A smartwatch as a notification relay

Tech
Written By DP

My wife bought me a Galaxy Watch S3 Classic a ages years ago when it first came out and after recently getting the new phones setup, I was revisiting the thought of getting a new watch. Going against all the advice, recommendations and reviews out there, I ended up going with the OnePlus Watch. I’m only a few days into the new watch but I acclimatize quickly — and the reviews are right: the feature set is a bit bare so there isn’t a whole lot to have to get used to.

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Selecting an upgrade

Samsung's offerings

After enjoying the Gear S3 watch, I bought my wife the successor, the Galaxy Watch. I initially bought her the larger 46mm variant (prioritizing battery life) but that ended up being a bit too bulky so I returned that for the smaller 42mm variant. Of course, while setting it up, I took the time to play with it as well and it was noticeably more responsive. The 46mm and 42mm variants only really differed in their physical size (and thus the battery capacity) and were otherwise identical in performance

 
ABCD
1
Gear S3Galaxy Watch (46mm)Galaxy Watch (42mm)
2
Year Released201620182018
3
Weight59g63g49g
4
Screen size1.3"1.3"1.2"
5
Screen resolution360x360360x360360x360
6
Always On Displayyesyesyes
7
Special InputRotating BezelRotating BezelRotating Bezel
8
Water/Dust ResistanceIP68IP68IP68
9
ProtectionGorilla Glass SR+Gorilla Glass DX+Gorilla Glass DX+
10
OSTizen 5.5Tizen 5.5Tizen 5.5
11
ChipsetExynos 7270Exynos 9110Exynos 9110
12
CPUDual-Core 1GHzDual-Core 1.15GHzDual-Core 1.15GHz
13
RAM0.75GB1.5GB1.5GB
14
Wi-Fi SupportWi-Fi 4 (N)Wi-Fi 4 (N)Wi-Fi 4 (N)
15
Bluetooth Support4.24.24.2
16
Battery Size380 mAh472 mAh270 mAh
17
ChargingWirelessWirelessWireless
 

Although the newer watch was definitely snappier, at the time (2018), there wasn’t a compelling reason to upgrade for the sake of upgrading since my watch was still plenty fine. When we compare to Samsung’s modern offerings we can start to see some substantial improvements:

 
ABCDE
1
Gear S3Galaxy Watch (46mm)Galaxy Watch 4 ClassicGalaxy Watch 5 Pro
2
Year Released2016201820212022
3
Weight59g63g52g47g
4
Screen size1.3"1.3"1.4"1.4"
5
Screen resolution360x360360x360450x450450x450
6
Always on displayyesyesyesyes
7
Special InputRotating BezelRotating BezelNoneNone
8
Water/Dust ResistanceIP68IP68IP68IP68
9
ProtectionGorilla Glass SR+Gorilla Glass DX+Gorilla Glass DXSapphire
10
OSTizen 5.5Tizen 5.5Android WearAndroid Wear
11
ChipsetExynos 7270Exynos 9110Exynos W920Exynos W920
12
CPUDual-Core 1GHzDual-Core 1.15GHzDual-Core 1.18GhzDual-Core 1.18Ghz
13
RAM0.75GB1.5GB1.5GB1.5GB
14
Wi-Fi SupportWi-Fi 4 (N)Wi-Fi 4 (N)Wi-Fi 4 (N) Dual-BandWi-Fi 4 (N) Dual-Band
15
Bluetooth Support4.24.25.05.2
16
Battery Size380 mAh472 mAh361 mAh590mAh
17
ChargingWirelessWirelessWirelessWireless Fast (10W)
 

Looking at the modern watches, we can finally start to see a meaningful jump with the latest Galaxy Watch 5 Pro — which, of course, is the most expensive — $500 at time of writing!! There are a few things of note:

  • It’s not immediately apparent just looking at a spreadsheet but Samsung changed the style of charger in 2019 so all my existing chargers would not work with any of the current generation watches.

    This is annoying because Nicole’s watch would still be using the older charger so we would have to have multiple sets of chargers lying around (at least until I buy her a new watch). The second annoyance is that I like to keep multiple chargers in different places so it would be an added expense to deploy those chargers for the new watch.

  • One of the best features of the Samsung watches was the brilliant use of the rotating bezel as an input mechanism - you had a solid, tactile thing that you could interact with to (literally) scroll through the watch interface with. I’m sure that the modern watches work just perfectly fine just using gestures and taps.

  • No more Tizen OS! I’m not sure how I feel about this. In theory, Google Wear is a great thing as it makes apps and support so much less tedious. That being said, I never really had any problems with Tizen and our use case is pretty simple.

Re-evaluating my needs

In light of the substantial asking price and the hassle of having to figure something out for charging the watch, I needed to figure out what I actually from my watch. It ends up being stupid simple:

  1. Show me notifications from apps of my choosing

  2. Provide a mechanism for “find my phone”

  3. Be water resistant

  4. Give me good battery life

You will note that this list is devoid of the biggest talking point of the entire smartwatch and wearable space: health and fitness. Almost every smartwatch will offer some kind of basic fitness crap: heart rate monitoring, steps etc. so even if I cared about this stuff, the ‘basics’ should be present on almost every option. For the most part, I’m treating the health and fitness functionality as whimsical party-tricks.

