What is currently the best "smart" watch?

Introduction

Smart watches has finally got into the mainstream market but what's the benefit with these smart watches and are they really any clever?

I been wearing watches for as long as I remember and enjoy the basic functionality plus the various bonuses that various watches have provided on the wrist, I most however admit that historically you had often to be quite happy with a stopwatch, an alarm and some simple timers.

There is clearly many benefit with having a smart device directly on your wrist and the requirements and need is probably different for everyone.

Comparison

So before I get into my personal opinions and experiences I made a simple table with the basic specifications for some well known premium watches.

Watch	Pepple Steal Time	Apple Sport Watch	Garmin Fenix 3	Garmin Fenix 3 Sapphire	Apple Watch
Price	From 300 €	From 449 €	449 €	549 €	From 699 €
Screen size	1.25"	1.7"	1.2" (round)	1.2" (round)	1.7"
Size (WxHxD)	37.5x47x10.5mm	42x35.9x10.5mm	51x51x16mm	51x51x16mm	42x35.9x10.5mm
Touch screen	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
Screen material	2.5D glass	Ion-X	Mineral glass	Sapphire	Sapphire
Body material	Stainless	Aluminium	Stainless	Stainless	Stainless
Water rating	30m	Water resistant	100m	100m	Water resistant
Weight	62.3g	81g	82g	85g	101g
Screen always on	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
Sun readably	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
Battery time	10 days	18 hours	Upto 6 weeks	Upto 6 weeks	18 hours
Apps	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
iOS support	Yes	Only iPhone	Yes	Yes	Only iPhone
Android support	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
Heart rate	No	Yes	Accessory	Accessory	Yes
GPS/GLONASS	No	No	Yes/Yes	Yes/Yes	No

My experience

My first real smart watch was the Samsung Gear Fit which I got when I changed over from my third iPhone to the Note 4. Since I bike almost daily I really liked the fact that I could start and stop Runkeeper from the watch instead of having to fiddle with the phone before setting off on the bike. I also enjoyed to get the notifications on the wrist and it became my daily wearer for a while with an okey battery life at about two days with some shorter bike rides. Everything was quite well and I was pleased with the watch until I got tired of waiting for Samsung to release Lollipop to the Note here in Sweden, and after trying to use their German version I finally settled for Cyanogenmod which was both a later version and didn't drain my battery in half the time. This change of OS on the phone did however come with an unexpected drawback, the Gear Fit wouldn't connect to the phone any longer, or wouldn't do it in any meaningful way.

As I mentioned I go biking quite often and started to wear my Suunto training watch more and more, it did however still require me to manually start run keeper on my phone and fiddle with everything but atleast I now could get some heart rate readings. With my hairy arms I have never been able to get a reliable (if any) reading from the optical heart rate sensors, like on the Gear Fit and Apple Watch.

In my office we got the Apple Watch a while back and my colleges each tried it for a few weeks and their consensus was that "it's not quite a nice to have" basically meaning that when they forgot to charge it in the evening the benefit of wearing the watch didn't make up for the hassle to charge it and one of my colleges stopped using it altogether and my other college changed back to his old analog watch instead as a daily watch, bear in mind that these where both technology enthusiasts just like myself.

So now to my big question, What if the best smart watch would be just an "ordinary" watch with some smart features? This was one of the reason that I took the leap and got the Garmin Fenix 3 with Sapphire glass. Given that the watch is still brand new I might miss some details but the initial experience has been great.

1) First when unpacking the watch I could start use it directly and with the assistance of GPS it got the exact time without me doing much at all. Just as a comparison when I thought I should try out the Apple Watch I first realized that it couldn't even start without being activated from the phone, and secondly that it had to be paired with an iPhone and that my iPad wouldn't work.

2) Since I like to use the watch while I'm training I have been reluctant to have a watch with touch screen since I haven't tried one which always works as expected without registering false touches, have this problem with my phone as well when it's raining but I can accept that I shouldn't use the phone in the rain but for the watch it's a requirement to handle the wet. Tactile buttons also means that I can interact with the watch without actually looking at it, great for races and other times when you're literally on the run.

3) Runkeeper, or to keep running while running... while I like runkeeper and been using it or similar apps for the past two years it has a severe impact on the battery life of the phone, so much that when I go paddling for extended periods of time I now bring a spare battery to charge my phone while I'm out. With the Fenix 3 they state 20 hours of concurrent GPS usage and if I would feel like an even longer run I would use the UltraTrak feature to get the GPS to last for upto 50 hours, all of this without requiring me to bring my phone with me whenever I like to train, or just keep the phone for emergencies and ensure it has some juice left in it.

4) Show me the time, the key feature of a watch has always been to show the current time, and regardless of how reactive a smart watch is to your wrist movement nothing can ever beat a screen which is always on, do I even need to say that I like to check the time even if the sun is shining or if I'm in a dark room without turning on a "flash light".

