Casio has been leaving a lot of money on the table in terms of nostalgia products. There's been a low rumble of demand for the Casio CZ series of synthesizers for a decade or more, and a bunch of non-Casio companies have cashed in on it (Behringer makes CZ-1 Mini, Arturia has CZ V, several other phase distortion synths exist). It's incredibly cheap to replicate, a simple early digital synthesis algorithm that'll run on anything; Korg has been making ARM-based emulation synths (basically a Raspberry Pi-like SoC in a keyboard form factor with some knobs) for a decade or more and I have to assume their margins are very comfortable since most of the guts are off-the-shelf low-cost parts rather than custom chips.
But, I guess their watches were always a bigger business than the synths.
Korg did it right - budget off-the-shelf processor, most of the money spent on the UI, wildly optimistic prices, no nostalgic ties.
The expensive part of a modern synth isn't the DSP board, it's the industrial design and tooling needed to build the rest of the hardware.
The CZ series was workable, but there really aren't many passionate nostalgic buyers waiting to drop a few hundred - minimum - on an expensive reissue.
> Casio has been leaving a lot of money on the table in terms of nostalgia products
Casio has been quite successful at not abusing trust in their brand by releasing lower-quality outsourced replicas like HP did with their calculators. Not that HP had much farther to fall but it’s nice to see a corporation that’s not incompetent!
They don't have far to fall in the synth world. Their current keyboard line has no synthesizers to speak of. But, also, they still have a keyboard line and relationships with music dealers, so presumably they wouldn't need to outsource the return of the CZ.
Trying not to leave any money on the table is exactly the approach that reliably kills off nostalgia income streams.
Picking off some low hanging fruit while demonstrating provable restraint can result in a huge money stream that goes on and on. But when the mindset "it's good, but it can be better!" becomes dominant (e.g. through market dynamics, being publicly traded means that ownership perpetually shifts to those who think that income sources could be squeezed just a little harder, or much harder, actually), it quickly turns sour. And when it flips from beloved to "why throw money at those greedy $expletive,plural" it flips hard, and forever.
I have a couple of Oceanus brand watches that I got in Japan. They are fairly un-cheap.
However, in Japan, their G-Shock brand (kind of lower cost, in the US), can get even more expensive than Oceanus. Some of them look like Pip-Boys (Because this is HN, I need to mention that this is a deliberate exaggeration).
One thing I've never understood (and hopefully some Casio geek can shine a light on): why do almost all old Casio models have a 24/12h time switch taking the premium spot as one of the main 4 buttons, instead of having it buried deep in the (awkward) menus. Seems to me that something like alarm or stopwatch setting or a second menu action button would have been far more useful.
I spoke with a Casio engineer about this. It's so that your bending wrist can accidentally switch it to 12h time when you actually really want it on 24h time or vice versa.
Those buttons are the menu. The idea of menus on watches is a modern ux extravagance.
I don’t have the satisfying answer as to why they dedicated a button to 12/24 hour time but my guess is that it’s simply a cool digital feature and stands out against the limitations of analog watches.
They had modal menus back then, they just didn't display them. You had to memorize which obscure symbols to press, to change various settings. For example, in the 1970's, HP's calculator watch required pressing ⯅• to switch between 12 hr and 24 hr modes, or A⯅A to clear an alarm.
In the 80's and 90's, when sixteen-segment and dot-matrix displays made displaying text easier, calculators started displaying menu items, so you didn't have to memorize the sequence.
Since then, we've moved on to full-color high-resolution displays that can handle any text of any language, and the menus have more-or-less switched back to memorizing a sequence of which obscure symbols to press, I guess because some people think they look cool? Sometimes there's no menu at all, and you just have to memorize finger movements.
You can bury stuff like setting the time into a menu, people will accept it. They know that there will be a way to set the time. But if the 12/24 is hidden, whatever is picked as the default will drive away a noticeable fraction of those would-be buyers who prefer the other setting. For starters, pretty much everybody who does not get pulled into a sales person interaction that's sufficiently deep to touch the subject. And that sales person interaction won't be the best possibly, you don't want to bore them with nuisance settings, you want to show off The Stopwatch (or whatever was the flagship feature of the watch in question)
I always followed trial and error until I reached my target and I had the feeling that my results were much better than if I were randomly clicking buttons. That is, some memory always remained. Or the menu is well thought out and has some consistency.
The button press sequences are still combo-style; when I set one of the alarms on my ABL-100WE, it always ends in trial and error. I mean, basically it's logical, but when the buttons change what they do (e.g. when the display says "SET", the light button becomes "up"), it throws me off.
In my country, 30-40 years back, people who needed a watch were those ones who travel regularly. And travel was mostly using public transport, trains and planes. Most or all of it operated using a 24h time. That button was very useful.
Compare that to the mute/silence/DND physical button in iPhones today.
Also people who worked in confined spaces who wouldn’t know if it was day or night outside after a days job. My father who worked in an oil rig in Abu Dhabi used one. He gifted me one.
Wearing a Casio as I type this. The "24hr" button switches 12/24 modes on the "watch" mode, when using stopwatch it starts the watch, and when using alarms it turns the alarm on/off.
