Casio's WS-B1000, at fifty-six bucks or so, syncs with your phone and tracks steps. It would be too much to call it a smartwatch, clearly, but it sits at the center of a Venn diagram of Cheap, Retro and Features and isn't that nice?
Smartphone pairing via Bluetooth® delivers automatic time correction and makes it easy to configure alarm, world time, and other functions from the app. Step counts and stopwatch times measured on the watch can be transferred to and viewed on the phone. Use this log data to guide daily exercise and help manage your health.
The Verge's Victoria Song reviewed it and liked it.
This device has Bluetooth to connect with your phone, an accelerometer to track steps, your classic stopwatch and timer functions, alarms, move reminders, and an LCD screen with a backlight button. In other words, just enough smarts to count as a fitness tracker — but barely.
A few years ago, that feature set probably wouldn't have appealed to me. But these days, I'm at a point in my fitness journey where I'm recovering from mental and physical burnout from prolonged overtraining. It is a frustratingly long process, and to my surprise, the thing that's kept me going are devices and apps that prioritize rest and simplicity over "going hard."
Digital minimalism (for example) has left its pioneer phase and is, depending on device class, either at the "oppressively hip" or "almost normal" stages of consumption.
