I'm just gonna say it: A wrist watch you need to charge every day, even every other day, is conceptually stupid. A watch with a display that isn't always-on is conceptually stupid. That isn't what a watch is supposed to be, fundamentally. It's supposed to be a device you barely think about & forget is there, not one which requires frequent attention. It's supposed to offer frictionless information at a glance, not require you to flick your wrist, rotate the bezel or otherwise "wake it up".
This was the reasoning behind retiring my expensive Samsung Gear S3 in favor of a cheap 2016 Pebble 2+ smart watch. Don't get me wrong. The Gear S3 is a beautiful device. That round, vibrant AMOLED display makes for some good looking drip on your wrist. But it lasts about a day and a half on a charge. Once it runs out, you're stuck with a heavy useless chunk of metal and glass on your wrist. The Pebble, on the other hand, lasts up to 7 days on a charge. 5 days if you have the health tracking features turned on.
Fitbit bought out Pebble 4 years ago simply to kill it off. It did everything Fitbit did, with equal or better battery life, but also had the full suite of smartwatch features. Control your music? Check. Receive notifications? Check. Dictate replies to text messages? Check. Weather? Check. Apps? Timer? Alarms? GoPro remote? It's all here. The only features on my S3 the Pebble doesn't have is wireless payments, which I rarely used and when I did, it often didn't work.
It should be a crime to shut down a competitor because they make a better product, but that's the world we live in. How does Pebble do all of this for 5-7 days between charges? The secret is the memory LCD display and 100Mhz CPU. Memory LCD is closely related to e-ink. Both of these display technologies use power only when changing the image. Memory LCD differs in that it can refresh individual pixels rather than the entire display at once and the refresh rate is much faster...at the cost of not looking like paper.
Apple Watch and all Android watches, my Samsung included, differ in that they contain fast modern CPUs and AMOLED displays (typically, some are LCD) which consume the bulk of the power coming from the battery. Compare this to a little over 1% battery usage for the memory lcd display of the monochrome Pebbles, and 4% for the color memory LCD display in the Pebble Time and Time Steel.
So, what about app support? Pebble's servers are gone now, right? Yes, but the community loves their watches so much, they made their own replacement servers. Visit Rebble.io and see for yourself. All back end services from Rebble are free, save for voice dictation which costs $3/mo. It's an easy process to get the watch switched over to the new servers through the companion app (which you can get from the Rebble website and sideload onto your phone). After that, your Pebble comes back to life with all the same features it had before.
Due to legal complications with selling apps for a family of devices owned by Fitbit, all the apps and watch faces are free. Some require a smartphone companion app that costs money, but these are few and far between. Of the apps I've so far tried, I get the most use from Music Boss, Weather, GoPro Remote and a little time wasting game called Pixel Miner which simply mines pixels in the background. You check in periodically to spend accumulated pixels and treasures your wee digger man has found on equipment upgrades and speed multipliers.
The best version of this is available only for the color display Pebble Time and Time Steel, but there's a monochrome version for the Pebble 1 and 2 as well. I am ashamed to say it's sufficiently addictive that when I replay it, I'll probably buy a Time Steel just for that purpose (and to have a backup for when my Pebble 2+ finally dies). It is bittersweet loving a technically defunct device this much, having to scavenge ebay for spare units, replacement parts, etc. For what it's worth, if repairability is a top priority for you, the Time and Time Steel are routinely rated five out of five stars for repairability. The 2+ not so much, as the display is glued to the front of the case.
So, what's the point of all this? Just to shill for watches made by a dead company? No, as ever, there's a bigger and more important message here: Mobile tech has gone off the deep end of the performance to battery life balance. Remember your old Nokia dumbphone that could sit in a backpack for a month on standby before it drained completely? Now modern smartphones are lucky to make it through an entire day on one charge. We've constantly got to have a wall adapter and/or power bank with us.
It doesn't have to be that way. Memory LCD, E-Ink and related low power display technologies have improved to the point that E-ink smartphones and tablets are practical. The Yotaphone line of smartphones is perhaps the best known, industry leading example:
Do not despair! It still has the usual AMOLED screen...on one side. On the other side, a monochromatic E-ink display. It switches seamlessly between them when you flip the device over. This permits you to do 90% of your business on the efficient, battery sipping E-ink side, only flipping to the AMOLED side when you need to take photos, watch a video, or other tasks requiring a color display panel with fast refresh. This compromise stretches what would otherwise be a one day battery life into 2 days, or just over 3 in airplane mode.
However, they're not the only player in this field. The idea is such a good one that a few other manufacturers have entered the fray with their own e-ink smartphones. The most advanced of the lot is Hisense, with their full color e-ink smartphone, the A5C:
The refresh rate of this new generation color e-ink is just enough that you can watch video and use it as the camera view finder. Frame rate is noticeably low at perhaps 10-15fps but in "Fast" mode (as opposed to Accurate) the entire screen no longer "blinks" with each refresh. It's suboptimal but entirely watchable, suggesting that before long it will be able to safely ditch the AMOLED display on the back (front?) entirely.
Put away your wallets though! For the time being these phones are available only in China and as such, the Google Play store is blocked at a hardware level that is very tricky to circumvent. It is a sign of what's coming in the US eventually however: A return to phones with long battery life that you can take backpacking, which won't die on you in an emergency when you need it the most, and which generally demands less of you than a power hog modern smartphone that needs to be charged every night.
"What's wrong with that?" you ask. "So you have to charge it at night. Big deal. You sleep at night, don't you?" Hahaha. Ahaha. If only that were true, friend. If only...