It has pretty critical functionality for those, I think the way its labeled on the watch face just makes it sound a little odd.
My F-91F I replaced the Casio module with an Ollee watch and pretty much disabled all of the features, I can sync the time when reconnecting to Bluetooth on my phone which I do about once a month.
BIG Warning to anyone thinking about purchasing one of these
You cannot connect the watch to Bluetooth without a proprietary app, and that proprietary app will not let you use the Bluetooth feature without some bullshit called a "CASIO Account". Their privacy policy is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser too.
From my understanding, apps need location permissions if they want to scan for available bluetooth devices rather than having the user pair in the bluetooth settings app. The reason being that advertisers set up bluetooth beacons all over the place and used passive scanning in apps to collect the users location.
What's not clear to me is why they really need to be able to scan for bluetooth. Surely requesting location permissions is worse UX than having the user go to the settings app to pair.
Hmmmmmmmm. I've always been a fan of the classic Casio aesthetic, and I want to want it, but this is a strange point in the functionality-vs-price space.
A base F-91W costs less than half that, and my phone can already track steps with reasonable reliability.
An entry-level fitbit costs about the same and monitors way more stats including heart rate, SpO2. Worse battery life and appearance, but if I wanted that featureset it's probably what I'd get.
Some of us prefer looser fitting bands. Most of smart watch features are useless unless you strap it down tight. I'd bite on something like this if the form factor wasn't off.
Really hoping this will include the ability to sync information from the internet via the BT tethered phone. But probably not
Similar to the current weather feature that grabs the weather for the next 5 days on every sync, I just want to push the local time train schedule just once per day to my watch.
Like their G-Shock watches, the actual area dedicated to showing the time is overwhelmed by superfluous elements. Must be barely 20% of the top surface that actually performs its primary function.
When I look at my watch I want to see the time, not wasted space announcing "Casio Step Tracker" or "Water Resist" ( which isn't even proper English).
I moved to Timex a few years ago as their basic digital watches have nice big numerals for the time display.
On the principal menu of my G-Shock, I have the time on ~80% of the screen. The rest is 8/19, WED and the seconds. Of course the time is smaller when I go to the tide screen.
I'll take some solace in mine supporting lots more alarms (beep when school recess ends) and a bunch of geeky stuff like sunrise, moon phases, tides, and stuff.
I have one of these, there is an open source project called gshock_api that supports it. I think that makes it a much more interesting device. I don't use the app, I tag alarms in remind, and sync them from cron - works great.
This is great, as is the CasioGShockSmartSync Android app. I wish there was an iOS app, as the official app is horrible, only works after signing up for an account, and only works if given every tracking permission possible to vacuum the maximum amount of data to the cloud.
Kind of hope this is a signal the culture is moving towards an analog 2.0 movement (a merging of old school interfaces with modern tech components thoughtfully incorporated).
Yes, it seems to be a repackaging of the ABL-100WE and has a long battery life. Unfortunately, their app is horrible, only works after signing up for an account, and only works if given every tracking permission possible to vacuum the maximum amount of data to the cloud.
Nice! When I wanted a “dumb” smart watch many years ago, I went with a FitBit. I think it matched the features to what this Casio offers minus the HR monitor. Fast forward to now, I use a Garmin Instinct that hits the spot for me. I’ve grown accustomed to the more detailed analytics (HRV and “daily battery” are awesome). Still I’d consider a Casio with more sensors and a solid phone app to give them justice. Anyhow, I own the previous version of this watch and a few other Casios and I still like them for what they are. Gonna hold on to them until I die :)
If you want a Casio watch and are traveling to Japan, just get one at a second hand shop there (WonderEx, Second Street, ...). They are tend to be well stocked on the Casio cruft.
I have a Casio PHYS STR-800, nonworking. I got it two decades ago because of the large lap memory (and unusual look, too); I was doing a lot of running, including track training and such.
It short circuited one day. Put in a battery, and it drained the thing in a minute. Put in another one, same thing.
It's been sitting in the top shelf of a bathroom cabinet since like 2011.
GW-M5610U-1ER enjoyer here. I am actually glad it is not connected to my phone, and I swap them with Garmin watches when I need to check the time and don't want to get any notifications.
Casio has so many great, cheap, watches for which you don't accidentally change the time, reset your stop watch, or switch from between 12/24h mode every time you bend your wrist.
The F201W (which this appears to be based off of) is not one of them.
I really like my F91W case with a Sensor Watch Pro board and accelerometer sensor.
My favorite features:
- Piezo alarm is much louder.
- Countdown time can be incremented by tapping the watch.
- LED color can be changed by adjusting RGB values.
- It features sunrise/-set and moon phase info/calendar.
- I changed the week day names to German abbreviations.
- There are lots of intriguing watch faces that you can compile into your firmware.
Sadly, the project is in some disarray as the originator apparently lost interest and the community isn't moving uniformly. Would love to see such a project for Casio with 4 buttons as this would allow for a lot more interesting use cases ... the pinnacle would be a board for their calculator watches. That would be rad.
