My longtime Garmin 735XT finally lost the battle to time. The wear and tear from wearing daily for more than 7 years has been showing for awhile. I was on my third watch band. The screen was cracked from an unfortunate collision with a protruding bolt on a street sign. Its battery life had diminished to just a couple of days where it once proudly powered through a week or more.
To be fair, I too used to be more indefatigable too – running, biking, swimming, soccer – for years I proudly recorded activities nearly every day of the week. These days, with my knees wearing out – one of them surgically relieved of a portion of meniscus, with my feet complaining after just a couple miles, I’m more often checking to see if I got some minimum number of step. From couch to 5k and back.
It was time to move on. And while I did seriously consider getting 735XT’s successor – the incrementally named Garmin 745, I had to realize that I’m no longer the guy who could identify with the fitness ethos of that device. Instead I started shopping for a smartwatch – a class of gadget that historically never really made sense to me. Smartwatches, with their tiny screens, imprecise inputs and interfaces, and fleeting battery life compared to Garmin’s lineup. Honestly, I really didn’t want to risk to become one those people pecking away at their wrists managing pointless notifications relayed from their phones or annoyingly lighting up the movie theater every time they reached for a handful of popcorn.
Still, based on the number of these devices I see out in the wild, I was curious; there must be some utility to them. So I decided give myself a small budget of up to $100 to invest (squander?) on a actual smartwatch. And now that I’ve had my Galaxy Watch 5 Pro for a week, I think I’ve discovered a few affordances that I didn’t expect. I was surprised to find that this smartwatch is actually helping to reduce my screen time. It’s perhaps counterintuitive that a new digital Internet widget could actually serve to reduce the amount of attention I spend on the virtual world.
The biggest reason this is the case is that I simply look at my smartphone less. I check the weather on the watch instead of reaching for my phone. When I need to set a timer, I can do it with two taps on my watch. When I receive a call that I am almost certain to ignore or (I mean 80% of the calls I receive seem to be from telemarketers or spam – this isn’t just me is it?), I can dismiss it with a swipe, sacrificing but a fraction of a moment’s attention.
