i have 60 beats per minute) and the gadgetbridge app doesn't record it anyway. Mostly use the accelerometer to turn the screen on from a brisk wrist rotation, but you can just make it hypersensitive to always stay on. The biggest reason it stays at home is just that you can't see the time and music controls/song title at the same time, and that I didn't get a dev version to even try some smart home stuff. An ESP32 watch might be better if you just want some way to control offline smart home things over zigbee or something, since it only has a bluetooth antenna.
The pinetime, banglejs, pebble etc .. are more of fitness trackers than smart watches.. when you think of it that way, You'll appreciate the fewer features and longer battery life (20-30 days on my bip) they come with as opposed to smart watches which run full multi tasking oses but you have to charge every couple of days.. just like your phone, laptop etc... As for privacy, as long as your smart watch doesn't connect to internet directly (read: has no LTE/wifi), any watch supported by gadgetbridge app is good enough imo. Your data stays with you on your phone. The device can only talk to that nice open source app via. Bluetooth. No privacy worries at all.
Electronic chips are becoming smaller, faster and more power efficient over time. In a few years we will see smartwatch size mini computers with the performance of current smartphones. That will allow tiny devices to run everything locally and won't need to be connected to a phone. The Moore's Law is flattening a bit but there's always a breakthrough. There's a few new chip technologies being developed right now but it's still early.
Honestly Garmin is the way to go for a no bloat fitness tracker (it's less "smart" than an apple watch or others but why would you check messages on a watch), no issues with the forerunner 965, tells me everything I need and tracks my sleep extremely thoroughly, with an insane battery life. Yeah you pay through the ass but it's worth it imo, you get a solid watch that sure does tell time as well as everything else (still day to day I wear an f-84w)
I am seriously considering to replace my iPhone with an Apple Watch! I am someone who doesn’t like the idea of carrying a phone or missing a call. It’s standalone with the cellular! And the Ultra can last a couple days at best. But who knows, my future job may not exactly be flexible for that… and cellular may drain its battery much faster. Now the tracking, I personally don’t care as I’d be using it either for outdoor exercise or work. It’s not like I’d be wearing it around the house lol. As for iPads, or convertible devices per se, I’m going to try pairing my iPad Pro with a Brydge 12.9 Pro+ Wireless Keyboard with Trackpad. I know they made a newer version apparently, with a magnetic back cover and better support for trackpad and keyboard it would seem, but I also heard MANY complaints of reviews on Amazon saying the hinges break too easily… sucks since it is such a cool concept in theory.
actually, a little thin e-ink based like, phone or phablet size thingie, would be pretty dope while they do make actually high refresh rate eink stuff (there's actual phones and tablets using it, very few, but there are some), you don't even need that, slow eink is perfectly fine for a watch, you just need to be able to do smart update algorithms (e.g. avoid the crappy e-reader "whole screen flashes on every update") and I mean, getting heart rate sensor, prolly some low-res IR camera+led, accelerometer, magnetometer (compass can be handy), heck, why not gps while at it, it's not all that hard, if you're willing to manufacture at reasonable scale so you're able to make custom boards, similarly with LTE (although getting a LTE module with open source drivers might be a little challenging) all the REAL challenge is just making a *GOOD* operating system for it, that can give you accurate and useful information e-ink also has the benefit that it's way better readable outside (so you can go for a run, without having to awkwardly cover the screen with the other hand to shield from the sun), and you can just shine a backlight through it, to make it visible in the dark, and you need very minimal power to drive it, overall screens are usually the BIGGEST battery drain, followed by mobile networking, so e-ink means you can have a lighter battery provide more "always-on" time, having just a dumb watch (be it digital or analog) displayed 24/7 wouldn't consume nearly any power, since you only really need to update it every minute (could also update every second, but I'd prolly do that only when you press a button or shake it, or something) and unlike a normal smartphone, you also don't really need 24/7 cellular connectivity, probably, so you can have "smart detection" for when you probably don't need it, you can still pair via bluetooth to notify you of incoming calls on your phone, it's not like you'd want to have your watch be the primary phone anyway most of the time (heck, you can prolly just get like some 2005 dumbphone if you're paranoid of the new ones and want to be available all the time), just like having "phone number" and "home/office number" separate isn't a trouble, just the same if people actually need to reach you, it's no trouble to just give them both watch's and phone's numbers, and there's also the benefit that you can just have a "dumb plan" for your watch (like idk, some 500MB data cap, and such, whatever the cheapest available solution is), and disable all incoming calls whatsoever, just auto-decline, and use the data only turning it on periodically to sync a bit of data (like once every hour, or every 2 hours, it's not like the watch's got much data to sync in the first place, nor would you usually need it particularly fast, if it's hourly sync, you'd probably already have the data synced anyway by the time you want to grab it, be it uploading your training data (you're not gonna need it synced RIGHT AWAY anyway), or syncing incoming messages or whatever (iirc, sms are kept at the carrier's side "sms center" cache for some time, so if your phone is offline, you don't necessarily miss the messages))
tbh rooting phones is not HARD, it's just the fact you HAVE to erase ALL the data on the device and you MIGHT screw it up due to even something as simple as a bit dodgy cable that happens to disconnect in the middle of it all with wearables though...fair at that, having to open them up is certainly WAY more daunting, and ruining the water-proofness you wouldn't know until it was too late (and would be a major bummer, imho)
As a cybersecurity nerd I've always found kinda sad that a lot of IoT devices seem actually useful or interesting but they're (intentionally or not) a hotspot for spyware and security vulnerabilities
Made explicitly for this reason. Willing panopticon.