The Sensor Watch forum on Discord is pretty active.
They make a replacement screen too. The feature set depends on the firmware, and you pick the right firmware for your screen (or make your own, it's FOSS).
would some Casio/watch expert know if it's possible to replace the face plate on these watches? I love the simplicity but I don't like all the text outside the watch itself like "Step tracker" and "Water Resist".
i love the product design aspect of a product that only needs to have one thing set (in this case, the time zone), to be eternally a functional device
which is why i love gshocks, both for design but also specifically the ones with tough solar/multiband 6 (and bluetooth (optional))
they have battery lives in the range of decades (due to solar charging), set themselves (multiband 6 is using atomic clock radio signals) and via bluetooth
you can get gw-b5600-2 and gw-s5600u (auto backlight) for under $200, but usually closer to $100. there are many more models, of course
that sounds expensive, but it's insanely durable construction and battery life means it'll be the only digital watch you'll ever need to buy. and the only configuration it will ever need is the time zone.
Bluetooth is watch initiated, and only turns on 4 times a day (or when the user explicitly requests it with a button press). The pedometer is probably a special chip.
You should compare this with the F-91W that gets 7 years on the same battery, and hobbyist hardware mods that get years out of the same battery running ARM chips.
Nice thing about BLE is that it can be really cheap and stateless, you don't need to keep polling. If it was sending each and every step count to the watch (or even every minute) that would be one thing, but a semi-daily sync for time and steps could easily fit in one BLE packet.
My little temperature and humidity sensors that show an LCD 2x the surface area of a watch and broadcast a BLE packet every minute lasts about 12 months on a CR2032 (~200mah). A CR2016 is ~90mah little less than half. And receiving a BLE packet takes way less energy than sending.
Then you have the on-demand stuff that costs a packet or two, like the lost phone finder -- which is what I'm most excited about.
I had the same thought--speculating, perhaps it's like you say and we'll see a disclosure somewhere that it's "Up to 2 years, with 1 weekly Bluetooth pairing, 1 second of backlight use per day, no step counter."
Though, the CR2016 is a pretty big battery vs typical watch batteries, and in some other Casio watches are used as 10-year batteries.
I feel the same about the apple watch. All I use it for is literally tracking steps. I do not care about any other feature. If my watch fails I will just get a casio watch.
Bluetooth stays on only for three minutes and then turns itself off once you're done syncing stuff. I have had one for nearly two years now (ABL-100WE). Absolutely love it.
I work with accelerometer chips, a lot of them have features specifically for pedometers. Keeping the accelerometer on will draw a few uA, then you can have the accelerometer keep track of the step count internally and have the main processor query it as necessary to update the step count display. When there's no motion for a while, you can also put it into a lower power sleep mode that doesn't track steps, then when it detects motion it'll wake up the main processor which will then put the accelerometer back into pedometer mode. I think 2 years on a CR2016 (90 mAh) is reasonable if Casio knows what they're doing.
If it's like the G-Shock, it's not a real step counter, it's a small accelerometer. It will trigger on every single wave when you're planing if you're windsurfing, which makes it quite useless.
I mean, airtags are doing radio stuff at a regular cadence. I've noticed they update once every 15 minutes, so they are turning the radio on to do whatever BLE triangulation they need to do 96 times per day. That's milliamps over at least a few milliseconds to wake the radio, do whatever triangulation is needed. It's amazing that they last that long considering what they are doing. I think they are using Nordic NRF54 internally so it's testament to the power efficiency those chips are capable of.
Airtags don't do any triangulation. They just send out a BLE beacon periodically to any iPhone within earshot, and also spend some time listening for new instructions that almost never happen.
They have no idea where they are or what their airtag/BLE neighbors, if present, are doing. They don't grok GNSS or wifi. There's nothing for them to triangulate or trilaterate or tri-anything when they're just sitting there.
So yes: They are indeed pretty tidy about energy consumption. They accomplish this in large part by being very simple in normal operation and leaving the heavier lifting to the world of iPhones with relatively enormous batteries that get recharged ~every day.
Here is a fun fact; the US believes owning and wearing an F-91W is evidence that you're a terrorist so much so that they can place you in Guantanamo Bay without trial[0]:
> In a handful of cases the detainee's possession of a Casio watch or the wearing olive-drab clothing is cited as evidence that the detainee is an enemy combatant. No basis is given to explain why such evidence makes the detainee an enemy combatant.
It's not quite as simple as "if you have one of these you're a terrorist" of course; it's one indicator based on long-standing patterns, but never used as sole proof.
AQ training/bomb-making manuals from the 1990s–2000s recommend cheap, reliable digital watches like this as timers for IEDs as they're extremely inexpensive and widely available worldwide, durable, water resistant, and easy to modify as delay timers.
Often these guys would get picked up with two or more watches of the same model, for example. We recovered them in bomb-making facilities and on fighters throughout the GWOT. Ramzi Yousef (Philippine Airlines Flight 434) and Ahmed Ressam (the 'Millennium Bomber') both had them.
