Do You Wear a Wristwatch When You Ride?

Just in case anyone is considering buying - the samsung has a charger that uses the opposite polarity to every other wireless charging thingy out there. Forget about using an aftermarket wireless charging pad, or the cars wireless phone charger! Remember when it was apple that did this with weird cables?

So, for example, if you hate wearing a watch but want to catch a run of AF on a bike ride....make sure the thing is charged before you leave home!

PS , I bought it so I can still ride when on call - it's awesome to be able to leave the phone in a back pack and still take calls. The poor person on the other end must be wondering what they interrupted with me panting away.....
 
No watch for me, don’t use a smart phone either, we live a pretty monastic life when it comes to tech. Had a smartphone in 2007 and 2008 and didn’t really care for it and turned it in. (It was a blackberry with a scroll ball and no real images, mainly just basic text websites) Was on Facebook in august 2005 with my university email at the time and within six months got off and said this doesn’t look like it will end well. I did have a Fitbit versa for a year to track heart rate and enjoyed that and learned some things but don’t really like things on my wrist so gave it to a buddy.
 
Catalyzt said:
I do not use Smart watches, I don't believe in the metrics, and I don't want to support Apple or Microsoft more than necessary.
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PedalUma said:
OMG, you have Bill Gates' watch
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I had to look that one up. Yep, as usual his timing (pun intended) was off by about a decade.

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According to this video my life would have turned out very differently if only I had bought a SPOT watch in 2004. It's like they baked pheromones into the watch.


www.neowin.net

A quick look back at Microsoft's proto-smartwatch technology, SPOT

Microsoft SPOT (Smart Personal Objects Technology) first launched in a series of watches in 2004, and were the precursors to today's modern smartwatches like the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6.
www.neowin.net www.neowin.net
 
scottsdalecommuter said:
No watch for me, don’t use a smart phone either, we live a pretty monastic life when it comes to tech. Had a smartphone in 2007 and 2008 and didn’t really care for it and turned it in. (It was a blackberry with a scroll ball and no real images, mainly just basic text websites) Was on Facebook in august 2005 with my university email at the time and within six months got off and said this doesn’t look like it will end well. I did have a Fitbit versa for a year to track heart rate and enjoyed that and learned some things but don’t really like things on my wrist so gave it to a buddy.
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Excellent. I remember when I got my first Blackberry-- for work, it was part of a job-- my wife used to stare daggers at me whenever I answered it, and say quietly, 'Toilet, toilet, toilet." My last Blackberry was a PRIV, the worst phone I've ever owned, and I smashed it with a hammer.

I do use smartphones, but always just buy the cheapest ones, because my opinion is that there's no meaningful difference between them. I don't mind waiting six or 10 seconds for my email messages to appear, I actually prefer it, because it keeps me from checking it too often. I take pictures on a stand-alone camera, and I have several of them. I do have a sequencer, guitar tuner, and million-track recording studio on my phone, but for my purposes, they run equally well no matter what phone they are on.

For incidental email surfing when I'm not at my computer, I now use an e-Ink micro tablet, actually a phone, but it doesn't get service in the US. Easier on the eyes, and since it also has books on it... well, when I'm about to check the news headlines for the seventh time, it's like, "Okay, this is stupid, I'll read some science fiction or Henry James or something," which is more satisfying-- great to have it right there in my hands. I love that it's black and white, I'm less likely to be distracted by graphics, videos, and text.

I do have an AssFace... un, Facebook account for friends on the East Coast, but I completely deactivate it for at least six weeks a year-- and I've been off for as long as three years. Man, FB really hates that... they just bombard me with ads.

What I love about deactivating is that it forces you to answer the question "Why are you leaving Facebook"? You have to select one of 10 or 12 responses, or you have to check 'Other' and provide a reason. My answer is always, "No reason will be provided." I don't know why that is so satisfying, I'm still such a punk!
PedalUma said:
I walked into a bike shop and the guy behind the counter said, OMG, you have Bill Gates' watch! Then proceeded to show a video of it. Anything 'smart' is dumb, so I got rid of my 'smartphone' about five years ago, so will I keep sharp and self-reliant. That was hard to kick for the first couple of days. I am glad to be free of the distraction. The watch is super accurate and durable. It is good to 200m and has a dive watch bezel that I use all the time. For example, if I have a meeting at 1, I will set the bezel to 1. Or, if I am cooking and need to attend to something in 20 minutes, I will set it forward by 20 minutes.

View attachment 165121 View attachment 165122View attachment 165125View attachment 165126
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These are really well-respected in the watch collecting community, and with good reason. Very robust, very reliable. Personally, I do not use watches with replacement batteries, mostly because all my watches have to be waterproof, I'm always in the water, though these days, mostly for lap swimming.

Timing bezels are great for coarse timing!