5) Notifications and apps, a smart watch which can't display notifications are probably not even allowed to be called a smart watch by today's standard. The question is if you need the watch to do much more or if it's not just as good to bring out the phone for more advanced interactions and communication? The Garmin watch has it's own app store just as the Pebble and the Apple watches but of cause no one will be able to compete with the share amount of apps that will become available to the Apple watch, the question we need to ask is if we really need all these apps? Got the find my car app to the Fenix watch which will save my both hassle and battery of my phone if I ever like to find back to my car easily, many other apps I'm happy to use on my phone as before.

I know that the price for the Fenix is quite hefty, but compared with the Apple Watch it's actually hard not to see it as a bargain considering what you get, this is actually a smart watch and not just an extra small screen to your phone. And with the Sapphire version you get a respectable looking watch with an included extra steel link armband, which however more than double the weight of the watch with an extra 104g. To get the Apple watch just in the same premium materials (Stainless steel and Sapphire Crystal) you have to pay an additional 150 €, and if you like to get a steel link armband that will be an additional 500 €, so for the same materials you would end up paying more than double the price for the Apple Watch.

Drawbacks

There are however of cause some drawbacks with the Fenix also, first and most noticeably, it's a big watch, but for some like myself it could be considered a good thing since I like to see my stats at a glance (even in sunlight...)

The watch run it's own software and will not benefit from the development efforts for the Apple Watch or the Android Wear platforms. If you like a training watch this might not be a big deal since the development community for Garmin is quite active to enable most types of customization from a sports perspective, but if you like to call an Uber taxi from your watch you might have to wait for quite a while. The watch has been on the market for about 6 month and I seen some complaints regarding the software from the beginning of the summer but from what I can see they been quite active in producing firmware updates and the latest update was only a few weeks ago.

Conclusion

To get the best "smart" watch for you the best thing to do might be to find the best watch for you and then see if it is "smart" enough to fulfill your smart requirements also. I still need to put this watch though it's paces but I'm confident that it will fulfill my expectations and if something isn't working as expected it seems like new firmware versions are pushed quite regularly so the watch will hopefully continue to improve over time.

How much does it cost to rent a car for 48 € (excl. fuel)?

Not to long ago we all knew that we have to watch out when we compared prices on flights to avoid paying 1 € for the flight and 200 € for the taxes and other surcharges. Thanks to massive critics the airlines have changed this somewhat and now we can normally compare the actual cost of flights.

Today I found out that the car rental companies have adopted this practice instead.

First a short background, I needed a car for the day down in Amsterdam and checked a few different sites to see if I could get a reasonable deal. I finally went with Rentalcars.com since they had the best deal on a reasonable car and since the rental was with Hertz with I used many times and usually been quite pleased with.

I prepaid the booking for 48 € and was quite happy since it clearly stated that "Local taxes" was included, no strange surcharges to worry about I thought and was happy to get away with the ridiculously expensive location charge of 55€.

When I picked up the car the lady at Hertz informed me that I had fooled myself and that I indeed had to pay the additional 55€, irritated by the fact that my rental had more than doubled in price already I asked her that there wouldn't be any other additional charges if I returned the car ful since the preliminary surcharges included refueling and came to a total of 160 €.

After a days driving around the Netherlands I returned the car this evening only to find out that there was an additional 21% tax on the location charge plus some other bullshit surcharge of 2 € (still don't know what that one is for). So my 48 € car rental ended up being a 117 € car rental, and I who thought that the fuel was the only extra cost of the rental...

I have registered a complaint with both Rentalcars.com and Hertz for misleading information and will update this if any of them replies and want their companies not be like some airlines have been in the past.
____
Fick svar från Hertz efter ett tag, men har än idag inte fått nått svar från Rentalcars.com (2014-02-18)

Hej

Tack för ditt mejl, du har bokat din hyrbil via Traveljigsaw och ska då kontakta deras kundtjänst med alla ärenden som rör din hyra. De ansvarar för att bistå sin kund med alla ärenden före under och efter din hyra och kontaktar i sin tur den biluthyrare i det aktuella landet som levererat bilen till dig.

Med vänliga hälsningar
Beatrice
Customer Relations Sweden

Hertz First Rent A Car | International Franchisee
Box 14, Skogsgatan 5, 933 21  Arvidsjaur, Sweden
Phone: +46 (0)960- 473 30 | Fax: +46 (0)960- 108 01

Email: customerrelations@hertz.se | www.hertz.se | www.hertz.se/omhertz

10 reasons why I support the Ubuntu Edge and you should to

Thanks to all the support and interest in the Ubuntu Edge, they have been able to negotiate the price of the components and have just reduced the price of the phone to only $695, there haven't been a better time than now to support this project!