> Khaled El-Masri is a German, Lebanese and French citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
> While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, raped, and subjected to other forms of torture.
> After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA admitted his arrest was a mistake and released him.
Trick question! It was actually that his name is one letter away from someone else's name, and some manager in the CIA had "a hunch":
> At the end of 2003, El-Masri travelled from his home in Ulm to go on a short vacation in Skopje. He was detained by Macedonian border officials on 31 December 2003, because his name was identical (except for variations in Roman transliteration) to that of Khalid al-Masri, who was being sought as an alleged mentor to the al-Qaeda Hamburg cell, and because of suspicion that El-Masri's German passport was a forgery.
> CIA agents discussed whether to remove El-Masri from Macedonia through an extraordinary rendition. The decision to do so was made by the head of the al Qaeda division of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, on the basis of "a hunch" that El-Masri was involved in terrorism; his name was similar to suspected terrorist Khalid al-Masri.
> When the Macedonian officials released El-Masri on 23 January 2004, American security officers immediately kidnapped him. El-Masri later described them as members of a "black snatch team." They beat him and sedated him for transport using a rectal suppository. "The CIA stripped, hooded, shackled and sodomized el-Masri with a suppository—in CIA parlance, subjected him to "capture shock"—as Macedonian officials stood by."
> Ramzi Yousef (Philippine Airlines Flight 434) and Ahmed Ressam (the 'Millennium Bomber') both had them.
This is like a statistics 101 question. Google says that Casio has sold over 100M F-91W's since 1989. Let's round down to an average of 2.5M a year, or 25M over the 10 peak years of the global war on terror (GWOT).
You named two terrorists who wore them. Let's say that's an understatement by 200X. Some quick math shows that the percent of terrorists who wore F-91W's is 400/25000000 = 0.0016% positive rate, or conversely a 99.9984% false positive rate. Not good!
Now I never actually took a statistics class, so maybe I got this question wrong. But it's obvious that using the possession of an F-91W as a sign of being a terrorist is a mistake.
Well, your argument might be valid but calculation of course has nothing remotely to do with truth. If we’re talking about the US, person has to be in the US/travel to US. That dramatically cuts down the amount from 25M. Second - the person has to be.. how do I put it, non white? Probably muslim. That also cuts it down by far. I can believe that people who fall in these two categories might have some subcultural groups. And in most of them they might just.. not wear Casio watches. It’s not like probability of wearing/not wearing Casio watches is equally likely for every person on earth. They have their target groups.
The wording doesn’t seem to me like owning the watch was the only evidence and that was enough to put people in Guantanamo, it sounds to me like it was a contributing factor. Still a bit crazy but I don’t think they just arrested everyone with this watch.
> In a handful of cases the detainee's possession of a Casio watch or the wearing olive-drab clothing is cited as evidence that the detainee is an enemy combatant. No basis is given to explain why such evidence makes the detainee an enemy combatant.
How does the Tacoma differ from the Hilux? I know there are some slight styling and engine differences for different markets, but pretty sure its still mostly a Hilux.
> the US believes owning and wearing an F-91W is evidence that you're a terrorist
No they don't, please don't spread misinformation. If this were true, the watch itself would be banned in the country and/or nobody would sell it.
Your own source says the Pentagon refuted the author's claims because they did not have access to classified information, which I believe would suggest that there is more to the story than merely owning a very common watch and nothing else. Otherwise millions of innocent Americans would be in jail.
There is a very, very good reason this was only "in a handful of cases" and never again.
I’ve seen some people put something like a Whoop on the opposite side of their watch, so theoretically the functionality is achievable, but I can’t imagine the form factor to work due to the demands on compute and battery heart rate and sleep tracking need.
After wearing an Apple Watch for almost a decade, the F-91W became my new "never take off" watch. For daily use, the only thing I miss from a smartwatch is a weather+temp forecast complication. Interestingly, it doesn't seem like this F-B100W-1A provides that (yet).
My father wears Casio watches almost exclusively, he's been tempted by a Fitbit so he can start tracking his step count, but even though I've bought him the Fitbit, he's finding the whole setup and app usage too intimidating, and so he hasn't used it.
This, in the silver ABL-100WE-2AEF model, is exactly what he wants. Same Casio, same interface, just now it has step count. He doesn't even need / want the Bluetooth.
(Me, I'll keep rocking my Pebble Time 2. Absolutely love it.)
Of all the things "smart watches" do, the one thing beyond time that most people actually perceive daily is their tracked steps.
IE; My apple watch ais the only one that goes out of it's way to make sure I know my steps for the day, and is always "accurate". Which is nice, but gimmicky for someone like me who doesn't analyze my steps.
I imagine Casio went after similar low hanging fruit, as an acceleromater is cheap/old tech, while still being able to feature compete with something like an apple watch.
Sure, but we can't do sleep tracking well. Todays devices mostly guess and map to typical patterns. Might, might not, work reasonably for you. But chances are that if you want to track your sleep because you suspect irregularities then they are about as useful as a potato.
From other anectdata the apple watch seems to just as bad as everything else.