@Not gonna lie you can wait a little more, i aint clicking it
Convenience usually means easier for the consumer. (Ex. Less Steps Needed) The inconvenience goes to the the company”s product. Therefore the steps that were taken out for the consumer are now in the hands of the company’s own agendas
Damn a pip boy would be really sick hahaha. Idk if it would be as practical to wear on an everyday basis but surely what it did do it would have the potential to do much better
Yeah, I remember about 10 years ago being so excited for the future when all this smart tech was being introduced. But then I learned just privacy invading and dystopian it all is, and I began to view it as if it’s literal poison.
Still though, at least in recent years I’ve discovered all the open source projects that people have made, and it’s given me hope that I can have all the tech without the loss of privacy. But if a cool piece of tech has been invented, but it’s not open source yet, then I don’t even view as being fully invented yet tbh.
Don't worry, we will be sure to keep hardware level trackers just for y'all.
oh thanks fbi, I can call you up to play games at my house easier (don't mind the door)
I would expect no less! 🥰
I'll turn your leg to spaghetti
AHH FBI, a bunch of liars who claim our country hacked your 2016 election....
Spying on the citizens of individualistic ideas....same bastards you feds are....by the way you will never catch any Russian Spies....they are everywhere....check your department
its insane how quickly and silently we went from "free, but you pay with your data" to "not free, but you also pay with your data"
The shadiness of spyware aside, at least originally you got something out of it, or you'd pay for something but keep your privacy. Now it just exists by default, you pay for the product twice.
Very well-said!
It's sick is what it is.
Similar happened with cable tv. First it was pay for no ads…
You will own nothing and be happy.
I don't pay for anything
I love how that ECG app has to ask for your birthdate just to even know if you're "allowed" to use the app. There is exactly one reason for this: if you're a child, it's illegal for them to harvest your data. With this prompt they're openly admitting that they do not give a fuck about your privacy.
it's actually not an option, they HAVE to ask you that, because they store it on THEIR servers, so THEY would get into trouble if they collected a child's data unwittingly, even if they're a perfectly good company that does nothing shady
but also that's what you read the TOS and such stuff for, what do they say they can do with your data, like if they don't "share your personal information with select partners" or such, then it might be reasonably fine
@@jan_harald A perfectly good company that does nothing shady doesn't have to store that data on its servers. You can (and should be legally forced to) keep that kind of sensitive data local unless EXPLICITLY requested otherwise.
@@jan_harald you say that but all it takes is one "privacy agreement" update to fuck you over.
Plus, they could verify the data in better ways. Like a contract, rather than asking personal info.
On the Apple Watch there is a like “system” DOB for core functionality that doesn’t get shared with the apps. Each individual app (EKG, blood oxygen, VO2 max exe) asks separately for your DOB (sometimes only for the year), and each individual app has a different age limit (IIRC EKG is 22+, but VO2 max? is 20+). You can give each app a contradictory DOB and it won’t care, so long as the DOB provided for each app is before the cutoff date in that app only. I know I have lied to one of the apps before and there is zero pushback, and you can just renter a new DOB if it says you are too young.
Clearly it’s just covering their legal liability with the AF stuff, there is no reason for them to collect this specific DOB when you already have an iPhone and an Apple Watch and thus have agreed to 3? licence agreements (iTunes/Apple ID, iOS and WatchOS), and have probably provided a more specific date of birth in other places.
Also you can opt out of having this stuff stored on the cloud by turning off iCloud sync for health in settings, and this data is (according to Apple) stored with end to end encryption. I’m actually pretty sure this specific DOB is completely local as moving to a new watch you need to explicitly opt back in to ECG and renter your DOB here.
I agree it’s not ideal but it’s pretty standard for Apple, which is basically just barely better than Google and sketchy android but not as good as full libre stuff.
The gadgetbridge project allows you to connect a smartwatch without going through its native spyware setup. Most of the native features that you would have had with the app from whatever vender the watch was from work.
There are also a lot of forks for in development dsvices, I think you could probably find most of the major company's watcher there. Documentation is pretty good for if you feel the need to add a device for yourself. Its also on fdroid, so that's always a plus.
you're a godsend man, had no idea 3rd party apps were available with zero built in tracking bullshit
Thank you for the based knowledge
@@dani1999n You need to know that some Smartwatches which are supported by gadgetbride need to obtain a token for communication. Some of them rely on extracting the token from the proprietary App such as for Xiaomi Mi Band's from Version 3 upwards. That means, you have to make an account, log into it with internet access, pair the watch, use Termux (if Root is available) and extract the token from the Apps's data. You can find more info on their wiki under Huami devices or something.
Take care on what type of watch you'd get to avoid this task.
Thank you for your knowledge!
