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Comment by SomeHacker44 | Hacker News Reader

I love my Fossil Q because it does one thing many other smart watches just don't: tells the time, all the time, no motion required, in a high contrast fashion.

All I really want out of a watch is that, plus long battery life (weeks at least, months preferably), self-charging, self-time setting, and, if I am lucky, some sort of "hey look at your phone" alert.

I get most of these with the Fossil Q. Others with my Citizens and Seiko non-smart watches, one of which has an e-ink display. Nothing has them all. Oh well.

I wonder if Google will make a Fossil Q which has it all. I do not need a display, health monitoring, etc.

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Dell made their money by becoming the first big computer manufacturer to let you pick and choose how you wanted your computer configured, and then delivering it to you a few weeks later (which was fast, at the time, for a personalized machine!)

Apple and Fossil and Samsung and all those others are trying to make varieties of watches, but perhaps by jamming every feature someone might want into most of their watches, they are falling short on other features (ahem battery life) that other customers prefer.

I own a Fossil watch and a Citizen, and they are very pretty (and do other things, too, I guess.) Like this parent comment, I want a smart watch that's mostly a watch, but not just a watch. I wouldn't mind getting email or text notifications. In my world, that's something that happens just a few times a day. So it wouldn't annoy me. But just because I don't want my heart-rate tracked or a built-in GPS does not automatically imply that I don't want any other feature smart watches have that mechanical watches do not.

Everything except the notifications has been available in watches such as the Citizen Satellite Wave and Seiko Astron lineup.

There are E-Straps from Montblanc that can notify you among other things.

There are also the "HOROLOGICAL SMARTWATCH" and "HYBRID MANUFACTURE" from Frederique Constant that could be interesting to you.

I have both of these. :) I am a big fan of solar powered self time setting (GPS/WWV) watches.

Sounds like you almost just want a regular "dumb" watch.

Sounds like you are looking or the hybrid smartwatches.

Garmin do a very good job of displaying the time in high contrast, but I'm not sure if they give you the option of being able to have the display on all the time.

Yep, most of their watches have the display on all the time. The term to look for is "transflective memory-in-pixel" in specs.

This was the main reason I loved my pebble watches as iirc all android wear watches couldn't do this.

the garmin 935 is basically my perfect smart watch, always on high contrast display with 2 weeks of battery life

that's what i wanted too (plus the heart rate). check out the withings watches https://www.withings.com/us/en/steel-hr

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