We just don't seem to have any idea how to track sleep quality even with better devices than just a watch/whatever. Even a binary, is the person I'm attached to sleeping, is hit and miss. And with that in mind you can be pretty sure that the sleep stages etc is even worse.
> Step counter seems like a bizarre thing to focus in on? are people passionately tracking steps without their phones?
Yup. I go for walks specifically to leave my damn phone at home. I do bring an Apple Watch w/ airpods in case I need to take an urgent call and for podcasts, but I don't bother with texts or alerts or any other nonsense.
And while step tracking is not critical, if you have health goals that include a minimum number of steps a day I find it incredibly nice to have. I can check my counter before bed, and take the dog for a 30 minute walk if I'm behind for the day. Just a means to hold myself accountable on those crappy low energy stressful days.
People are, absolutely, yes! In the tech world there is an ever-growing focus on devices which can operate independently of smartphones, even to an offline/local-first extent.
The trend is trickling down into other circles as well. People are beginning to correctly identify needless hyperconverged connectivity as a burden rather than a convenience.
I had this same reaction to past step counters. I keep my phone in my pocket, and it works basically perfectly as a step counter.
But then I realized that many people do not keep their phone in their pocket, especially women. For them, a watch, bracelet or ring really is the best option.
Grandpa kept a pedometer in a little pouch for decades. I got him a Fitbit but he didn’t like that, and more recently another cheap pedometer off of Amazon.
I am not passionate about it but I like to make sure I'm moving a lot. I like that I can at a glance just see how much that's happened each day. I have one of these. Had one a while now and its the only watch I've ever used that I've stuck with and kept using.
My phone is sitting on my desk now connected to a charger - meaning any pacing I'm doing at the moment it not tracked. When I cook I often set my phone on the counter with the recipe - again while I'm moving all over. I often go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without bringing my phone.
I hate watches, but one would be better for step tracking - it is more likely to be on me to track information.
Step tracking is for health reasons. Unless you do activities you describe 12h a day, every day, whether they are counted or not doesnt move the proverbial health needle a bit
From what I can tell health is about both quantity and quality. 30 minutes of exercise and sitting is not good for health. That is why 10,000 steps per day is so often a goal - I can do a few thousand steps in the 30 minutes of exercise, but other activities should also give steps and I want to know in general how active I am.
Step tracking is for people who like to pretend they are doing something healthy without actually exerting any dedicated effort above and beyond their normal routine.
"Walking briskly for 30 minutes" is a better measure of something healthy than how many steps you took.
I do try to get my daily exercise. However it is still interesting to know how many steps I've taken. (sometimes my daily exercise is bike or swimming which are obviously not steps)
Started looking at Casios. Now I am thinking of getting W-800HD-1AVEF. Old A159W is kinda broken or pain to get right. Not really using one often, but maybe a few times in 10 years clock would be reasonable.
i want one of these but i need it bigger. i bought an F-91W last year and its so small, it barely fit on my wrist and it looked like a little girl watch on my wrist.
I feel that the smartphone connectivity feature is a departure from the philosophy of the F-91W. Is having a smartphone for "Easy watch setting" not a flaw of the watch, rather than a feature?
I'd love if it was radio controlled and charged with solar. And without phone connectivity.
Personally not at all interested in these new features - an F-91W that needs a smartphone to operate properly is madness to me - but I do appreciate the way they implemented them, with a focus on longevity and simplicity.
I'm a huge fan of the Casio F-91W, have two of them on my desk right now. Maybe it's just me, but for this specific model I feel like it becoming bluetooth enabled breaks the spirit of the simplicity of the model.
But hey, seems like people are excited for that, happy for them! Mine will last another 10 years without it.
It's still powered by a coin cell so it's probably for power conservation reasons. Way cheaper to periodically power on the BT radio and sync steps to your phone than it is to constantly listen for notifications.
It's not just power, if it where, they'd fit a USB C rechargable cell in there.
Its still a cheap casio resin watch at the end of the day. If this where to be able to push/pull notifications, the watch would be completely different in cost, ui, marketing, etc.
It would go from being charming retro tech with modern features, to dime a dozen bloatware/fitness tracking hardware.
If you want a coin-cell powered watch with a couple of years battery-life, but still want notifications, the G-Shock GBD-200/300s have this feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCq1ei5cT_8
huge dimensions comparable to bricks sold by Garmin, key new know when Casio will produce something with F-91W dimensions
if I have to choose between used Amazfit Bip for 15-20$ or pebble time 2 with worse (bigger) dimensions, worse battery life (even compared to 5+ yo Bip battery) and not even built in GPS for 200+ $ it's pretty easy choice
That's an interesting take. I wear a non-smart watch specifically because I don't want notifications or any smart features. I wore an Apple watch for years but went back to a dumb analog watch when I got tired of the distractions.
I've been thinking of going back to a smart watch and only turning on notifications for texts from my wife. This so I can leave my phone out of my hands when I'm with my son.
and as someone who want dumb watch you have tons of options compared to someone who just want small watch with notifications which will last at least one month and have real AOD
no such thing besides old Amazfit Bip and overpriced pebble time 2 exists, everything else has either no battery life or looks like brick on wrist (greetings to Garmin and Casio)
Vibration is precisely what made me sell my brand new (sold out) Pebble watch. No matter the firmware or options (un)chosen, it would randomly vibrate at odd times of the day. Couldn't stand the constant distractions.