I have a watch for 1 year (that was a gift) that I don't use because spyware app. Thanks to you and gadgetbridge (couldn't find it before without the name), I now have a working smartwatch that keeps my health datas for myself. as @timlpde said, it was a bit of pain to pair with the auth key needed, but after a few hours of pain I'm now happy.
@@TIMLPDE yh i have an amazfit one and i did have to get a python script to scrape it from the official app's data folder
Advertising with 'No spyware!' would be a good selling point. but do most zoomers really care?
zoomers basically swim in bad opsec
what's an opsec?
sincerely,
a zoomer
@@kingdededelicious Operational Security, I believe
@@kingdededelicious operation security
It's said in the military that there's like 5 operations you always have to do to survive, and the most known and in common use outside the battlefield its that, opsec
Most don’t care. But I would
Quickly becoming one of my favorite tech youtubers. Not only does your content interest me, and fit my needs, but it is also very informative and entertaining! Another video upload I've enjoyed. Thanks Outlaw, looking forward to more videos.
On the pipboy idea, no need for a new device, phones are already 90% there. I'm imagining something like a wrist phone hub that has extra sensors and charges your phone with it's own battery, with some slight UI changes to make it easier to use the phone in landscape mode.
Might be a reason for smaller smartphones to make a comeback.
And ui changes can be probably made just by installing custum launcher
Pretty disturbing that there was spyware to begin with.
Nothing out of the ordinary, though; just another day in this fucked-up world! :D
Ah, yes, data collection, so amazing.
We're living in the cyberpunk dystopia, just without the fancy neon stuff
@@intifadayuri depends on the area
@Scarlett Witch 🅥 can yall bots just get fked?
@@intifadayuri if I'm going to have my data collected, I want the fancy neon stuff
@Scarlett Witch 🅥 spammer
In case you don't know about it there's an amazing video by a guy who worked for IBM developing a pioneering Linux smartwatch back in the day. Although it didn't take off, a lot of the developments were used in later smartwatches.
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IoT is actually a cool hobby if you are into tech. With something like Home Assistant on an Rasperry Pie you can do pretty cool stuff, and if you know React you can Build your own Dashboards.
Paired with Shelly or similar devices you can make your home smart and be the only one with access to your data. You can even integrate your Smart Watch and write a script that emails you a personal health report every month.
Any projects started s of yet ?
I got a Huawei Watch and flashed Astroid on it.
The process was actually pretty simple and has the advantage that I don't have to install crappy spyware from Huawei.
I'm pretty happy the watch is fantastic for what I want from it.
So mainly sports and as mp3 player when I run.
For people who also do sports and do not want to be distracted or better want to track their progress I can only recommend it.
How do you flash astroid?
@@profound369
You can find the instructions on the website.
It's really not a complicated process.
Even I got it done, and I'm not the most technically savvy person by far.
It basically just amounts to enabling developer options, changing a setting and running a few commands through your terminal.
You can even keep Asteroid parallel to the original os if you want.
according to teclore you can use Garmin watches and download your data offline to a computer. Therefore, you don’t even have to use the Garmin services that track you
Garmin also has stealth modes. Their watches are pretty popular with military members so they make them with privacy concerns in mind.
There are people still using their pebble smartwatches. There was a sleep tracking app available back when I used my Pebble Time. Unfortunately the only heart-rate enabled pebble watch had rubber side buttons that deteriorate and fall apart eventually.
@Scarlett Witch 🅥 Unexpectedly wholesome?
Yeah, I had the first model of the Pebble. Loved it so much, I convinced a friend to get one even though it was already the age of Rebble. Only reason I didn't use Morpheuz more was because I never got used to wearing a watch to bed. I wish we saw more watches like it that focused on battery life and always-on displays.
I still use my pebble, got it in middle school. But I've always been mad that I cheaped out and didn't get the time steel. They were cheap asf brand new when I was buying, but I'm cheap asf too
Step tracking is spot on but the heart rate monitor wasn't all that accurate to begin with, they would have needed a few iterations possibly. Shame they fell through.
@@Camoceltic Sleep as Android is pretty stellar, but yeah, you have to be used to wearing it to bed. I got used to taking it off for 1 hour per week which is pretty awesome.
You mentioned a lot of the valuable parts of a smartwatch, but something that doesn't get acknowledged enough is how much more convenient notifications and speaker calls on the watch are. Being able to set up timers easily, use them to control my phone's camera, change music while working out, and have a full calculator, my calendar, and the forecast, I use my watch for basically everything I can do on my phone but reading or watching videos. I'm pretty excited about the resurgence of e-ink and the possibility I could use a cheap phone for reading and emails and have my watch for everything else (yes, I cant watch videos on e-ink, but I don't watch stuff outside the house anyways.)
Is it, though? Seems like doing all that stuff is a nightmare on a watch. Even phones can barely do it well, I don't see how they can get watches right.
Take calendar for example. You can see, what? Today's events? No option for a 30 day view that's useful? A terrible user interface that takes forever, and you may as well use a phone or computer?
I just don't see the use of the interface. I think good AR will be far better.
@@O1OO1O1
Before you read: I am talking about my experience with stock Samsung watch and phone if you have no interest save yourself some time.
