Hybrid Smartwatches

Hybrid smartwatches, or analogue smartwatches (of today) are the ones that connect to your phone and, through your phone to the internet, like other smartwatches. They do almost everything a smartwatch does but look more like an analogue watch and don’t waste a lot of energy on a tiny touchscreen. In my not so humble opinion, hybrid smartwatches are better because they look nicer, are more practical, and are way cheaper than serious smartwatches.

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What was the first smartwatch? Hint: it wasn’t the Apple Watch.

If you Google this question you will probably end up reading the Wikipedia article on smartwatch where you will see many examples of old smartwatches. Even before googling it, I was already sure it dated way back because I saw Casio watches from the 80s such as Casio Databank and the touchscreen Casio TC-50 among Buxton Collection in an HCI conference some time ago; this also proves Apple wasn’t the inventor of touchscreen or touchscreen watches. The most important thing I remember from visiting Buxton Collection was a question that Mr. Bill Buxton asked us; I couldn’t answer and his own answer seemed so obvious that made me feel very dumb at the time.

What is the biggest problem of a watch with a touchscreen?

Buxton’s answer: you need a pencil sharpener for your fingers!

Since then, every time I use a touchscreen to input anything, most notably when I type on my iPhone, I remember Buxton’s answer. Screen real-estate on touchscreen devices is so limited that people try to circumvent this problem by other means such as machine learning. Google’s smart keyboard, Gboard, is a solution that only sometimes works: a couple of days ago I was suggesting a friend to share something with our group, except Gboard replaced group with Groot.

To summarize my rambling about touchscreens: the large finger problem still exists and that is a major weakness of touch interaction with smartwatches.

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What are the advantages of smartwatches over regular (stupid?) watches?

Most of my expectations for smartwatches are the stuff you expect from regular watches but I want to get the obvious ones out of the way before getting more serious; it is a pretty sad situation that this first list is more obvious to smartwatch producers than the second one.

The most obvious expectation from a smartwatch, that a regular watch cannot fulfill, is self-adjustment. A smartwatch should take daylight saving into account and update time-zone based on location. Fortunately, this is the industry standard as far as I know. Showing multiple time-zones is also a bonus that is very useful for business people. My current smartwatch doesn’t have it!!!

Since Fitbit and its rivals entered the market, activity monitoring such as counting steps and calories burnt and measuring workout time and distance traveled has become another trivial requirement.

Presenting notifications from applications on your smartphone, especially as vibrotactile stimuli, is a low-hanging fruit, therefore it has also become an industry standard too. Now you can multitask, i.e., get distracted constantly, even without your phone.

Lastly, some smartwatches also measure heartbeat and as far as I know, very few measure blood pressure,  and only one has been approved by FDA: Omron. This is great news for people with (or suspected of) heart conditions and patients whose heart and blood need to be monitored frequently such as cancer patients. I self-censored my joke about people who are obsessed with health.

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What else should we expect from a smartwatch, hybrid or otherwise?

This is my second list of requirements and mostly includes qualities that the industry leaders fail to meet. I wish Steve Jobs would be as obsessed about the Apple Watch as he was about the Macintosh and iPhone; maybe he was but cancer …

A smartwatch should be a good watch first and a good watch reveals current time efficiently. If you have to touch the screen first to wake it up, it isn’t a good watch. If you have to lift your wrist, it is a bit better but not perfect.

You wear a watch in sickness and in health, in the wind and in the rain, therefore, most good watches these days, even the cheaper ones, are water and dust resistant. A good smartwatch should also be water and dust resistant too. This wasn’t the case at first, especially for Apple Watch, but it is becoming an industry standard too.

The most subtle requirement of a smartwatch is subtlety. You should be able to read it without anyone else noticing. This is useful in a meeting, or an interview, or a date. The fact that you are checking the time because you are bored or you are late for something else is between you and your watch. Nobody else needs to know.