Casio G-Shock GW-M5610U back on my wrist where it belongs.
Plenty of smartwatches are relatively thin and have vibration, and it only uses up battery when it's used. There's no excuse except they probably just wanted to cut costs.
I'm disappointed because that's what kept me from buying the Amazfit Neo, which is a similar concept to this one. Without vibration it's useless to me. They get so close to a great product and then...
Nice move! I wish it would support even more activity / health features in the future like GPS tracking, sleep tracking, etc. As a full package in the classic design it would make a great alternative to Garmin / Polar / Whoop / Oura etc.
But, I guess their watches were always a bigger business than the synths.
The expensive part of a modern synth isn't the DSP board, it's the industrial design and tooling needed to build the rest of the hardware.
The CZ series was workable, but there really aren't many passionate nostalgic buyers waiting to drop a few hundred - minimum - on an expensive reissue.
Casio has been quite successful at not abusing trust in their brand by releasing lower-quality outsourced replicas like HP did with their calculators. Not that HP had much farther to fall but it’s nice to see a corporation that’s not incompetent!
Picking off some low hanging fruit while demonstrating provable restraint can result in a huge money stream that goes on and on. But when the mindset "it's good, but it can be better!" becomes dominant (e.g. through market dynamics, being publicly traded means that ownership perpetually shifts to those who think that income sources could be squeezed just a little harder, or much harder, actually), it quickly turns sour. And when it flips from beloved to "why throw money at those greedy $expletive,plural" it flips hard, and forever.
However, in Japan, their G-Shock brand (kind of lower cost, in the US), can get even more expensive than Oceanus. Some of them look like Pip-Boys (Because this is HN, I need to mention that this is a deliberate exaggeration).
I don’t have the satisfying answer as to why they dedicated a button to 12/24 hour time but my guess is that it’s simply a cool digital feature and stands out against the limitations of analog watches.
In the 80's and 90's, when sixteen-segment and dot-matrix displays made displaying text easier, calculators started displaying menu items, so you didn't have to memorize the sequence.
Since then, we've moved on to full-color high-resolution displays that can handle any text of any language, and the menus have more-or-less switched back to memorizing a sequence of which obscure symbols to press, I guess because some people think they look cool? Sometimes there's no menu at all, and you just have to memorize finger movements.
A few months without doing them, and it was hopeless trying to remember how to do them again.
15 beeps, btw, till it turns itself off for the day.
Press MODE, then press ALARM ON/OFF.
One thing I miss that’s not on my Fitbit is an hourly warning. When you have ADHD, it’s a huge helper.
Also people who worked in confined spaces who wouldn’t know if it was day or night outside after a days job. My father who worked in an oil rig in Abu Dhabi used one. He gifted me one.
This was 1998.
It’s a little strange that a dedicated button would be needed to switch between them, especially when the math to convert between them is so simple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units
It has pretty critical functionality for those, I think the way its labeled on the watch face just makes it sound a little odd.
You cannot connect the watch to Bluetooth without a proprietary app, and that proprietary app will not let you use the Bluetooth feature without some bullshit called a "CASIO Account". Their privacy policy is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser too.
The absolute state of things.
Edit: Also, not saying it's a good thing.
What's not clear to me is why they really need to be able to scan for bluetooth. Surely requesting location permissions is worse UX than having the user go to the settings app to pair.
US, for now, can keep getting the unconnected F91W $25 lookalike. IIRC, the F-91W has a really small strap. Almost a "ladies watch" size.
A base F-91W costs less than half that, and my phone can already track steps with reasonable reliability.
An entry-level fitbit costs about the same and monitors way more stats including heart rate, SpO2. Worse battery life and appearance, but if I wanted that featureset it's probably what I'd get.
https://www.olleewatch.com/
https://www.sensorwatch.net
Similar to the current weather feature that grabs the weather for the next 5 days on every sync, I just want to push the local time train schedule just once per day to my watch.
Is it did that get implemented solely so someone could say "I'll make my own watch, with blackjack and hookers"?
When I look at my watch I want to see the time, not wasted space announcing "Casio Step Tracker" or "Water Resist" ( which isn't even proper English).
I moved to Timex a few years ago as their basic digital watches have nice big numerals for the time display.
That said, I really like this because the ABL-100WE comes with metal bands and I'd really like another watch with a rubber band :)
https://www.casio.com/de/watches/casio/vintage/product.ABL-1...
I'll take some solace in mine supporting lots more alarms (beep when school recess ends) and a bunch of geeky stuff like sunrise, moon phases, tides, and stuff.
https://github.com/izivkov/gshock_api
The full lifelog (what Casio calls the steps and other metrics) is an opaque binary blob, but we mostly understand it now, so you can access that too.
https://github.com/izivkov/gshock_api/pull/3
I have a Casio PHYS STR-800, nonworking. I got it two decades ago because of the large lap memory (and unusual look, too); I was doing a lot of running, including track training and such.