Most people use calendar to check current day events, you can create new ones with voice commands, but the 30 day view doesn't show your future appointments. Yet it is good enough to keep track of your day and you may do your planning and checking of future appointments once or twice a day in the computer and focus on the day with the smartwatch.
Answering or denying calls is a breeze, just a quick swipe or even a gesture using the accelerometer and I'm talking.
Speak to text is quite decent for longer answers, there are preprogrammed quick replies and the qwerty keyboard with swipe typing is good enough for the edge cases.
I agree. Aside from normal watch functions, I use my gear s2 primarily for calendar, weather, and email reading purposes. It's great for when I'm walking somewhere and want a quick, small dashboard of what I have going on.
For many of my activities even a phone is bare bones. But yeah, everyone has different need and wants. Yet there still are open software solutions that grant you your features without the privacy concerns
gatekeeping features on the device you payed for with DRM is already a thing. Some of the sensors are just broken without a subscription to fitbit. Others may be censored by region, like Samsung features turning off outside of South Korea.
For me, its the G-SHOCK GBD200-1. Classic square g-shock with some basic fitness tracking that displays right on the watch. Sure, you can connect it to an app on your phone, but you don't have to.
For me it's the GW-M5610U, the fact that it perfectly syncs the time with a radio signal is "smart" enough for me. It tells me the time, it has a few time alerts available, it has a stopwatch, it has a timer, it has world time, it's solar powered, it's shock resistant and water resistant, what more do you want from your watch?
@@supra107 Impressive. Very nice choice.
@@kalgonzo148 The only model that can rival it is the GW-9400 with the sensor. However 1) it's way more expensive and 2) it's way more bulkier. The GW-M5610U is probably the cheapest daily driver that just runs itself.
@@supra107 That sounds like what I have. It's put up with some serious abuse.
@@maxscott3349 The model name and the module version is always engraved on the backplate of the watch.
My watch has 3 little hands, that spin around in circles, over and over and over. I look down at it, and suddenly I know the time. This is as technology advanced as I want my watch.
I bought both a sealed and an unsealed PineTime last year, and the TLDR is that the software Pine put on (infinitime) pretty much sucks, although it is getting better every few months. There is a lot more development happening however on other OSs for the PineTime, like Wasp-os and the OS from the Zephr watch also runs on PineTime. Personally, given Pine64's pretty good reputation in the opensource / openhardware space, which is a space where many companies just take your cash and run let alone keep supporting software for real products, I think the PineTime is the perfect watch for the privacy-concious to rally around. These watch OS' are small and easy to reason about, and they can even run a python REPL.
The only good smart watch I've ever owned was a Pebble, nothing else has really gotten the point of the smart watch aside from pebble. My checklist: Needs a battery that lasts a minimum of a week, needs an always on display as a gesture to turn on the display prevents easy casual time/stat tracking, needs an app store thats open to third party developers, finally fitness tracking is nice but it should be secondary to checking and responding to notifications, and features relating to time keeping and schedule management. I don't mind the watch being reliant on a phone, it's just gotta have features that reduce the need to pull out my phone
A couple things I've seen current smartwatches are alike to the pebble are in price and battery life. What matters to me is that it lacks a touch screen. No real replacement for the Pebble yet, how long has it been again? A decade?!
I got a Fitbit after years of refusing to get a 24/7 tracker. It helped me fix my sleep and stuff but now I am pretty sure there is a digital me being sold by Fitbit somewhere
PSA: everyone with a garmin watch has a 85%+ chance of being a fed
Guess I am a fed.
You can tell by the fluorescence
not only the watch glows in the dark
And a 100% chance of being on strava
Some time ago, I had the opportunity to try a Xiaomi MI band. I liked the experience, I realized how good it is for checking the time without taking out my phone. It convinced me to think about buying a $20 Casio in the future.
While it probably isn't the most secure strictly speaking, I use Garmin devices. Particularly those in their fitness tracker category rather than anything labelled as a "smart watch", all the fitness tracking, but limited options for connectivity with various phone apps to the fitness tracker. Phone Notifications is about as much as you can hope for and honestly that is more than I need.
The pinetime development kit actually looks pretty interesting... Seems like the middle ground between a finished product and developing your own.
I'd honestly rock a pip-boy style device
I built my own device but mostly cause I cannot wear a normal watch while wearing an orthotic device. So I embedded the sensor in orthotic for SpO² and pulse and have magnets and pogopins to clip on the watch I made. So it's an add on for my orthotics. I have SpO² sensors on forhead and legs to calculate orthostatic differences. Not something watches can do and I needed the extra feedback.
I agree with the last pip-boy comment. I've had for the last couple of years a mighty need to make my own smart watch, kinda like the ZSWatch. After some months tho, I thought that I'd be better to just go full-on cyberpunk and make a bigger wearable. Maybe something that could fit the entire foremarm, put a keyboard, a linux distro, make it like a tiny pc, maybe something crazier. It'd be fun and I'd get a cool device (and some bragging rights) in the end.
I've wanted to put together my own pip-boy with a raspi, still working on figuring out how to aquire the internal hardware to work on it. I do have an idea on how to make the buttons and dials work though, since QMK is pretty customizable.
