It’s been many years since I went to the gym regularly. I’m reasonably active, I enjoy long hikes and I try to ride my bike to the co-working space I use weekly. But weather and kids often gets in the way of doing any of that and frankly the lack of exercise is starting to show. So it’s time to start hitting the gym again. And what better way to encourage me to do that than buying an expensive new gadget to help me track my progress!

There are many options when it comes to smartwatches, particularly if all you care about is fitness tracking. But fitness tracking isn’t all I care about, I wanted something to help with that but also something more general purpose that would maybe even let me leave my phone at home entirely when going out. I don’t have an Apple phone so that left me with a Wear OS watch.

I first owned a Wear OS smartwatch around 10 years ago (it was called Android Wear back then). At the time it was pretty clear that Google didn’t care very much about the platform. They didn’t make their own smartwatch and I remember the device (A Moto 360 2nd generation) being somewhat slow and clunky and not terribly useful for anything. So I was somewhat interested to see the state of things now that Google make their own watches. Hopefully that would mean they would care more about making the platform useful. Choosing the flagship watch seemed to make sense, particularly since I already have a Pixel phone.

Let’s start with the basics. The watch itself looks nice enough (though that’s subjective of course). The default strap is not great so I may end up changing that, but you can change it and there seem to be a wealth of options available. It comes with a selection of maybe a dozen different watch faces (the default display that tells you the time) you can choose between with many more available for free or to purchase. Unfortunately it seems that Google have done a typical Google thing and entirely broken what was a thriving community of watch face designers so options are more limited than what was available with previous versions of Wear OS.

The specs claim you can get 24 hours out of a charge. This seems to be mostly true though like any of these claims it depends on usage. I find the battery takes a hit whenever I work out, probably from the higher frequency heart rate monitoring and GPS positioning. Maybe also from playing music. It also uses somewhat less overnight, when it decides you have gone to sleep it turns off the screen. So I’ve been generally charging it to full in the morning when we’re getting ready for the day and I throw it on to an additional charge when showering after a workout and over a week it hasn’t dipped below 40%.

Can you use it without the phone? I did buy the LTE version, mainly because at the time it was on sale and cheaper than the WiFi only one. Nice to have the option I guess but only two operators in the UK are supported and they are on the more expensive side. The cheapest option I could find would set me back around £23 per month for a combined phone and watch plan. In comparison my current phone plan is £6 so that would be quite a hike. So the question for me is can I do things out and about without any data connection?

Well the watch has my music app and it will download playlists for offline playback so that’s a start. The watch also includes Google Wallet and after a bit of faff my credit card is on it and so I can pay for things with only my watch. Google Maps will download your offline maps to the watch so you can see where you are but will only give driving directions not walking directions when offline which is a bit odd. The FitBit tracking stuff all works fine without the phone and the workout tracking app I have settled on works reasonably well too. So basically yes it works pretty well without a phone.

The calendar on the watch is not great. The first problem is that I can’t add my work account to the watch, so I can’t see my work calendar at all. I’ve ended up building a rather hacky setup of exfiltrating my work calendar data to my personal account so I can see what meetings I have coming up on my watch. The second problem is that while I can see my personal account calendars I see all of them. I have a number of personal calendars for sporting events etc. that I don’t need on my watch but there is no way to see them on my phone but not my watch.

I settled on an app called Hevy for tracking my workouts. It works well on the watch alone, as long as you set up your routines beforehand. Trying to make changes suring the workout is a bit of a pain but what are you going to do with such a small screen to work with? Might be nice if it let me use my voice to choose exercises, but voice recognition on the watch doesn’t work unless it is connected to the phone so that isn’t going to help me.

You can take the watch swimming and Fitbit Exercise supports tracking swimming. But it’s completely dumb. When you get in the water it turns off and locks the screen so you can’t see anything and all it tracks is the time you spent exercising. It doesn’t monitor your heart rate at all which means you don’t get any of those previous cardio points towards your daily target. That actually puts me off going swimming!

Update: So I wrote all of the previous a few months ago then promptly forgot to finish it and post it, so I guess you get the conclusion now. Which is helpful because now I’ve been using it for a while.

Generally it is good news. I’m still making extensive use of the watch and I think it was a worthwhile investment. I am hitting the gym regularly and my weight is down to sensible levels. I did end up buying a different strap for the watch during which I discovered one of the dumb (well, money grabbing) decisions that Google made here, and many smart watch manufacturers appear to be making. They use non-standard strap connections. Most watches all use a little pin to attach a strap. Not Google. The strap needs to include a precision machined metal bracket to connect and basically all the third party ones have reviews where about half the people complain the one they received didn’t quite fit right. Luckily the one I got fit fine but still it seems like a downer on what is otherwise a decent bit of hardware.