It short circuited one day. Put in a battery, and it drained the thing in a minute. Put in another one, same thing.
It's been sitting in the top shelf of a bathroom cabinet since like 2011.
Or going to meetups.
The F201W (which this appears to be based off of) is not one of them.
My favorite features:
- Piezo alarm is much louder.
- Countdown time can be incremented by tapping the watch.
- LED color can be changed by adjusting RGB values.
- It features sunrise/-set and moon phase info/calendar.
- I changed the week day names to German abbreviations.
- There are lots of intriguing watch faces that you can compile into your firmware.
Sadly, the project is in some disarray as the originator apparently lost interest and the community isn't moving uniformly. Would love to see such a project for Casio with 4 buttons as this would allow for a lot more interesting use cases ... the pinnacle would be a board for their calculator watches. That would be rad.
The Sensor Watch forum on Discord is pretty active.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-wa...
[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/img/87bb/b84945f8-c8fd-4a06-9291...
I got one earlier this year, pretty awesome project!
For example, there is a "text removal" option on this one: https://www.nocturnaltime.com/shop/p/obsidian-casio-watch-ws...
https://www.casio.com/europe/watches/casio/product.F-91WB-1A...
https://www.casio.com/europe/watches/casio/product.F-91WB-8A...
which is why i love gshocks, both for design but also specifically the ones with tough solar/multiband 6 (and bluetooth (optional))
they have battery lives in the range of decades (due to solar charging), set themselves (multiband 6 is using atomic clock radio signals) and via bluetooth
you can get gw-b5600-2 and gw-s5600u (auto backlight) for under $200, but usually closer to $100. there are many more models, of course
that sounds expensive, but it's insanely durable construction and battery life means it'll be the only digital watch you'll ever need to buy. and the only configuration it will ever need is the time zone.
You should compare this with the F-91W that gets 7 years on the same battery, and hobbyist hardware mods that get years out of the same battery running ARM chips.
My little temperature and humidity sensors that show an LCD 2x the surface area of a watch and broadcast a BLE packet every minute lasts about 12 months on a CR2032 (~200mah). A CR2016 is ~90mah little less than half. And receiving a BLE packet takes way less energy than sending.
Then you have the on-demand stuff that costs a packet or two, like the lost phone finder -- which is what I'm most excited about.
Though, the CR2016 is a pretty big battery vs typical watch batteries, and in some other Casio watches are used as 10-year batteries.
However, the manual recommends to be sparing with the backlight.
Might take another look at these - given the price, it's not a huge gamble to try it out for a few weeks.
They have no idea where they are or what their airtag/BLE neighbors, if present, are doing. They don't grok GNSS or wifi. There's nothing for them to triangulate or trilaterate or tri-anything when they're just sitting there.
So yes: They are indeed pretty tidy about energy consumption. They accomplish this in large part by being very simple in normal operation and leaving the heavier lifting to the world of iPhones with relatively enormous batteries that get recharged ~every day.
> In a handful of cases the detainee's possession of a Casio watch or the wearing olive-drab clothing is cited as evidence that the detainee is an enemy combatant. No basis is given to explain why such evidence makes the detainee an enemy combatant.
This is also noted on the F-91W's Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W#Usage_in_terrorism
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seton_Hall_reports#Detainees'_...
AQ training/bomb-making manuals from the 1990s–2000s recommend cheap, reliable digital watches like this as timers for IEDs as they're extremely inexpensive and widely available worldwide, durable, water resistant, and easy to modify as delay timers.
Often these guys would get picked up with two or more watches of the same model, for example. We recovered them in bomb-making facilities and on fighters throughout the GWOT. Ramzi Yousef (Philippine Airlines Flight 434) and Ahmed Ressam (the 'Millennium Bomber') both had them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri
> Khaled El-Masri is a German, Lebanese and French citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
> While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, raped, and subjected to other forms of torture.
> After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA admitted his arrest was a mistake and released him.
Trick question! It was actually that his name is one letter away from someone else's name, and some manager in the CIA had "a hunch":
> At the end of 2003, El-Masri travelled from his home in Ulm to go on a short vacation in Skopje. He was detained by Macedonian border officials on 31 December 2003, because his name was identical (except for variations in Roman transliteration) to that of Khalid al-Masri, who was being sought as an alleged mentor to the al-Qaeda Hamburg cell, and because of suspicion that El-Masri's German passport was a forgery.
> CIA agents discussed whether to remove El-Masri from Macedonia through an extraordinary rendition. The decision to do so was made by the head of the al Qaeda division of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, on the basis of "a hunch" that El-Masri was involved in terrorism; his name was similar to suspected terrorist Khalid al-Masri.
> When the Macedonian officials released El-Masri on 23 January 2004, American security officers immediately kidnapped him. El-Masri later described them as members of a "black snatch team." They beat him and sedated him for transport using a rectal suppository. "The CIA stripped, hooded, shackled and sodomized el-Masri with a suppository—in CIA parlance, subjected him to "capture shock"—as Macedonian officials stood by."