ZSwatch looks pretty nice, altough I'm not big enough of a consoomer to need a smart watch at this point
Nice username.
Same lol I just brought me a watch that looks like a calculator instead 🤝
I have a Garmin instinct 2. It has everything the other watches have just in black and white with a battery that last weeks!
What really makes me love it is the stealth mode that stops the watch from sending out signals that could cause you to be tracked. Another is a kill switch that will let you wipe your data off the watch.
You can connect a watch to ADB easily! Just enable developer options the same way you would on a phone, and use wireless debugging to connect it to ADB. How did you think developers test their apps :P
Does it accept a wireless connection with no Internet? Not to mention, iirc, Google Watch devices force you to go through the Google Watch app on your phone for first-time setup. That means phoning home to Google and all.
@@3lH4ck3rC0mf0r7 No. You have to enable wireless debugging, and then run "adb connect [ip]" to connect to it like you would any phone. There is also wireless debugging over bluetooth, but I never used that. It's just easier to connect directly through WiFi. I'm pretty sure you would need to have it set up so you can access the watch's settings page, like you said. I don't know if rooting/bootloader unlocking is even possible through ADB, though. I'm more into programming than hacking lol.
@@imaperson1060 I meant connecting both the phone and watch to a Wi-Fi router that lacked access to the Internet. It also hasn't been easy to find if WearOS watches can be setup offline (that is, going offline after the wearos app has been downloaded to the phone) and skip transferring Google accounts to it. It appears they can though, but I don't know for sure.
I barely trust Google after I found out how unusable basic Chromecasts are without 24/7 Internet access and a Google account. Those things just become bricks.
That would seem possible for the same reason you can print on your local network even if there's no internet. The only problem would be, as you said, with setting up without internet. It's possible and likely that you'll just be blocked from setup entirely. Tbf though not that much data is being collected on setup except that you _have_ a watch. I don't think you're required to do anything past link your Google account, and even on the Pixel Watch iirc Fitbit is optional (you just won't be able to track health stuff without signing in).
@@imaperson1060 Meh. I can still just make a new Google account on a spare, rooted, freshly-wiped phone w/ spoofed bluetooth address at a coffee shop, move the pairing key and app data to my daily driver phone and firewall the app out of the Internet forever after the deed is done. But I'd still rather avoid that hurdle entirely if I can. Not to mention, as a person that uninstalled Google Play Services, I know I'll find obstacles on that front, too. People have been succesful pairing on those phones, but it takes some... extra steps. And I don't know what features might be unavailable.
I use the open-source app Gadgetbridge with a Fossil Hybrid watch. It's a good compromise (some smart features, notifications, HR tracking, etc - but all data stays on my device, I don't have the closed-source manufacturer app installed, and the watch has no connectivity apart from bluetooth to my phone). It also works with Mi Fit / AmazFit bands, etc.
Hit the nail right on the head. What we really need is a Pip-Boy
I have a BangleJS2 smartwatch and love it. I'm surprised you didn't bring that one up.
I use a band watch. But I never use it for fitness traking.
The most useful features for me are the music controls, timer and alarm.
It's also useful for call warning, as I work in a very noisy environment and arent always able to hear my ringtone. But the band vibrating never fails getting my attention.
Everything else may as well not exist.
There is another option to get the leaked bootloader for chinese watches or gadgetbridge watches and enjoy all the benefits of specs and privacy
Got to have a high dpi oled screen or what's the point?
Learning about smart watches was terrifying but I love my Gamin Fenix 7 so much :(
I have the pinetime watch and it's great imo but mostly just for notifications and timer. Still "beta" and not in competition with Samsung apple or Google yet for fitness and many other features.
Heart rate tracker has been unreliable in my experience.
I loved my pinetime but after about a year of use the wrist strap broke. And it's real pain to get a new one since any in person stores only care about apple watches. I tried to order a replacement strap from Barton Watch bands online and the material was too thick to slot into the groove so I ended up having to sand it down to make it fit. I really wish pine would just sell replacement watch bands. I'd just order a couple sets and I wouldn't have any other complaints with them.
@@theodis8134 I have family who own the Samsung watch and with some experimenting learned that 20 mm watchbands work for the pinetime. This sort of information should be on their website, a mistake on their part.
I got a few replacement bands off Amazon. The one that comes with it definitely sucks.
correct me if I'm wrong but, couldn't you use a Garmin watch for these?
I know about the Garmin app and that it's proprietary but I think that in some models (or maybe most of them) you can just connect it to your computer and transfer the files of your training for the day and analyze it over some other program that can read the type of file etc.
imo this is the best option (unless someone has a counter) and I'm highly considering getting a Forerunner here myself
Pine time looks great for me. IDC about fitness tracking.
Someday I’d like one of those Garmin watches for Hiking and camping.
The lilygo T-Watch is a esp32 based device with LoRa, Bluetooth, wifi, and gives so much potential but the esp32 is a power hungry thing.
I've been looking into buying a Pinetime recently and I remember reading that Sleep for Android supports the Pinetime, and is a great sleep tracking app. I have yet to try it but I sure am excited to
That's what makes me want to become good enough in making devices to make my own smart watch.
