Any fans of regular non-smart watches?

I don't feel the need to spend as much as a phone to have another, smaller phone on my wrist, particularly since my job is going to lead to me banging it around. I got a Timex Weekender because it's reasonably sturdy, and a rubber watchband for it because I work in a bar environment, bussing tables, washing dishes, and wanted to be able to keep it and myself easily clean.

I take advantage of the advent of smart watches to buy lens protectors, the sort of flexible material people usually throw on their phone, so that when I do inevitably hit something it'll bare the brunt of the impact, not my glass/crystal lens. I also sort of like the look of a beat up watch body and pristine lens.

In my country smartwatches are quite expensive so pretty much everyone uses regular digital or analog ones. I've only been able to see a smartwatch once haha

Feels strange as I'm getting the vibe from you that smartwatches must be very common where you are lol

I actually currently wear a Pebble Time Round, and I like it, but when it inevitably dies, I think I'm going to move on to a nice dumb watch and be done with smart watches for the foreseeable future.

I love watches (I got my first watch in my preteens, was super excited about it, and have worn one practically every day since), and the vast majority of smart watches are bad watches. The biggest culprit are sometimes-off screens (making the device a bracelet unless you perform a specific gesture to activate the screen), but they also tend to be physically clunky, nonreplaceable batteries and CADT software seriously limit the lifespan, and the smart features interfere with the watch functionality in other ways. I find the smart features of my Pebble useful (reading texts and hanging up on unwanted calls without pulling my phone out of my pocket are both really nice), but not even close to useful enough to give up having a nice-looking, very functional watch.

Definitely a fan of Casio’s classic A158/168 variants, particularly as a reminder of their appreciable values in solid engineering design.

Citizen Chandler (BM8180-03E) with a NASA strap. Simple, small, easy to read, relatively cheap, runs on solar, pretty durable and the only time it might need any input from the user is when the month changes.
By changing the strap, you can make it adapt to different situations (going hiking, wearing a suit etc.)
IMO a perfect everyday watch. The only thing I would like to see is a titanium version.

Yes. I love a plain watch. But on the other hand I can sort of see the logic of a high tech watch. After all, watches are supposed to be high tech, right?

I mean, all of those tiny cogs, constant movement and the intricate designs. Watches have always been a high tech thing. Making them smart is only just the evolution of this high tech nature of watches. I just wish I didn't have to charge them.

I seem to alternate between really appreciating having phone notifications appear on my wrist, and wishing to be rid of the darn distractions on about a 6 monthly period, so swap between smart and dumb watches semi regularly.

My smartwatch is a Pebble 2 SE. And while it's excellent at everything it does, I don't love it. If it broke, I would probably try to source a replacement one, but I wouldn't mourn the loss of the old one.

My dumb watch however, is a Seiko SNK809 automatic watch. That's the watch I love. I love it for the engineering inside it as much as the aesthetics. It's a precision engineered mechanical item with zero electronics, whose manufacturing process has been perfected over many years to the point where it's cheaper to buy than most smart watches. It has a sweeping second hand and makes a nice ticking noise when you hold it to your ear.

But my Seiko is showing its age. It's probably 10 years old now and has never had a service or a clean and isn't keeping time as well as it did when it was new. I can't find anyone locally (I'm in the UK) who can look at it for less than the cost of a whole new one, so if it's going to get fixed then I probably have to do it myself. I'm sure that's possible, but I've never taken apart something that delicate and I'm worried that I will destroy the thing I love. So for now, it stays imperfect, and I wear it less often because of that.

I have a cheap Timex analogue watch. Really simple, no date or any other features. My motivation was that I spend too much time on my phone so why not reduce the number of times I have to look at it during the day.

One big improvement from my past watches is that it has a leather strap rather than metal links. Much better if you have hairy wrists like me.

I love a good watch. I typically use a NATO strap and have the watch on the inside of my wrist — which in be an issue, depending on the dial location.

Watches are really great, but I don’t have a flashy collection or anything... yet.

I sometimes wear one of my Pebbles, but I don’t have any notifications enabled on anything. I also don’t track nothing. I like them for the timers, music control, and hourly vibrations. So not totally smart, but also not dumb.

My main watch is actually this $9 piece I found through reptime. It looks identical to the watch it’s copying, but I only got it because it looks plain. I couldn’t imagine dropping $4500+ on a watch... especially this one.

I've been on and off with watches for a long time, but I really like to have items in my life that do one thing well. I always have my phone, but it's purpose to me is a phone/communication device, not a clock, so pulling it out to check the time feels very unsubtle. When I graduated from high school I bought myself a Benchmade and an unnecessarily fancy Seiko that I largely stopped wearing. So when I graduated from college, the one thing I wanted was a good, simple watch. I ended up getting a stainless steel Bertucci field watch as a graduation present from my partner and her family. I've worn it every day since and beat the hell out of it but it still looks pretty much like new. I put a leather band on it and it really dressed it up, but I keep the nylon bands around for when I work out, swim, etc., and I love that it can accompany me on anything I want to do. The offset crown makes daily wear really comfortable.