The big takeaway here is that, since health and fitness barely registers as a requirement, this opens up the doors to a lot more options (read: cheaper options).

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What about the OnePlus watch?

Coming off the heels of getting the phones setup, the first entry on my radar was the OnePlus watch. From the way the watch is presented, it’s clear they focused on style over substance but if the watch manages to meet my needs and happens to be stylish? That would be a win all around.

 
ABCD
1
Gear S3Galaxy Watch 5 ProOnePlus Watch
2
Year Released201620222021
3
Weight59g47g45g
4
Screen size1.3"1.4"1.4"
5
Screen resolution360x360450x450454x454
6
Always on displayyesyesyes
7
Special InputRotating BezelNoneNone
8
Water/Dust ResistanceIP68IP68IP68
9
ProtectionGorilla Glass SR+SapphireNone
10
OSTizen 5.5Android WearCustom RTOS
11
ChipsetExynos 7270Exynos W920STM32
12
CPUDual-Core 1GHzDual-Core 1.18GhzNot-specified
13
RAM0.75GB1.5GB1GB
14
Wi-Fi SupportWi-Fi 4 (N)Wi-Fi 4 (N) Dual-BandNone
15
Bluetooth Support4.25.25.0
16
Battery Size380 mAh590mAh402mAh
17
ChargingWirelessWireless Fast (10W)Wireless Fast
 

We don’t have a lot of visibility into the CPU or the operating system so it’s difficult to do an on-paper comparison (all three phones are using different operating systems too). Going by online reviews, consensus seemed to be that the OnePlus watch was very snappy, charged quickly and had incredible battery life. For downsides, the watch is disliked for being too basic and not offering very much by way of apps, watch-faces, customization etc.

The crazy amount of battery life on the watch changes the way I care about the charging situation — I don’t necessarily want (or care) to have watch-chargers in various places anymore — I can just keep one charger at my desk and charge it once a week for 15-minutes and be good to go. This has the added benefit of decluttering the limited space I have on my night stand. It all comes down to whether or not the watch, with all it’s missing functionality, can manage to meet by basic needs or not.

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So how does the OnePlus watch fare?

I bit the bullet and ordered the OnePlus watch and I picked up a matching watch band to go with it. From an aesthetic perspective, I love it: they nailed the shape, curves, angles and the choice and finish of materials is spot on. I quite like the use of plastic for the underside as well: I personally like the feel and I imagine it’ll be more comfortable to wear on super warm/cold days. They definitely hit a home run for the way it looks and how it feels.

My comments are with respect to version 11_B.70.

  • This is the first area where you start to see that the prime directive of the watch was to prioritize battery life and responsiveness, everything else be damned.

    The selection is abysmal. Full stop. There are 54 available watch faces to choose from and perplexingly, before you can set your watch to use a given face, you must preload that watchface onto the watch - of which you have 14 available slots. From an OS design perspective, I get why they did this but it’s just a little jarring when coming from a full-experience smart watch.

    My main complaint though is that there are not a lot of simple and clean [digital] options. I did manage to find three really clean analog options for which I am very grateful, but if you’re looking for a digital watch face, I only found ~1.5 options.

  • From what I’ve read, this wasn’t available at launch and was provided via a software update and people were a bit miffed about that. Thankfully I had the update available so I had access to this. Enabling the AOD though leads to a few perplexing things:

    Firstly there exactly four (4) always-on watch faces: two analog, two digital. Of the four, only one of the analog faces is clean and while the two digital faces are mostly clean, they have odd background shapes on them (one has a single skewed triangle, the other has a boatload of circles). I understand the need for hardcoded AOD watchfaces - it’s easier to manage resources when the faces are predefined but why can’t we get one uncluttered digital display as well?

    This brings me to a related problem: with the AOD displaying a watch, when I flick my wrist to wake the watch up, it then wakes to the watch-face I pre-loaded and then selected. It would be nice to just keep the same watch face for both (even if has to be the predefined one). All of this is very odd from a design perspective.

    Note: you can only set the AOD watchface using the watch directly which is odd.

  • With an emphasis on battery life, the watch has a maximum delay of 8 seconds before the watch turns the display off (or switches to the AOD).

    This is more of an oddity with the “why even bother having a main watchface”. After all, both the main and AOD watch face show the same things (actually my AOD displays the date, something the main watch face doesn’t show me).

  • Out of the box I had an update available which was nice, but the update process was peculiar. Firstly, the update process needed me to have 40% battery life remaining before it would allow me to start. For a watch that has a marketing-advertised number of two-weeks that seems excessive. Even with active-GPS, the battery life is advertised as 25 hours.

    The update process is pretty standard: download the update on your phone, transmit the update to the watch and then transmit a go signal to the watch to tell it to do it’s thing. The 40% battery requirement prevents you from even transferring the update to the watch (even if the watch is plugged in). The transmit process took a lot longer than I expected (feels like 15 minutes to transfer) and the phone app tells you not to use the watch or phone during the update.

