No matter what smartwatch you decide to buy, I expect a significant proportion of non-athletes fall into a similar pattern with them: initial and continued usefulness from reading and responding to notifications; some initial interest in sleep tracking that trails off after a couple of months; and the occasional messing around with things like timers. And steps – 10,000 steps…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I got the first Apple Watch release, then after abandoning it as a solution to a problem I didn’t have I decided to try again about 5 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While I liked being able to leave my phone on silent all the time – something I adopted, and stuck with right from Day One – it was a pretty low ratio of utility relative to charging needs. After the battery performance started to drop off, I couldn’t find a daily pattern for charging it that suited me, so I decided to abandon ship for a Garmin Solar 2. Perfectly acceptable in terms of what I wanted, but with a 22-ish day battery life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, the LCD screen real estate is tiny and in the last 18 months I’ve found myself having to reach for my glasses to read the notifications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This set me on a long drawn out, low-intensity piece of research: what about having something screen-less, but with a super long battery life. This was kicked off by looking at a Whoop. I have quite a high barrier for entering into subscription contract #643 in an apparently infinite series, so I abandoned that after about 30 seconds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I eventually stumbled on just before Christmas was something called a ‘Yanmis’ tracker. Amazon had a protracted shipping estimate (from China probably), so I had a look on eBay and found one for \u00a314. It also has an estimated 40 day battery life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The design is… compromised: in what is probably an attempt to look like a Whoop, the strap only attaches to one side. The app (QWatch Pro) appears to be generic, and used by a bunch of cheap fitness trackers. The documentation it came with was free of detail and – well, pretty much any useful information whatsoever. I migrated to Android and haven’t really looked into the permissioning model that closely. I’ve basically set the bare minimum, at least for notifications to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s still ticking all the right boxes for me. It also means that I can wear my mechanical watch again (or at least not feel like an idiot hiding two watches with long sleeves.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No matter what smartwatch you decide to buy, I expect a significant proportion of non-athletes fall into a similar pattern with them: initial and continued usefulness from reading and responding to notifications; some initial interest in sleep tracking that trails … Continue reading