Good ideas for cheap wearables for work?

mr cheese · February 6, 2023

Hey all, I have two phones, one for work and one for my personal life. I've been through a couple different smart watches (Fitbit Blaze, a cheap Fossil Wear watch that was slow as hell, and a Fitbit Versa) that I acquired either cheap or as gifts over the years, each not lasting for very long due to either slowness or the eventual lack of use, taking it off and not even remembering to wear it again. Unfortunately, with work requiring two phones at any given point (my personal has a custom ROM that breaks when using Work profiles, despite being dual SIM) I want to find a cheap smartwatch with good battery life that I can wear to get my notifications from my work phone without having to flip between two devices sporadically.

Looking for something minimal (kinda like a FitBit Alta) but that can get app notifications from things like Slack and Outlook, while keeping all-day battery life, price point around $50-100 including/especially used. Bonus points if it can also do sleep tracking! The only brand I know is Fitbit but as they've been acquired by Google I am definitely open to other brands.

TetraSky · February 6, 2023

You want both phones to interact with the watch?
Not sure if that's even possible.

In any case, I use the Xiaomi band 7 and it works great. Low profile and I believe does all you've mentioned.

I got a metal band for it, but there are plenty of options like nylon, silicone or leather.

https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-smart-band-7/

Bought mine on Aliexpress last year for $42 and the metal band was an extra $14 USD. They've released a bigger "pro" version now, which I believe might be more down your alley as the regular Band 7 linked above is more of a "fitness" one while the Pro has a bigger screen.

https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-smart-band-7-pro/

mr cheese · February 6, 2023

4 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

You want both phones to interact with the watch?

just one per, I'm sure I can probably revive one of my old ones too.

5 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

In any case, I use the Xiaomi band 7 and it works great. Low profile and I believe does all you've mentioned.

I dig this, finding it for about $30-40 on eBay, will I have to be installing any Xiaomi software on my phone and keep it there to make it work? I'm not super paranoid, only a little bit lol...

TetraSky · February 6, 2023

19 minutes ago, mr cheese said:

will I have to be installing any Xiaomi software on my phone and keep it there to make it work? I'm not super paranoid, only a little bit lol...

There is, yes. Mii fitness.
Honestly, I don't consider myself "paranoid" either...

But I still installed NetGuard and entirely blocked its access to the internet.

It doesn't need internet access to work, be it to sync notifications, calls, music control, etc. I connect it to the network like once a month to check for update (disable NetGuard and re-enable it within a minute) and that's all.

Netguard is basically a configurable firewall for your phone. Quite useful for apps you don't trust or know they shouldn't have network access, yet you see them taking your data for some reason.

Can also configure it to tell you what IP it tried to connect to. From my testing, the app mostly try to connect to Amazon AWS servers. I haven't seen it try to connect to some

Spoiler

mr cheese · February 6, 2023

6 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Honestly, what I did is installed NetGuard and entirely blocked its access to the internet.

awesome, is this app rootless?

TetraSky · February 6, 2023

1 minute ago, mr cheese said:

awesome, is this app rootless?

It sure is!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.faircode.netguard&hl=en_CA&gl=US

Fair warning, it's certainly overwhelming at the start and not super intuitive. Test the options to see what they do and if it does what you want it to do. If you configure it like I showed in my screenshot in my previous post, that should disable all network access to that app.