Several months ago I decided to buy a Huawei watch [0] - black with metal band. It's a good-looking, comfortable watch, and reasonably functional. I had been wanting to get an all-black watch anyway, and one day when I saw this on sale I decided to give it a shot.

The big draws for me were the full circle face (I don't like the look of the square ones or the 'flat tire' on some of the earlier cirlce watch faces), the fact it looks like a basically normal watch, and that it runs Android Wear (I considered a Samsung Gear, but I don't like that it's within the Samgsung software ecosystem).

I wear it pretty much every day, though I often take it off while I'm coding/keyboarding (which I've done whenever I wore a watch).

I've never wore a watch while I sleep, and always just put it on my nightstand beside the bed. The magnetic base is on my nightstand, and it takes about 2 extra seconds to put it on the charger vs just set it down, so I generally charge it every night. I've forgotten a couple times, and it easily gets through two days anyway.

For me the most useful things are message notifications and the ability to reply quickly with a couple canned responses and agenda.

I actually use Microsoft's Outlook watch face. The outer permiter shows blocks of time for the next 12 hours where something is scheduled and it's pretty cool. I didn't find any other faces that had quite the same functionality, but I think I could build one using one of the custom watch face apps, I just haven't bothered to spend the time yet.

I don't use the fitness tracking on it. An interesting side effect though is that my phone counts more steps. When I'm sitting at my desk, I tend to take my watch off but keep my phone in my pocket -- so if I get up to go to someone else's desk, bathroom or get coffee, my phone counts those steps whereas before I had the watch, I'd often take my phone out and then forget it on my desk when I did those things.

The Google Authenticator app is almost useful on it, but it generally only works if I've recently opened it on my phone. I rarely have to use it more than once in day, so I just use my phone.

Weather is useful. Oh, I also use Stocard to manually enter loyalty numbers at a gas pump. I've never tried using in store.

It's kind of neat for controlling Google Music whether I'm listening with bluetooth or casting to my living room stereo, but not something I use regularly nor would miss if it didn't exist.

I don't really use any other apps on it. I had to block quite a few notifications of random things -- it seems everyone thinks their app notifications are really important and should show up my on wrist.

People find it a combination of fascinating/impressive/weird that I can pull up a live HD view of my baby camera (via TinyCam connected to a Foscam HD IP camera). I don't find that to be a useful feature so don't do it other than when my wife asks me to show someone.

So I know there's a lot of negativity here about 'smart' watches, but overall I'm pretty happy with it and really have no big complaints. It's got a couple handy functions vs a normal watch. It costs within the same ballpark as what I was going to spend on a watch anyway (I'm not a watch guy). It looks like a regular watch (a few times I've had someone see me activate it and say something to the effect of "oh, it's a smart watch! I was wondering how you could tell time on that blank black face".

[0] http://consumer.huawei.com/en/wearables/huawei-watch/index.h...