Modifying or repairing your device does not void your warranty (in most countries). Manufacturers like to claim so and some will actually refuse service, but by law the manufacturer has to actually prove that your modification damaged the device.
Also, no device will claim to be waterproof. They are water resistant.
An always on display is important for it to function as a watch IMO, I wonder if one will pop up in a nice case, waterproof and heart monitoring with an eink display.
Man, I really enjoyed this video. Please keep making more about things like this.
The Pipboy has that sweet sweet AM/FM radio that the kids are swing dancing to these days
If I am to design and build a smartwatch from zero I would definitely add a NFC and 125kHz module, a 300-900MHz general purpose modem and a infrared interface. I would definitely want to use it in conjunction with access control systems.
I had no idea the pinewatch existed. I have a pinepower and love it. Ordered the watch ti mess around with, thanks for this video.
I like my Casio, has a BT App to set the time ( used it practically once for that, with internet to the app disabled, because apparently you could do geolocation with BT ), but otherwise dump as eff...
Sometimes, just sometimes, life needs to be a bit easier.
the problem with apple devices like the Apple Watch is that they’re actually miles cooler the the competition, it’s hard to look for competitors when that’s so appealing
Define cooler
ahh downhill skateboarding uses all of your muscles and it's much more exhausting than you would think........
I would like an Apple watch that pairs with my android. Why can't that be a thing? After all the ipod was a thing and it synced with windows.
nO, yOu HaVE tO buY ipHOnE
if youre looking for a pipboy style watch, garmin has something very similar. they have some pretty cool stuff as far as wearables go i just havent done enough research on them or been able to audit one myself to see whats all going on under the hood.
afaik you don't need to connect it bluetooth to your phone app or anything and you can just transfer the files of your training to a computer and open them with another app etc so issues with spyware don't seem to really exist on it if you just wanna use it for basic stuff like monitoring training/sleeping
Garmin spies on our heart rate 24/7
idk man, im thinking about buying the old school casio watch
You've added casio watch to your watch list, feds have added you to their watchlist.
You could also buy some chinese fitness tracker from aliexpress that only uses bluetooth and write your own android app to sync the data with your phone. Theres a communication standard for Bluetooth health devices, as long as the device uses it you can do it and protect your privacy.
A fair warning tho, bluetooth can be quite frustrating, and please use kotlin instead of java.
My favorite brand of sport watches are Suunto which directly compete with garmin but dont have unecessary things like wifi and just handles the sport things greatly, though they are pretty expensive since they are hand assembled in Finland, but overall much more secure than the orher brands.
As a powerlifter I can attest that the Apple Watch is pretty accurate at tracking calories while lifting weight, has made bulking and cutting a lot easier
I am absolutely looking for someone, one day, giving the possibility to push WearOs on my Huawei Watch GT Pro 2.
I very much like the jewelry aspect of a watch, the women model with or witouth a custom strap gives much character, I had several compliments.
I own several normals watches but it's really useful not having to do the math for how much I slept, especially after having only 6-7 hours where I'm a bit hazy.
Having notifications is also very basic but is definitely feeling liberating from having my phone in my pocket all the time. I don't like the sound of notifications or the vibrations (which can be too loud when on desk or not enough when you're walking)
I'm sure to be alerted when my wrist is shaked.
I'm not that hopeful because Huawei had a history of not giving the possibility to unlock the bootloader. But it's just for kicks yknow, I'd like to add more than the 20 apps the Huawei shop disposes.
All of my needs are definitely set, it's not that bad (notifs, sleep, steps, heartrate, chrono, alarm, meteo, lots of watchfaces, body temperature even) It have 5-6 days of battery
But having other possible shops or a way to import apks would be great nonetheless
Have a happy new year full of beauty y'all
The ZSWatch looks pretty nice! 4 buttons, round display, I'm curious what the upcoming version will look like! Sadly it looks like it doesn't have a transflective MIP LCD but needs backlight to be visible. I used to wear a Pebble until a year ago, and I don't want to miss full button operation, always-on sunlight-visible screen and several days of battery life. I can live without health/activity tracking, touch screen and things like phone calls on the watch. So last year I replaced my Pebble Steel with a Garmin fenix 6S Pro which comes pretty close. But now I miss the Pebble's open ecosystem, and somehow also its geekiness...
garmin vivosmart 4 would be nice without the cloud data thru the Android. Size is small but not readable at my age. Buzzes for "new goal reached" should be blocked too. Nice video.
Pip Boy is the shit!
In Fallout universe, the transistor was never invented,so miniature vacuum tubes on mobile info/combat device scare the FEV out of me ;)
I have a pinetime. Can vouch for the fact that the heart rate monitor is a bit inaccurate occasionally
pip boy would be awesome! but i reckon it would be heavy af on the hand
due to my job I cant have one during work hours so I jsut use a notebook, hands, and mind to keep track of my bpm, and distance I've walked
I have a trusty old g-shock and if any watch is going to replace it on my wrist, it'll have to provide at least half the battery life and durability it does; smart watches may provide utility to people who go out trekking or walking a lot, but my watch doesn't need to be charged (solar ftw) and does one thing, which is telling the time, and does it well. As a UNIX autist, I love tools that do just their job and do it well.