This is like a statistics 101 question. Google says that Casio has sold over 100M F-91W's since 1989. Let's round down to an average of 2.5M a year, or 25M over the 10 peak years of the global war on terror (GWOT).
You named two terrorists who wore them. Let's say that's an understatement by 200X. Some quick math shows that the percent of terrorists who wore F-91W's is 400/25000000 = 0.0016% positive rate, or conversely a 99.9984% false positive rate. Not good!
Now I never actually took a statistics class, so maybe I got this question wrong. But it's obvious that using the possession of an F-91W as a sign of being a terrorist is a mistake.
(they did have one called "pickup")
No they don't, please don't spread misinformation. If this were true, the watch itself would be banned in the country and/or nobody would sell it.
Your own source says the Pentagon refuted the author's claims because they did not have access to classified information, which I believe would suggest that there is more to the story than merely owning a very common watch and nothing else. Otherwise millions of innocent Americans would be in jail.
There is a very, very good reason this was only "in a handful of cases" and never again.
Or more recently, to some officials, showing up at a No Kings rally.
Another alternative is a smart ring.
This, in the silver ABL-100WE-2AEF model, is exactly what he wants. Same Casio, same interface, just now it has step count. He doesn't even need / want the Bluetooth.
(Me, I'll keep rocking my Pebble Time 2. Absolutely love it.)
IE; My apple watch ais the only one that goes out of it's way to make sure I know my steps for the day, and is always "accurate". Which is nice, but gimmicky for someone like me who doesn't analyze my steps.
I imagine Casio went after similar low hanging fruit, as an acceleromater is cheap/old tech, while still being able to feature compete with something like an apple watch.
We just don't seem to have any idea how to track sleep quality even with better devices than just a watch/whatever. Even a binary, is the person I'm attached to sleeping, is hit and miss. And with that in mind you can be pretty sure that the sleep stages etc is even worse.
Yup. I go for walks specifically to leave my damn phone at home. I do bring an Apple Watch w/ airpods in case I need to take an urgent call and for podcasts, but I don't bother with texts or alerts or any other nonsense.
And while step tracking is not critical, if you have health goals that include a minimum number of steps a day I find it incredibly nice to have. I can check my counter before bed, and take the dog for a 30 minute walk if I'm behind for the day. Just a means to hold myself accountable on those crappy low energy stressful days.
The trend is trickling down into other circles as well. People are beginning to correctly identify needless hyperconverged connectivity as a burden rather than a convenience.
But then I realized that many people do not keep their phone in their pocket, especially women. For them, a watch, bracelet or ring really is the best option.
Indiglo WATER RESIST 69m ALARM Chronograph
I hate watches, but one would be better for step tracking - it is more likely to be on me to track information.
"Walking briskly for 30 minutes" is a better measure of something healthy than how many steps you took.
I do try to get my daily exercise. However it is still interesting to know how many steps I've taken. (sometimes my daily exercise is bike or swimming which are obviously not steps)
Tracking steps helps me stay on track.
The least apps on my phone, the better. And the least I've got my phone on me, the better. I often leave the house without taking my phone.
I don't track my steps but the wife does... Using a watch.
Why do you automatically assume everybody on earth is as tied to his phone as you are?
I'd love if it was radio controlled and charged with solar. And without phone connectivity.
https://www.casio.com/us/watches.filter.solar-radio_adjust-K...
But hey, seems like people are excited for that, happy for them! Mine will last another 10 years without it.
doesn't mean others can't want a smart casio, but, it's not for me :D
F-91W (old): 38.2 × 35.2 × 8.5 mm
F-B100W-1A (new): 41.9 × 38.1 × 8.8 mm
I bought one with a slick (new) dark red face....which lights up bright pink from the one white LED on the left side of the face.
Even in the marketing/landing page for this watch which is linked in post.....they show the backlight feature, looking like it's missing an LED.
The ABL-100WE has an orange light that stays on for either 1.5 or 3 seconds (configurable) and provides some decent light.
The display contrast doesn't seem to be quite as good as it used to be with older movements, though.
Interestingly, though, the aesthetic reminds me a bit of my W71, which is more boxy and less angle-y than the classic F-91W.
so I guess I'm staying on my third Amazfit Bip since Pebble Time 2 has insane price
Its still a cheap casio resin watch at the end of the day. If this where to be able to push/pull notifications, the watch would be completely different in cost, ui, marketing, etc.
It would go from being charming retro tech with modern features, to dime a dozen bloatware/fitness tracking hardware.
It's not great... but it's something?
if I have to choose between used Amazfit Bip for 15-20$ or pebble time 2 with worse (bigger) dimensions, worse battery life (even compared to 5+ yo Bip battery) and not even built in GPS for 200+ $ it's pretty easy choice
pebble PR team enjoy downvoting me
no such thing besides old Amazfit Bip and overpriced pebble time 2 exists, everything else has either no battery life or looks like brick on wrist (greetings to Garmin and Casio)
Casio G-Shock GW-M5610U back on my wrist where it belongs.