What good is a Smartwatch?

I waited a long time to even try out a smartwatch.  I don't like wearing watches in the first place, and the phone in my pocket has all the info I need.  I didn't see the use for a smartwatch.  I do however, like tracking my fitness especially with bicycling.  I had a Polar Bluetooth heart rate sensor that I used but it quit working.  I also did not like wearing it.  I wanted a better heart rate sensor so I decided to look into smartwatches.

I chose the Motorola Moto 360 Sport.  These have been around for a while and you can often find them on sale for a great price.  I think I paid $169 for mine but I have seen them under $100 sometimes.  It has the optical heart rate sensor.  It came with Android Wear 1.5 but it should be upgraded to Wear 2.0 any day.

Uses

While I was certainly a naysayer on smartwatches, I have found more uses for mine than I thought.  I wear it every day now.  I don't think I would spend over $200 to get one but for the price I paid, I feel I am getting the value from it.

Fitness Tracking

May first use for the watch was for heart-rate monitoring during bike rides and walks.  I wanted a device that would integrate with the apps I use for tracking these activities.  I use Google Fit for my daily activity tracking.  I was using Cardio Trainer for bicycling.  I had also used My Tracks for this in the past.  It turns out that Cardio Trainer and My Tracks do not support the heart rate from this device.  Lame!  So, I switch to a more popular biking app called Strava.  This is a better app than Cardio Trainer anyway and it gives nice graphs for heart rate, as well as the rest of the data.  It also integrates with Google Fit.  Very nice.

Notifications

Sometimes it would be handy to see notifications without pulling the phone from my pocket.  I know this is a first world problem but what the heck.  Some of the more useful things are:

• Rejecting callers.  Spam calling is totally out of control and it is very handy when one of these calls comes in to just glance at the caller info on the watch, and swipe it away.  
• Navigation.  I didn't expect this one.  I am all about stopping distracted drivers.  People need to hang up and drive.  You should not take your eyes off the road.  I was using Google Maps to navigate on a trip.  The phone was on the seat, not visible while driving.  I was on a long straight stretch of interstate and wondered how far it was to my next turn.  I glanced at my watch and there it was.  Just a small message with the distance to, and direction of the next turn.  Nice.  
• Seeing the time and date.  It is a watch after all.  There are many useful watch faces that are informative.  It shows the time and basic info even when the screen is off.
• Seeing general notifications.

Development

As an amateur Android developer I wanted a device that I could write apps for if I wanted to.  Learning Android Wear development should be easier since I am familiar with Android. The first app I started for Android Wear is a remote control for my Gamin Virb Ultra 30 action camera.  I just wanted to be able to start/stop recording and maybe snap a photo using the watch as the remote.  I did get the remote working on the phone first so I could learn how to interact with the Garmin.  Once I did that, I created a wear app for the watch.  Getting the basics going was not hard.  I don't have this app done yet though.  There is a feature I depended on that Wear 1.5 does not support.  The alternative was to use the watch app in conjunction with its phone counterpart to control the camera.  That is a work in progress.