Review: Watchy - an eInk watch full of interesting compromises

The last smartwatch that I tried was some awful early Sony device with a locked-down ROM. The battery died after a day and I couldn't find the proprietary charger. It slurped up all my data. It was garish to look at. And it was expensive.

The Watchy is the opposite in every single conceivable way.

It is an Arduino powered, open source, eInk display, with no data guzzling tendancies. And is only £60 including delivery. It's gorgeous to look at without being distracting, has a massive battery life, and allows for a bunch of tinkering.

But...

Ah... Let's get it out of the way. This is not a consumer product. It is fiddly to assemble, has very little protection for its delicate components, and to change the timezone you have to recompile the firmware!

Oh, and it uses USB-Micro rather than USB-C 😡

The watch ships in kit form and is not overly satisfying to build. The buttons are especially fiddly to fit, the instructions assume you know how to open a ribbon connector, and there's warnings about how fragile everything is. Took me about 20 minutes all in - and that was mostly aligning the buttons.

But, once built, it does look great. Here are my first impressions:

It is an fun device to play with. But the whole thing is built on a set of (very reasonable) compromises.

The eInk screen is a delight to look at and helps keep the battery lasting for ages. There's no backlight - but that also makes it less of a flashy distraction.

The eInk screen is fragile. Yet, bizarrely, the watch comes with zero protection. There is no plastic shield to keep it from getting bumped or scratched. I appreciate that might cause glare or get dust trapped in it - but I don't think the deep bezel is going to protect that screen.

Similarly, there's no water ingress protection. I wasn't expecting a diver's watch with rubber gaskets - but I'd be nervous about wearing this in the rain. You can 3D print your own case, or buy a different one - but that adds to the cost.

There's no speaker - again, less distracting than other watches. The vibration motor is sufficiently powerful to discreetly alert you to anything important.

There's no touchscreen - again, saves on power and protects the screen. But the buttons are hard, loud, and just don't feel nice. Luckily WiFi can be set up by connecting to the device's own SSID. I was dreading the thought of having to enter details using those buttons!

It won't monitor your heart rate, sweatiness, or blood pressure - nor will it try to sell those data to perverts on the Internet. It does have a step-counter which uses an accelerometer to keep track of your movement.

It can't pair to your headphones for listening to music - but you can use BLE for firmware updates and WiFi for NTP.

You can reprogram it! But there's only 3,673,264 bytes to play with, so you can't squeeze to much in there. Oh, and the instructions are the usual half-finished & untested set of scattered files beloved by hackers.

There's no weird proprietary connectors needed to charge it. But it uses USB-Micro. So you'll have to dig out one of those old cables that you kept when the world moved over to USB-C.

Do you see what I mean? It isn't quite as spartan as the Casio F-91W, but it is missing some things you may find essential in a modern watch.

I'm conflicted. I love everything eInk. I like devices which are fully under my control. I don't want to wear something expensive and distracting on my wrist. I want to change the watchface to match my mood.

But... I don't want to wear something fragile. If I go abroad, I don't want to lug a laptop with me just to change timezone. I'm not sure I want to learn yet another programming paradigm. And, if I'm recharging something, I want it to use the same connector as every other gadget I've bought in the last few years.

I enjoy tinkering. But the instruction on the website are incomplete and hard to follow. I've sent a pull request to fix some of the errors I found. Eventually, after some confusion, I was able to download a face, edit the settings, and flash it.

I'm going to spend a few weeks playing with it. The Watchy is crammed full of possibilities. But it remains to be seen if I can fulfil them.