    That warning isn’t messing around - I accidentally replied to a message on my phone and even though the watch seemed to finish the update, I had to redo everything (including the transmit) because reasons.

    All in all, a very peculiar update process.

  • This is a minor one but on the OnePlus phones, to go back, you swipe from the right of the screen towards the left. On the OnePlus watch, it’s the other way — you swipe from the left of the watch face towards the right.

    Would it have hurt to have them do the same thing (or even allow swiping from either side to trigger a ‘go back’)

  • When you open up the watch applet list to see what you can do with your watch, the list of applets is static and predefined (which makes sense if you understand that they did this for RTOS battery and performance reasons)

    It’s just a bit of a pain for me since I have to scroll through a bunch of fitness crap I don’t care about to get to the app I want; this is also one of those times when I really miss the rotating bezel dial on my old watch. Thankfully, you can very easily bind the alternate [physical] button to any one of those apps.

    Pro-tip: when you’re setting up your watch, set the alternate button to launch the Settings app!

Most of these are relatively minor quirks of the watch and I can live with all of them if it delivers on the primary reason I got a watch in the first place — to pass along notifications.

Broadly speaking, notifications worked like a charm:

  • GMail notifications

  • Phone and text notifications

  • Skype and Teams chats

  • Camera alerts

One notable missing entry is Google Chats (formerly Hangouts) notifications - I struggled to get them to get them to the watch. Very intermittently, I would get notifications to the watch (maybe one notification for 50-100 messages). Poking a bit further, the problem isn’t the watch or it’s software — any notification that made it to the phone was faithfully passed along to the watch but Chat/Hangouts notifications just weren’t getting to the phone.

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Side quest to fix Chat/Hangouts notifications

The problem ultimately is Google’s Chat/Hangouts trying to be clever. The underlying issue has some merit: if you are using a computer to chat and happen to have your phone on you, should you get notifications on your phone? Google seems to think ‘no’ and I can certainly see the motivation to prevent duplicate notifications. Where this falls apart is that it relies on ‘something’ figuring out which system you are ‘actively using’ at any given moment and how fast the cutover should be.

Getting the notifications to work for me involved a few things to check for:

  • Prerequisites:

    • Make sure the app on the phone has notifications enabled and set the way you want

    • Make sure OnePlus Health app is set to synchronize that application’s notification to your phone

    • If needed (likely is),

      • lock the OnePlus health app so it doesn’t get closed to aggressively

      • disable power optimization for the OnePlus health app

  • Google Chat (on Desktop). I happen to use the standalone app:

    • Check the Settings Gear window and uncheck ‘Allow chat notifications’

    • If you’re missing notifications for just one person (or perhaps a select few people), in the chat conversation view, click on their name at the top (it’s a dropdown) and make sure it the setting says ‘turn off notifications’ (meaning notifications are on) and not ‘turn on notifications’ (meaning the notifications are off)

  • Google Chat (app): under settings, make ‘Mobile notifications’ is turned on and double check that your entire phone isn’t running in ‘Do not disturb’ mode (at least while you troubleshoot)

Once you get notifications working reliably, you can revisit whether you specifically need to have an application locked to stay running all the time or not.

But I want notifications on all devices (including PC)? Let me manage ‘duplicates’ on a per-device basis

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like you can do this. Google’s assumption is that you don’t have a bunch of computers in front of you all connected to chat and that you may want to reply back from any given one.

Now that I have [chat] notifications on the watch, I find the notifications to be bland — they are functional but that’s it. Their update indicated that ‘Enabled notification app icons for the most frequently used apps’ which is neat but it seems like Chat is not one of them, so my notification icons are generic. A minor gripe for now.

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The final verdict

After tinkering with Chats notifications to get them to work, I can say that the primary requirement of the watch has been met: it gets me notifications reliably of the things I care about. As for some of the other [limited] things you can do with the watch:

  • The alarm app, while basic, is perfectly fine

  • I love the Do-not-disturb / bedtime mode of the watch (being a totally separate setting from any Do-not-disturb setting you might have on your phone)

  • I don’t take it seriously, but for fun, sometimes I check out the sleep-tracking

  • The remote camera trigger (for your phone’s camera) is neat albeit gimmicky

  • The find-my-phone functionality works as advertised

  • The built-music app can be run in two different modes: you can either use it as a standalone music player that plays music on your watch or you can use it as a remote control for media playing on your phone. This is actually really awesome if you happen to be listening to music on your phone but have your phone on your desk or something. My headphones have a button that lets me pause/resume but on the watch, I can also change songs and adjust the volume. This works for video as well (i.e., YouTube) which is awesome. I have no interest in using the watch as a local standalone music player.

While I originally wanted to have a few chargers (say, one for a travel bag), I think with the ridiculous battery life of this watch and fast charging, this bypasses any charge-anxiety concerns.

Don’t get me wrong, the software experience of this watch is definitely much rougher than it ought to be in 2022 and the software feels unpolished but for my primary objective of being a cost effective notification relay, this watch checks all the boxes I need it to.

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DP
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