WTB Smart watch

Hi all. I am looking to buy a budget smart watch. Does anyone have any good ideas on what to buy? I need to be able to wear it at work. Would need to $50 or less

What do u want from it, display notification, display message or notify you when there is new notification?
How often do you want to recharge it, because most smartwatch battery is not great, about 1-3 day
I am wearing huawei watch 1, it has nice luxury look, battery is not great, lack of gps, but it’s convenient to read facebook messenger( my mostly used)

I just want to be able to read the time and see txts and FB messages any other features are just a bonus

well, in that case, i guess the huawei watch 2 is a good choice
Samsung gear s3 is also great, but i prefer steel more
and the Samsung one runs Tizen, not Android wear, so there would be some limited when installing app

Watches that can be flashed with the official android 2.0 but are still inexpensive like the ASUS Zenwatch 2 or Moto 360 Sport.

Around Christmas 360 sport it could be had for under $100. Current lowest price is about $20 more than that, but Amazon seems to put it on sale with some regularity.

facebook messages and sub $50 are your limiting he factors. You might have to ditch one or the other.

There are 100s of sub-$50 smart watches. I do not know which ones will run FB messages, since I do not use that app.

FWIW I have a couple DZ09 watches and a moto360 gen-2.

I just use them for time telling, g-mail and android messages, everything else is not needed. Android Wear has been a bad experience for me on the moto360 gen-2. The 2.0 update rolled out in March 2017 and it soft-bricked my watch for 6 months until the 2.6 version was released. So all is well now in 2018 on Wear OS 2.11.

Still though, I have a hard time openly/positively recommending android wear or even the newest incarnation Wear OS. The Borg mother ship can remote terminate your device at any moment with an update. You can literally wake up one morning and find your watch inoperative.

My views here…

So for your needs, you don’t have to buy a fully-fledged Android/WearOS smartwatch…

Grab yourself a good old Pebble Time (second hand on ebay) for (normally much) less than $50

On Android, you can use the GadgetBridge app (it’s free software and respects your privacy)

https://gadgetbridge.org/

I personnally use it with my Pebble Time and it works nicely (after a bit of tweaking) :+1:

On iPhone, see https://rebble.io/
(also works for Android)

If you want a budget chinese connected watch that doesn’t look too bad (at least it isn’t too bulky), I would currently (as of july 2019) suggest the Senbono CF-58. In short : great battery life (for me 2 weeks), displays a lot of text for notifications (and not only the first three words like many other similar cheap watches).

But you have to use the COLMI Android app with this watch so message notifications will work! (the DaFit app was buggy/incomplete for me in that regard)

I personnally have no use for the fitness functions (it’s mostly a gimmick anyways)

One watch to avoid for now : the LEMFO F9.

Just bought it, the watch itself is of nice quality, but the companion app (WearHealth) is atrocious (requires online login, sends all your info into the chinese clouds, message notifications is limited, etc…). So basically if the app doesn’t work you end up with a totally useless device.

I really hope to find another compatible app for this watch, but I guess it won’t happen soon. Or someone would have to add support for this watch into GadgetBridge, which requires some retro-engineering work…