The Perfect Smartwatch Might Be a $20 Casio From 1989

The Perfect Smartwatch Might Be a $20 Casio From 1989

Ollee Watch Took the Nokia of Watches and Made It Smart

I have owned smartwatches going all the way back to the original Apple Watch.

I’ve watched them get faster.

I’ve watched the screens get better.

I’ve watched them add health tracking, apps, notifications, better sensors and increasingly impressive features.

I’ve also watched the battery slowly get worse until something that was supposed to make my life easier became another device I had to remember to charge.

That’s always been my problem with smartwatches.

I don’t necessarily want a computer strapped to my wrist.

I want a watch.

I just want it to be a little smarter.

And somehow, the answer might be a Casio that has been around since 1989.

You Probably Know This Watch

Even if you don’t know the name Casio F-91W, there’s a decent chance you know the watch.

Black resin strap. Little rectangular digital screen. Blue accents. Three buttons.

For me, it immediately brings back memories of seeing inexpensive Casio watches hanging around Walgreens near the register when I was a kid.

They were just there.

You’d be standing around waiting to check out and there would be the Casios: cheap enough to buy without turning it into a major financial decision and practical enough that you knew exactly why someone would.

Today, finding an F-91W sitting around my local Walgreens isn’t nearly as easy.

But the watch itself never really went anywhere.

Casio introduced the F-91W in 1989, and the basic design has remained largely unchanged ever since. Casio calls it one of the most memorable watches in its history and a record-breaking bestseller.

There’s a reason for that.

The thing just works.

It weighs only about 21 grams. It has a stopwatch, alarm, calendar, light and water resistance. And its battery is rated for approximately seven years.

Basically, the F-91W is the Nokia of watches.

It’s inexpensive.

It’s recognizable.

It’s simple.

It’s durable.

And apparently nobody ever told it that electronics are supposed to become obsolete every three years.

Then Somebody Decided to Make It Smart

This is where things get interesting.

Ollee Watch takes compatible classic Casio watches including the F-91W and replaces the original electronics with a modern module that adds Bluetooth, an accelerometer, RGB backlighting and a bunch of software features while keeping the watch looking like a Casio.

Not a smartwatch pretending to look retro.

An actual Casio.

And suddenly the cheap digital watch I remember seeing at Walgreens can sync with my phone.

The watch automatically syncs its clock through the Ollee app and adds world time, configurable alarms, timers, a logging stopwatch and a databank.

It also tracks steps.

You can set daily step goals.

It logs ambient temperature.

It can store 30 days of activity information directly on the watch.

And the activity information can integrate with Apple Health on iPhone or Google Health Connect on Android.

Unnecessary little games including Blackjack, poker and a Pong-style game.

This thing is ridiculous.

In exactly the right way.

But Here’s the Part That Sold Me: I Don’t Have to Charge It

This is the entire reason the concept works for me.

Ollee estimates approximately 10 months of battery life with normal daily use and its default settings.

Not 10 hours.

Not 10 days.

Ten months.

Power-saving configurations can stretch that to three years or more, depending on how you configure and use it.

That’s obviously nowhere near the roughly seven-year battery life of an untouched F-91W, but that’s the trade I’m actually willing to make.

I’m getting smartwatch functionality without adding another charger to my nightstand. That’s huge.

After years of Apple Watches and other smartwatches, I’ve realized that I don’t need my watch to duplicate everything my phone does.

I want the handful of things that are actually useful on my wrist.

Accurate time.

Steps.

Alarms.

Timers.

Basic activity information.

Maybe weather.

Sync it with my phone when I want.

Then leave me the hell alone.

Ollee’s Bluetooth doesn’t even have to remain connected constantly. By default, you manually activate Bluetooth for a syncing session and it turns itself back off afterward. You can configure Bluetooth to stay on, but Ollee warns that doing so uses more battery.

That’s almost the inverse philosophy of the modern smartwatch.

Instead of constantly maintaining a connection and begging to be part of your life, the watch connects when there’s something useful to do.

It’s Smart Without Looking Smart

And I think that’s the coolest part.

Someone looking at your wrist doesn’t see another giant glowing rectangle.

They see a Casio F-91W.

The same basic watch people have been wearing since George H.W. Bush was president.

Underneath it, though, is a Cortex-M4/M0+ processor, Bluetooth Low Energy, accelerometer, programmable RGB backlight and modern firmware that can receive wireless updates through the phone app.

It’s basically a sleeper build for your wrist.

There’s something wonderfully backwards about taking one of the simplest digital watches ever made and quietly giving it capabilities that didn’t exist when the watch was designed.

There Are Tradeoffs

This isn’t an Apple Watch replacement for everybody, and pretending otherwise would miss the entire point.

You’re not getting a giant touchscreen, cellular service or the massive app ecosystem of a conventional smartwatch.

The heart-rate feature isn’t continuously measuring your pulse with an optical sensor, either. Ollee explicitly says there’s no dedicated heart-rate sensor. Instead, it works as a pulsometer: you physically count 20 beats and the watch calculates your BPM based on the elapsed time.

And opening/modifying the Casio affects the original water seal. Ollee says handwashing, rain and sweat should be fine after modification, but it does not recommend swimming, showering or taking the modified watch into hot, humid environments.

Those are legitimate compromises.

But again, they’re compromises I’m much more willing to make than charging my watch every night.

Maybe We Made Watches Too Smart

That’s really what reviewing this made me think about.

Technology usually moves in one direction.

More.

More features.

More processing power.

More screens.

More connectivity.

More notifications.

More things demanding electricity.

Ollee Watch goes in the opposite direction.

Start with something that was already nearly perfect at its original job.

Don’t redesign it.

Don’t make it look futuristic.

Don’t put a gigantic OLED display on it.

Just quietly give it some of the modern functionality people actually use.

That’s why this might be the perfect smartwatch-not-smartwatch for me.

I’ve spent years wearing increasingly sophisticated computers on my wrist.

And somehow I’ve ended up back at the Casio I remember seeing hanging around Walgreens as a kid.

Except now the damn thing counts my steps and talks to my iPhone.

Sometimes progress doesn’t mean replacing the old thing.

Sometimes it means figuring out why the old thing was so good in the first place and knowing when to leave the rest of it the fuck alone.