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- Hacker News
- 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.
The absolute state of things.
by wpm - It seems to me that it's a slightly more affordable repackaging of the ABL-100WE. The features are the same, so is battery life.
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...
by eloeffler - 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.
by dingaling - 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.
by Retr0id - 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.
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.
by taviso - For anyone interested in modding the F-91W there's also The Ollee Watch, a replacement PCB which adds even more "smart" features.by __fst__
- 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.by jorvi
- 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.
by SwellJoe