But the other reason is that I have too many watches. If I forget to replace the batteries in the non-solar quartz watches, they often leak and destroy the movement. I lost an old favorite, my Seiko Sports 100, that way after it served me really well for 15 years, and never got over it. Real heartbreaker-- I take it in to get fixed, they clean it up, it works for a few weeks, and then fails again. When I had only one watch, replaceable battery was fine.

I don't like expensive watches, and I do wear all of my affordables, which is pretty crazy. I am capable of changing watches three times a day. I like both solar and mechanical, and for the latter, I'm particularly partial to the NH35 movement (and related variants), for chronographs I like Valjoux 7750s or Seagull ST19s. The ST19s are super cheap, more delicate, and have to be cased properly, but if you get a good one (or a bad one fixed properly under warranty) they can last for decades.
 
Catalyzt said:
I also don't want to get out of the habit of trusting my own body and sensations to let me know if heart rate or blood pressure is too high, I've been meditating for half a century and studied method acting for years, so I better be able to objectively assess my own physical condition from moment to moment.
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High blood pressure does not feel bad, it feels good. Until the heart attack that comes at the end. It is losing vision every time I stand up from a hard chair that tells me my blood pressure is back to normal. I started doing that when I was 15, a biker, and a marching band cymbalist who walked 1.5 miles home from band practice at 98 F carrying 6 books and a 14 lb bassoon.
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My e-bike display and/or Wahoo give me the Time of Day at all times. However, I wear a Casio Edifice solar wristwatch just to look good :) Also, a wristwatch with the hour and minute hands gives a better understanding of the time flowing on the ride. If I see the time such as "17:50" on a digital clock, it means nothing. However, a glance at the wristwatch is telling me "the sunset will occur in several minutes!"

My cycling friend Jerzy's joke (related to the fact you wear no underpants when you wear chamois) is: "You may wear no underpants but the wristwatch makes you a man!" :) Or, "The wristwatch is the only kosher jeweliery for a man!" :)
 
My Casio Solar Pathfinder isn’t as spiffy as @Catalyzt's but it has served me well over the years. As a general rule, I rarely wear a watch when I’m riding.

My wife who never wore a wrist watch in her lifetime now doesn’t ride let alone leave the house without her Garmin Fenix. Truly astounding.
 
Rugged Mechanical automatic, using it for ... telling the time.
I don't fancy overkill.

Never had to recharge or change battery.

Watch1a.jpg


Watch1b.jpg

Yes it is Russian, so today I would have bought another mechanical watch.
When the weather and the roads are really good, some times I wear this in the pocket.
After all real jeans does have pockets for pocket watches:
watch2a.jpg


watch2b.jpg
 
scottsdalecommuter said:
we live a pretty monastic life when it comes to tech.
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So how are you even posting on EBR? :)

I didn't wear a watch for years and then started looking into smartwatches. Avoided Apple Watch because I thought they were overpriced but other smartwatches didn't play well with my iPhone... so finally caved and got an Apple Watch in 2020. Never drops its pairing and is pretty much bulletproof (well... I have a rugged case/band on it). Even survived my near death crash on my bike.

Like others have said, it's good for notifications even though my phone is on my handlebars and I ask my watch things like "What city am I currently in?" on my rides or whatever factoid my buddies can't remember.
 
I stopped wearing wrist watches some 30 years ago, but now wear a Garmin Venu 2 smartwatch.

As I slink past middle age, I wanted something for general health monitoring and didn't want a phone branded smart watch - I'm geeky enough that I run a De-Googled Android alternative called Graphene OS, so Google services can only be run in a sandboxed environment, and have zero interest in phone notifications popping up on my watch. :)

Since it's Garmin, it doubles as a cycling computer, and as a bonus, there's a 3rd party app that connects to my bike (Shimano motor), and displays data fields including battery as percentage, so I can run the bike display free.
 
It's funny in 50+ years I've never had a watch -- cheap, expensive, new, old, heirloom, "ultra durable" -- that I didn't manage to break within the first HOUR of wearing it.

Hell, I've got a crack on the screen of my two week old Ulefone Power Armor 13... which is basically the Panasonic Toughbook of mobile phones.
 
Jason Knight said:
It's funny in 50+ years I've never had a watch -- cheap, expensive, new, old, heirloom, "ultra durable" -- that I didn't manage to break within the first HOUR of wearing it.

Hell, I've got a crack on the screen of my two week old Ulefone Power Armor 13... which is basically the Panasonic Toughbook of mobile phones.
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Sounds like me. i broke watch after watch. I finally switched to Timex. Didn’t break those, and I guess taught myself to not break my watches.
I got an Apple Watch when I was diagnosed with AFib as a monitor. It’s really helped there and now that the latest versions automatically sense a bike ride and act as a simple cycling computer it’s an even better choice. I wish it would connect to my Specialized Turbo Vado SL for bike data capture but my ride data needs are pretty simple so I’ll make do.
 
A tri-athlete told me about an idea of running assistance with heart rate. When you heart rate reaches a certain level you start getting assist, the higher the rate the more assist. I like simple. Not having the tech run me.
 
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