1. Support a new movement and prove that crowd funding can compete against big companies.
2. Be among the first to get your hands on a real super phone. The spec of the phone can still improve, but is already impressive and who knows maybe it will be more powerful than the MacBook Air in the end.
3. Designed to be used with one hand, this is the reason it's 4.5" instead of 5", the perfect size will differ between people but I like the fact that they prioritize the usage of the device rather than the spec on paper.
4. A phone with specs which has a purpose: 300dpi is as good as normal printed paper, no need to go beyond than, instead they are promising to select the screen with the best picture quality and brightness.
5. A camera that can be used, instead of getting the highest megapixels they will provide a camera which can take good photos even in low light.
6. Scratch free crystal glass, it's currently to expensive for mass production but Cronical likes to push the envelope and give us the best possible glass which doesn't get scratched.
7. Best battery, using new battery technology which is believed to increase the capasity with up to 40%, this could result in a phone which actually last more than one day without charging.
8. If we don't like the phone Mark Shuttleworth offer us to return the phone within 28 days for a full refund (shipping excluded).
9. I was among the first to buy the iPhone and the Android G1, both devices which I could have sold at a great profit when I got my hands on them. I'm sure that the demand for this phone will be equally great when it arrives especially since you have to be a backer to get your hands on it. With a bit of luck my second phone might pay the bill for the first one, getting a super phone for free sounds like a good deal to me.
10. If the phone sucks and I can't sell the second phone I can always return them both for a refund and will end up spending about 50 euro (including shipment, missed intrest etc) and if the project doesn't hit the target I won't have spent a dime to support support this great project with a great vision, sounds like a low risk deal to me.

Together we can enable the Ubuntu edge to evolve and we can finally together assist in deciding how future super phones should look.

Go on to the campaign site at Indiegogo and back the project yourself before it's to late.  

Software "update" ?

What is it with Apple these days?

They release a new version of OS X and all of us in the office who had been required to update to Lion thought - "It can't be any worse can it?".

Here are the good news:

* It isn't any worse than Lion...

The bad news is however:

* It's not really any better than Lion either.
* The features which was highlighted and we thought would be nice to get either didn't work as we hoped or required a brand new Mac to work, we are currently having 1-2 year old MacBooks in the office which I would call far from obsolete.
* It cost all of us big parts of a day to update the computer and ensure that all the applications would still run after the update.

Feature updates which wasn't much of an update in the end...

AirPlay

Required a brand new MacBook to work, we could however use it to stream music from any app but for the video to work Apple requires the latest generation of MacBooks.

Full screen mode

In Lion one big draw back was that the full screen mode wasn't of much use when you use multiple screens, in Snow Lion they had enabled the full screen application to be on any screen - Great we thought we can use that feature on one of the screen while maintaining a work bench on the other - Nope, full screen applications are full desktop screens and fill all screens, however the screens which a the active one are just displaying a desktop background. Great feature right....

VMWare

I been running VMware fusion for some time to run Linux and occasional Windows application, after the update it wouldn't start and VMware have the currency to now inform their customers that version 3  (version 4 is their latest version) will not be made to support Snow Lion.

So what has this update given us so far?

* The understanding that Apple isn't trying to maximize the user experience for their customers but rather forcing them into buying newer product at an ever higher rate (did I mention the iOS updates which does even less if you don't have the last generation device).

* One day of taking care of paper work and other tasks while waiting for all required software on our computers to start working as expected again.


Thanks for the cold software, and thanks for not making it worse than Lion.

Madonna MDNA Tour in Gothenburg

• Opening act 1/10 - Started over an hour late and after the show it was more than another hour before the actual show started
• Visual Effects 10/10 - Can't think of anything that could have done it better...
• Dancing 8/10 - It's Madonna after all, can't be anything but great.
• Sound 3/10 - Important to not misstake this for the music, the music was fine but the sound technician was doing a lousy job with the discant  breaking through repeatly making it almost unbearably to listen to at times.
• Show 8/10 - Got pace any no breaks from start to finished with a feeling of a red thread going through the whole performance

Total points

• As a show 7/10, the opening act and the sound takes down the points from a solid nine.
• As a concert 4/10, good music but to many remixes and the failing sound leaves the audience untouched until "Like a prayer" concludes the performance.

Put a move on it...

Just saw this really cool product at Kickstarter and just had to support it.

Have a look below and take the opportunity to also support Motrr and thier Galileo, probably one of the best accessory for your iOS device so far.

LION SUX!!!

After month of staying away from Lion Apple finally found a way to force all of us to update to this shit!

If it wouldn't been for X-code and the new iOS release I wouldn't have had to do this update and could happily been waiting for the next version.

Lion is iOS for Mac and here are just two example why this was a bad idea!

1 - Scroll view in the wrong direction by default (easy to change but still idiotic!)
A desktop is not a touchscreen, so the scroll shouldn't be the same way!

2 - Full screen mode which leaves my second screen unusable! I can't even leave a document open on that screen.
THIS IS NOT AN IPAD!!!


Now I just hope that Mountain Lion or whatever the next version will be won't be such a huge let down.



Apple if you are reading this:

Please don't force your developers to upgrade when you know the newest version isn't an improvement over the last one!