Casio has added Bluetooth and step tracking to a £55 digital watch without turning it into a smartwatch or sacrificing replaceable-battery convenience.
The snappily named F-B100W pairs with Casio's smartphone app to record activity, adjust settings, and keep its clock accurate. Despite the additional electronics, Casio claims approximately two years of operation from a replaceable CR2016 battery.
It is very much not a smartwatch. There is no touchscreen, app store, or stream of notifications – just a conventional digital watch with a step counter and a little Bluetooth connectivity. That combination has nevertheless attracted attention on Hacker News and Reddit.
We admit it: this ape-descended life form is so astoundingly primitive that he still thinks digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Douglas Adams first mocked humans' fondness for digital watches when the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was broadcast in 1978 – nearly half a century ago. The Casio F-91W is only a decade younger. This strangely ubiquitous watch, once labeled a supposed "sign of al-Qaida," is widely regarded as the classic quartz digital watch and has been described as the bestselling watch of all time. One reason is that it's only £20 ($30) new. Another is that if you bought one of the first batch, it's probably only on its third or fourth battery by now: they are rated for seven years, but often last longer.
The F-91W is very simple and very cheap. Its main rival for all-time bestselling watch is the reverse: the Apple Watch has also shifted about 300 million units.
This is not a radical innovation for Casio. The existing ABL-100 does much the same, but costs over 25 percent more and weighs more than twice as much. What is interesting is that Casio has brought the functionality to a smaller, cheaper, and lighter watch – and possibly a more robust one. It's also retained an impressive battery life. These Bluetooth-enabled models should still run for two years or more on a single, replaceable, CR2016 lithium button cell. Since those only cost a buck or so, that sounds good to us.
The Reg FOSS desk has a fondness for inexpensive technology that performs a modest set of tasks well. Our first budget smartwatch was an Amazfit Bip, bought new for about £60 ($80). It had an always-on, daylight-readable color display, lasted a month and a half on a charge, and did everything we asked of it.
After five years of daily use, its battery stopped holding a charge. We replaced it with the then-latest Bip 5, only to find that the newer model lacked its ancestor's always-on display and offered less than a quarter of its battery life.
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Our next move was therefore backward to a secondhand Amazfit Neo. It is the most basic smartwatch we have encountered. A conventional segmented LCD displays the time, while a smaller strip cycles through the world clock, step count, pulse, estimated calories burned, battery level, and waiting notifications. It cost £15 ($20) and still lasts a week and a half on a charge.
This "beyond retro" design is, we need hardly say, no longer made. That is why Casio's move in the opposite direction – adding a few connected features to a basic digital watch – interests us.
We found the existing threads about these devices highly educational. There's a whole world of digital watch geekery that we barely even knew existed.
Some posters raised concerns we found very relevant. For instance, the vexed issue of date formats: it seems many low-end Casios can only display dates in US MM/DD format. Apparently, to get European-format dates, you need to go to more high-end models such as the GW-M5610U-1ER at a princely £135 ($185).
These lower-end Bluetooth-equipped Casio devices send only one Bluetooth Low Energy update to the phone at the end of each day, which is why they can boast such impressive battery life. In its pricier G-Shock range, the company does offer devices with bidirectional Bluetooth support, so that the watch can display on-screen notifications, such as the £129 ($165) G-Squad GBD-200 and GBD-300. Better still, it seems these can deliver silent vibrating alerts.
Another concern is that officially syncing these watches requires Casio's proprietary smartphone app, but there are FOSS alternatives such as Casio G-Shock Smart Sync.
The Register asked Casio for more information and a review unit but had not received a response at the time of publication. ®
