Moved your post here, please see some recommendations above…
FYI I’m very happy with my PineTime. Probably not ethically sourced but open and hackable and the battery lasts almost a month between charges at this point (!). With enough work it’s like having an old-style microcomputer on my wrist. 
…and will we ever get one? They killed the buds, so i am thinking “not very likely”.
I really want a smartwatch, but they’re all kinda underwhelming. I just want something simple and beautiful, like the pebble (just not, you know…dead), and repairable. Not a sport centered feature monster or a watch that only really works with a smartphone from the same company.
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hello and welcome.
I do not think they killed the buds, I think they are working on an improved version.
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I moved your post here, as I doubt we will see a Fairphone Smartwatch soon/ever and you might find some recommendations above.
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Be careful w/anything from Pine64. They are based in Hong Kong and give 1 month warranty.
You are aware of the Pine64 EU Store? According to the information there it should have the standard 2 year warranty and also ships from inside the EU, so no customs or CE issues to be expected. I bought my PineTime from them, but of course it’s much more expensive to begin with than ordering from China and trying to skip customs completely.
(Also, the watch seems to be out of stock right now.)
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For their more expensive products this warning is 100% useful, but the PineTime costs £30. It’s so cheap I bought two (one an unsealed developer one for hacking on without bricking worries). It’s so cheap that you might as well treat it as throwaway if you break it: sending it back for repair would almost certainly cost more than buying a new one.
Thanks to the recent inflationary bout I literally spent more on takeaways yesterday than on my PineTime, and that was for only two people…
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I do get your point and I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean it like that, but I can’t agree with the implied carelessness regarding the “throwaway” nature of cheap electronic devices. We certainly don’t need more electronic waste. 
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Nope, I wasn’t aware of that, thanks! The price is a lot higher but it includes VAT, quicker S&H, and warranty.
I’m not interested in skipping customs as paying taxes is part of living in a civilized society. So the VAT should be added either way (and besides, usually they bust it these days in my country).
I also agree you can treat it like a burner (I saw a case/screen protector for it costs less than 1 USD on Ali).
But both last comments are a bit out of line with ‘sustainable’. PineTime is ‘hackable’. Can you repair it yourself? Not sure.
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Sorry, I did not want to imply that in your particular case, it was just a general statement as this is still a relatively common practice.
That really depends on the definition, I guess. If it lasts for a long time, it could be considered (more) sustainable. Having open firmware contributes to that. Actually hardware repairable smartwatches are something I have yet to see anywhere. But you only have to repair it if it breaks first. So far it’s looking good enough for my PineTime in that regard. The battery is or course a weak point in any such devices, but it might still last a decent amount of time.
Also, assuming that the hardware is decent enough quality, a lower price likely also means less resources were used in constructing the device. So it might be more sustainable than something with a lot more features and hardware. There are “smart” watches that cost 10 to 20 times as much, after all.
Also really happy with my Garmin Instinct Solar. Rugged smartwatch with limited features and long batterylife. In principle infinite if you turn off smart functions entirely.
Well, the non-devel version is sealed for waterproofing: you can break the seal and fix it but then you have to reseal it again. But in my case, I can’t fix anything in hardware because my coordination is too bad, so repairability by myself is not on my radar when I buy things
(I got the unsealed devel version for access to the debug pins so I could plug in a Black Magic probe and debug things if I bricked it, not so I could repair it, and I could only manage to insert the probe after a dozen fumbled attempts. It looks as repairable as any other very small circuit board to me, but then as noted I never try to repair such things.)
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Yeah the Swiss one 600 EUR lol.
For 30 or 60 EUR its sweet.
Are you able to disable radios like BT and WLAN from the smartwatch? I guess ideally I’d want physical killswitches but not practical.
A watch is always going to be limited by it’s tiny form factor. What would probably be worth exploring is a better way of dividing up the responsibility of the devices:
- a fitness tracker to track fitness metrics - heart rate etc
- a sturdy GPS device for navigation, recording activity etc.
I would cheerfully have a simple fitness tracker like a fitbit, alongside a handheld GPS unit like a Garmin eTrex. Except for one limitation: recording and uploading activities from a handheld GPS is a complete PITA.
What the market is missing is arguably not a sustainable smartwatch, that’s probably impossible. But a Garmin eTrex type unit that starts an activity with a single button press, uploads after activities, and runs off 2 x AA batteries? That would be a big step in the right direction.
(No, a phone is not a suitable way of doing this for lots of reasons - 30+ hour activity times; touch screens are a complete nightmare on the hill in bad weather; phone needs to be kept charged and in the bag for emergencies).
I would say, check the Garmin Instinct 2X Solar or the Gshock Rangeman (3rd generation). Both are build like a tank and can be repaired to a certain degree. The main concern is software support. BLE is a security nightmare. But you can use both without a phone. Both can hold a charge for a long time and have a solar cell.
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Maybe I’m an idiot, but I don’t understand why anyone wants one of these things on their watch anyway. It’s always paired with a phone, and the phone does it anyway! Is this for people who don’t have proper ways to carry their phones when they’re running, so they have to leave it behind?
In my case it’s that the phone is for emergencies so I don’t want to be running it down with gps/screen use. Phones are also relatively delicate, and touch screens are more or less unusable in the rain.
With a handheld gps I have button control to zoom in/out, a simple uncluttered display and I don’t have to worry so much about breaking it.
It also does 25 hours on a pair of AA eneloops, and I can put fresh ones in without stoping recording.
If it wasn’t such a pain to reset counters at the start of an activity and upload the resulting track, I wouldn’t bother with a gps watch at all.
This is an assumption. There are smartwatches who have eSIM, GPS, etc (even solar charge). But these are tailored towards (top)sport.
Indeed, but not just running. Outdoor sports in general. Rowing (with proper IPx rating), hiking, marathon – you name it!
So offline, pairing, and autonomous online (WLAN, LTE/NG) are the three modes of operation. Each has their pros and cons. Offline would use the least power, and allows for something like TOTP being offline and galvanized from internet (an attack surfice would for sure include a camera on smartphone/tablet/laptop). Pairable usually means Bluetooth or Bluetooth LE. These are a security nightmare. Then there’s completely online with WLAN, LTE/NG. Also a security nightmare and expensive chips, as well as higher energy costs. Tho, ideally, you want killswitches for radios, smartwatches don’t always have these. Esp not hardware killswitches.
There’s some movement towards highly customizable smartwatches, too. For example, Sensor Watch can last for one year on battery and it has several smartwatch features.
This one uses a popular Casio smartwatch as base system and hacks itself on top of it. Talk about sustainble!
They’re on to a successor (Pro version), have not looked it up yet as of now.
Meanwhile, there’s smartwatches tailored for biohacking/health:
That one is repairable. Though they don’t compare with any Garmin.
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