I prefer Garmin watches. They are not as smart but can't talk to other services on their own. They work together with an app installed on the phone.
It tracks heart rate and sleep. The data is sent to to the app via bluetooth. Display of notifications on the watch work the same but in the other direction (notifications from the phone are displayed on the watch)
I still wear an iPod Nano 6 from 2010 with a watch band attached to it. Its definitely outdated and only connects to a PC/mac over a wired connection, but lack of wireless connectivity other than fm radio, microphone or anything of that sort makes it pretty much impossible to use as a tracking device, and it still looks like a smartwatch despite technically not being one.
Is it really spyware if you agree to the terms of service before using the product?
Actually you can disable most of the proprietary bloatware if not all, just by using adb commands. You can connect adb wifi and give some commands from your computer, for disabling stuff. Also, you can disable most manufacturer apps just by going into the settings, app info, and tapping disable. Problem is that those apps are often needed to get good tracking
“When a wrist watch becomes old, its an heirloom,
When a smartwatch becomes old, its an e-waste”
-Michael Fisher [Mr. Mobile]
My 10 year battery casio watch:
I have a garmin instint and tbh I can't see why it would ever be e-waste. Unlikely to break and the features it has now will be just as good in 20 years. Only the more phone like smartwatches become ewaste.
I've been using a very basic xiaomi watch w/o connecting it to anything. It's locked down as hell, but it's cheap and lets me see all I need to see without having to be connected to any phone or network. I only have to connect it to a device every other month for it to sync the time, in which I just use some e-waste android tablet I have laying around that's never connected to my network either.
It's a really stupid set-up, but it works
Dude, if you want a good tablet/laptop device, Microsoft Surface Pro series is awesome. I bought a used Surface Pro 7 last year for $600, and the minute I got it, I nuked Windows 11, and threw Arch on it. The only things that don't work, is battery optimization, the stylus, and the webcam. All things I couldn't care less about (I'm lying, I want the stylus). There's even a github repo for linux-surface kernal, and all that good stuff. Honestly, the only issue I've had was dumb shit with Pacman not being able to download some packages sometimes. Oh, and the keyring for the surface kernal gets fucky every now and then, and needs to be manually updated.
For real though, a tablet with an i7, 16gb of ram, and a 4k HDR display? Yeah that's pretty dang decent. The only thing that bugs me is soldered SSD. But it's still pretty whatever, since I use the thing for diagnostics/reading schematics/word processing.
You can buy tablet PC's like the dell 5290 2in1 or the Microsoft surface tablets, these are life changers for people that move quite a bit
Gadget Bridge is a good alternative app that lets you use the main stream watches without using their tracking app. I have a fossil hybrid and it works better then the stock app with gadget bridge.
I just recently bricked my watch (for a dumb reason that I wont get into lol) while trying to root it and I gotta agree that there's less consequence than rooting phones, I can buy a replacement watch for like $60 online
I got the fossil hr hybrid watch I feel it's a compelling product. Battery last for about a month it is a traditional watch with hands but the face is eink and has productivity functions of a smart watch.
The only reason I'd want a smart watch is so I could modify it into looking like the pause menu from Goldeneye 007.
while normally I'd rather not share my data with Google, I think in this case it's worth it. It's worse than the ideal open-source solution, but it's still better than nothing
I can host my own email, so there's no reason to allow spyware to read it. I can host my own NAS, so there's no reason to let companies mess with my files. This is different, as I can't do any of it myself.
Google's ML-based heartrate monitoring and sleep tracking is really good, and there's no open source alternative that even comes close yet. If sharing my data is part of the cost of doing business, I think it's worth the price.
We're a bit spoiled in that we have Free software for almost everything under the sun, but this is one area where we still really just have to pay.
I agree a Pip-boy would be badass,
Just thinking about the tracking chips people used to fearmonger over. What were they called? I forgot...
u should make a video on how BrightVPN uses user's residential IP's as Brightdata Residential proxies and doesn't even clarify it on their main page, u have to click "How is it free?" to be told thats what they do
If you want a smartwatch to monitor your heart rate during workouts, just get a heart rate monitor. You’d be getting a better and more accurate monitor at a lower cost without spyware attached to your wrist.
Do any of these watches have a NVD comparable screen mode though? Or a low battery usage mode so it can last for days with minimal use?
I have a pinetime and it lasts maybe 5 days with it mostly on my desk, 3 or 4 days wearing it to work. The heartrate monitor is kind of trashy (sometimes saying i have 60 beats per minute) and the gadgetbridge app doesn't record it anyway. Mostly use the accelerometer to turn the screen on from a brisk wrist rotation, but you can just make it hypersensitive to always stay on. The biggest reason it stays at home is just that you can't see the time and music controls/song title at the same time, and that I didn't get a dev version to even try some smart home stuff. An ESP32 watch might be better if you just want some way to control offline smart home things over zigbee or something, since it only has a bluetooth antenna.
The pinetime, banglejs, pebble etc .. are more of fitness trackers than smart watches.. when you think of it that way, You'll appreciate the fewer features and longer battery life (20-30 days on my bip) they come with as opposed to smart watches which run full multi tasking oses but you have to charge every couple of days.. just like your phone, laptop etc...
