• go $fsck yourself@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    You’re describing a ton of features that a smart watch does not need. It doesn’t need wifi or a camera, for example.

    The thing is, there’s TONS of off-brand smart watches that can do constant heart rate monitoring, notifications, sleep tracking, and those more basic smart features very well. The problem is that they require proprietary apps and a cloud account you have no control over.

    • tetris11
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      3 days ago

      You’re describing a ton of features that a smart watch does not need. It doesn’t need wifi or a camera, for example.

      I agree, I was just demonstrating that you could have a tiny chip packed full of features as well as optimized sleep states to really save on power, and it still runs out of power on the same scale as a smartphone, due to the sole reason that it’s not actually allowed to go to sleep and still function as a watch.

      Most get around this by not displaying the time unless you shake the watch awake (which I find hilarious), or running at extremely low clock-rates in which case the latency in user-interaction suffers.

      The problem is that they require proprietary apps and a cloud account you have no control over.

      Agreed. SQFMI’s Watchy powered by the fantastic ESP32 seemed promising, but despite having a full bluetooth/wifi stack is very limited in other features.