watches.

If we wear a Suunto, Garmin, Apple watch or Fitbit the device wants us to wear it for sleep, for every step we take, every heart beat and more. At the end of the year we do get fitness summaries but related to what we ran, swam, cycled and possibly walked. That means that for 22 hours a day we are tracking our heart rate and more for nothing.

With fitness watches if we track walking and hiking there is a good chance that the end of year summary will ignore these activities. This means that we’re wearing an intrusive, compulsion forming device for nothing.

For some reason I have found my interest in casio watches re-awakened. I cheap models that woke my nostalgia, and then I looked at other models. I came across the GBD-200 before I came across the GBD-800 and I wished I had come across them in the reverse order. The GBD-800 is cheaper and it’s designed for different sport intensities. If you go for a quiet walk you can select one intensity and if you go for a run you can go for another intensity. It doesn’t track heart rate or anything, other than steps.

The GBD-200 is better suited to runners who don’t mind not tracking heart rate, and that don’t mind carrying the phone, for GPS location info.

I’d like to conclude by saying that the Casios I mention are around 40-150 CHF, whereas Garmin Instinct, Apple Watches and others start at 300 CHF and get up to 1000 or more francs. If you’re looking to play with gadgets then casios are nice because they are more affordable, and their batteries last for years rather than a day, with Apple, to a month with Garmin, Suunto etc.

I played with Casio in the 80s and 90s when all of their features were new, and now I am playing with them again because we’re in a pandemic, and we need a way to cope with the never-ending solitude of pandemic life. I also think these would be good gifts for nieces and nephews, as they gather a minimum of data about their users and they are hard to break.