As for privacy, as long as your smart watch doesn't connect to internet directly (read: has no LTE/wifi), any watch supported by gadgetbridge app is good enough imo. Your data stays with you on your phone. The device can only talk to that nice open source app via. Bluetooth. No privacy worries at all.
Electronic chips are becoming smaller, faster and more power efficient over time. In a few years we will see smartwatch size mini computers with the performance of current smartphones. That will allow tiny devices to run everything locally and won't need to be connected to a phone. The Moore's Law is flattening a bit but there's always a breakthrough. There's a few new chip technologies being developed right now but it's still early.
Honestly Garmin is the way to go for a no bloat fitness tracker (it's less "smart" than an apple watch or others but why would you check messages on a watch), no issues with the forerunner 965, tells me everything I need and tracks my sleep extremely thoroughly, with an insane battery life.
Yeah you pay through the ass but it's worth it imo, you get a solid watch that sure does tell time as well as everything else (still day to day I wear an f-84w)
I'd choose mainstream smartwatch and install CustomROM. But, as you said, not for everyone.
Thanks for pointing out the pine time. I'll try it out
I am seriously considering to replace my iPhone with an Apple Watch! I am someone who doesn’t like the idea of carrying a phone or missing a call. It’s standalone with the cellular! And the Ultra can last a couple days at best. But who knows, my future job may not exactly be flexible for that… and cellular may drain its battery much faster. Now the tracking, I personally don’t care as I’d be using it either for outdoor exercise or work. It’s not like I’d be wearing it around the house lol.
As for iPads, or convertible devices per se, I’m going to try pairing my iPad Pro with a Brydge 12.9 Pro+ Wireless Keyboard with Trackpad. I know they made a newer version apparently, with a magnetic back cover and better support for trackpad and keyboard it would seem, but I also heard MANY complaints of reviews on Amazon saying the hinges break too easily… sucks since it is such a cool concept in theory.
actually, a little thin e-ink based like, phone or phablet size thingie, would be pretty dope
while they do make actually high refresh rate eink stuff (there's actual phones and tablets using it, very few, but there are some), you don't even need that,
slow eink is perfectly fine for a watch, you just need to be able to do smart update algorithms (e.g. avoid the crappy e-reader "whole screen flashes on every update")
and I mean, getting heart rate sensor, prolly some low-res IR camera+led, accelerometer, magnetometer (compass can be handy), heck, why not gps while at it, it's not all that hard, if you're willing to manufacture at reasonable scale so you're able to make custom boards, similarly with LTE (although getting a LTE module with open source drivers might be a little challenging)
all the REAL challenge is just making a *GOOD* operating system for it, that can give you accurate and useful information
e-ink also has the benefit that it's way better readable outside (so you can go for a run, without having to awkwardly cover the screen with the other hand to shield from the sun), and you can just shine a backlight through it, to make it visible in the dark, and you need very minimal power to drive it, overall
screens are usually the BIGGEST battery drain, followed by mobile networking, so e-ink means you can have a lighter battery provide more "always-on" time, having just a dumb watch (be it digital or analog) displayed 24/7 wouldn't consume nearly any power, since you only really need to update it every minute (could also update every second, but I'd prolly do that only when you press a button or shake it, or something)
and unlike a normal smartphone, you also don't really need 24/7 cellular connectivity, probably, so you can have "smart detection" for when you probably don't need it, you can still pair via bluetooth to notify you of incoming calls on your phone, it's not like you'd want to have your watch be the primary phone anyway most of the time (heck, you can prolly just get like some 2005 dumbphone if you're paranoid of the new ones and want to be available all the time), just like having "phone number" and "home/office number" separate isn't a trouble, just the same if people actually need to reach you, it's no trouble to just give them both watch's and phone's numbers, and there's also the benefit that you can just have a "dumb plan" for your watch (like idk, some 500MB data cap, and such, whatever the cheapest available solution is), and disable all incoming calls whatsoever, just auto-decline, and use the data only turning it on periodically to sync a bit of data (like once every hour, or every 2 hours, it's not like the watch's got much data to sync in the first place, nor would you usually need it particularly fast, if it's hourly sync, you'd probably already have the data synced anyway by the time you want to grab it, be it uploading your training data (you're not gonna need it synced RIGHT AWAY anyway), or syncing incoming messages or whatever (iirc, sms are kept at the carrier's side "sms center" cache for some time, so if your phone is offline, you don't necessarily miss the messages))
I've been eyeing esp32 based watches lately.
There is also bangle js2. I own one and its very good for my daily tasks.
There is bangle js 2 as well
old trusty Casio will do for me. I don't need to measure progress, i can feel it.
I’ve been looking for a smartwatch, might look into the pinetime
tbh rooting phones is not HARD, it's just the fact you HAVE to erase ALL the data on the device and you MIGHT screw it up due to even something as simple as a bit dodgy cable that happens to disconnect in the middle of it all
with wearables though...fair at that, having to open them up is certainly WAY more daunting, and ruining the water-proofness you wouldn't know until it was too late (and would be a major bummer, imho)