I used to be big into those dorky digital watches when I was growing up, and I've been tempted by fitness trackers. My concerns are:
A) Is the Bluetooth connection secure? Are they taking steps to make it so the Bluetooth connection isn't easily trackable? How easy is it, for instance, for me to set rules to turn off the Bluetooth when the watch isn't actively syncing?
B) Does the watch send any data to someone else's remote servers, at all? Do I need to go through a 3rd party to get access to my own data (ie. what Fitbit does)?
I already have a Smartphone, I don't want my watch to act like one. I don't want to have to do a bunch of syncing through a 3rd-party server that will get shut down and sold off with all of my data someday. I'd pay a lot of money for a device that uses my Smartphone as an access-point/hub, but that largely just works offline and independently.
Me and my girlfriend been using the Bip for a month now.
We run every day.
The battery life is pretty phenomenal, the step counter and weather bits are handy, the GPS just works, you need the AmazTools app if you want to share your runs to Strava (but it works great), I have an alarm set to shake my wrist every morning at 7am, and if I destroy the watch.. it was all of $70.
The continuous heart rate monitoring is also handy for our gym and zone workouts. I wish it had multiple levels of heart zone alarms, like the TICKR FIT app -- which is amazing for more refined zone training, but it will tell you when you pop out of zone 2 on a run, so it's still useful.
Sleep tracking works great for my girlfriend, doesn't work great for me. So I turned it off and that doesn't bother me.
I think it's a great starter watch, I can see upgrading to the Garmen vivoactive 3 Music, since I'm not very interested in an Apple Watch.
I just preordered the Amazfit Verge. I've tried smart watches in the past, and I never could find any use for them, as I'm the type of person who silences all notifications, but now I play tennis and maybe it'll be useful there. It was mostly just an impulse purchase, but I hope I don't regret it.
It’s not quite 30 days for me, more like a couple of weeks, but I have everything enabled.
It genuinely is really great, if it had an app ecosystem, slightly higher resolution and was a little smaller / more stylish it would be perfect. A FOSS OS and support for emojis would also be nice