The quality most ignored by technology geeks is design aesthetics. How can enjoying the beauty of a piece of technology you carry around all the time be less important than all the other qualities I talked about? The beauty of the design, not just how the device looks, but also how it feels when your fingers touch it and it touches your wrist and how much it weighs on your hand and how it reflects the light, they all matter. design aesthetics is not just important for watches but also for computers, headphones, and even toasters but it is probably more important for a watch than a computer or a toaster. Disclaimer: we do have a very beautiful toaster and every time we toast some bread we enjoy looking at it. Back to smartwatches: many of them are super ugly and the material they use feel so cheap, even though they are not cheap. I mean, rubber band for a $200 watch? Some of their leather bands are not good either. And the steel bands are sometimes not hypoallergenic. Most cheap regular watches look much nicer than these expensive smartwatches.

Most importantly, you wear a watch most of the time, unless it’s just jewelry for you, in which case this article is not written for you. Just like a watch, a smartwatch should be able to tell you the time any time of the day. You shouldn’t touch your phone screen and brighten the room up early in the morning to know if you can sleep one more hour before rushing to work. Neither should you ask Alexa, Siri, or Okay Google. This means charging your smartwatch by the bed every night, because its battery lasts one or two days, robs you of one of the best pleasures of wearing a watch on your wrist. To summarize: the battery must last at least several days and recharging it shouldn’t take too long either: I suggest the length of a shower because I don’t wear my watch in the shower.

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Why hybrid smartwatches are better than touchscreen smartwatches?

A hybrid smartwatch shows the time with its hands and they don’t disappear if you don’t look at your watch or don’t touch it for some time. This means hybrid smartwatches show the time efficiently and subtly.

A hybrid smartwatch doesn’t waste screen real-estate on a power hungry touchscreen. This means its battery lasts longer, much longer in fact, than most touchscreen smartwatches. It also means you look at actual moving pieces under a glass, i.e., it has a 3D display that works 100% of the time and under any condition. A bonus is you don’t forget how to read analogue clocks: one fewer human ability to lose to technology.

A hybrid smartwatch may take less space and unlike touchscreen smartwatches, it doesn’t look like a tiny skyscraper on your wrist. Moreover, it can easily be round and tell people that you are not a square person. I am sorry to upset Apple Watch fans, but I do think as much as having an iPod in the early 2000s was trendy, wearing an Apple Watch, both the cheapest and the most expensive model, and less so the ones in the middle, make you look conventional and boring. In my defence I am not saying you are boring; I am saying wearing those square, or squircle, smartwatches actually makes you look boring, old-fashioned, conventional, and religious. If you don’t believe me, you should visit one of Apple campuses and see young Apple employees.

And lastly, back to Bill Buxton’s comment about sharpening your fingers, you don’t need sharp fingers, or a stylus pen to interact with a hybrid smartwatch. The interaction is limited to one to three buttons like most regular watches and that is enough.

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What hybrid smartwatches have I tried?

My first analogue smartwatch was (is?) a Skagen Hagen Connected. It is a beautiful watch that does the job. There were a few glitches with connectivity with my iPhone at first but they got resolved or I didn’t use it as frequently as I used to. The battery, which is not rechargeable, has lasted several months now and it is still ticking. The reason I stopped using it was that I had allergy to the band. It might be easy to fix but I fell in love with another smartwatch before fixing it. It does everything I have said above except heart rate monitoring.

My second analogue smartwatch was a Fossil Hybrid Q Commuter. It is almost identical to the Skagen in terms of functionality to an extent that one might have borrowed from the other. I will return it soon. Its connectivity seems to be much better than Skagen but it is clunky as hell. My wife thinks it is very ugly and she knows what she’s talking about when she talks about design. The leather straps are very (what’s the word?) phony, and the blue face was not a very nice blue. We all fall for the wrong watch, don’t we?

My third and last smartwatch is a Nokia Steel HR; it does everything that Skagen and Fossil do plus it is smaller, lighter, more elegant (sadly not as photogenic as the other ones apparently), has a better app, and most importantly: measures heart rate. The only seemingly disadvantage is that its battery doesn’t last months, it is said to last 25 days. In my opinion, that’s not a deal breaker at all. Even two weeks of battery life is good enough; plus, having a chargeable battery means theoretically you never have to pay and change a battery and I personally prefer charging my watch once or twice a month than finding out the exact model of a battery, trying to find it online or in a drugstore, opening my watch, and replacing its battery hoping for the best.