I used to wear a Casio WVA-320J -- solar powered, syncs to atomic clock radio transmission. It took a bad fall.

I now wear a Seiko 7S26 -- it is mechanical, not solar, and somewhat lossy in its timekeeping, lacking the atomic sync. I haven't worn it in ~3 days and it has stopped.

I used to have a Suunto for heart rate, FitBit for steps, higher complexity digital watches, and so on, but I increasingly favor a simple device for clean aesthetics, no batteries, and the sync feature.

I come from the watch-making area in Switzerland, so I used wear have watch, but I've stopped a few years ago. Feels naked at first but you get used to it.

I love watches!

I used to wear an old Fossil watch my father gave me when I was thirteen or so. When that thing finally broke I upgrade to a Fossil "Hybrid" smart watch, i.e a digital watch with a non-digital watchface, which still offered smart solutions like the ability to change tracks on your phone via a bluetooth connection, etc. And while I liked the watchface, I soon grew disillusioned with it. I wanted a plain watch. Around that time I found out that Victorinox, the inventors of the Swiss Army Knife, also made watches, among other things. Enter the Victorinox I.N.O.X Professional Diver Titanium. I love things that are built to last forever, and after a lot of hard thinking (I spent almost a year mulling over if I wanted to spend that much money on a watch), I bought it and am very happy with it.

While I don't dive (I was planning on completing a diving course last year pre-covid though), I love how it looks and I love the materials. And I still plan on diving! I didn't buy it because I wanted a diver's watch, I bought it because I liked the look.

Me! I have a Seiko my parents got me as a gift, and an old Raketa watch I got off Ebay that's a winder. Love 'em both.

I haven't been wearing a watch much during the pandemic since I'm always home without many appointments, but a couple years ago I bought a great Charlie Brown Timex. It's not exactly the same as the ones available on the Timex site, it was some limited collaboration with Todd Snyder (see this old blog post). It's fairly loud, but I get a kick out of it every time I check it, and people always comment.

My daily watch is a Seiko SNE039 stainless steel solar watch with a black leather band. After years of use, there's a few barely noticeable scratches on the body, and the band might need replacing, but the lens is still clear and everything works well. I have slender wrists, so large-face and smart watches tend to look and feel bulky, but this one is a nice size. The solar power means I never need to worry about winding, replacing a battery, or having it run out of juice like other watches and smartwatches. I feel like if I have time to fiddle with a smartwatch, I'd have time to just fiddle with my phone. Questions of time is really the only thing I need frequently, at a glance, and while busy or with my hands full (i.e. can't use my phone).

Fitness is a bit trickier. I've got a running belt for my phone to use GPS, but it's certainly clunkier than a little wearable. No heart-rate monitoring type stuff with just the phone either. Oh well.

I've worn a Casio F-91W on my wrist for a long time. It tells the time, it's legible, and it was about 10 bucks. I have a NATO strap on it because the one it comes with is awful. I've never really felt the need for any more, and I honestly don't know how a smartwatch could change my life for the better. People seem to just like spending money on things to spend money on things sometimes.

Theoretically I’d wear my Luminox, but it needs repair, I haven’t gotten around to sending it in/taking it to a shop, and I’m not sure if it will trip the metal detector at work...

Marginally related, but I am now a fan of my non-smart phone, which is also

nothing fancy but extremely durable, about 15 years old

with a battery that lasts up to one week before it needs charging.

Also, the last time I wore a wristwatch was about 20 years ago, I guess.

Theoretically, yes. Practically, no.

I have not worn a wristwatch in more than a decade, until I bought a Mi Band 5 near the end of November. Previously, I was looking at Casio watches - I figured I'd get an humble F-91W, which I think was also the watch I was wearing in high school - but I don't think I could go back to "dumb" watches^*.

Don't get me wrong, I could definitely do without notifications on my wrist, and I hate, hate, hate the fact I need to use a proprietary app to connect with it^†, but I like having a small sensor platform on my wrist. I like knowing at a glance what the weather will be, and I like how much less obnoxious a vibrating alarm is.

These days I'm seriously eyeing the PineTime and thinking about DIY: I could have all of this without being forced to be connected to a phone. I think I'd be happier with this than with "just" a Casio, even if I really really like some of the features on the more high-end models (looong battery life, solar panels built-in).

* Thinking about it, I don't think I ever liked "dumb" watches that much. I got a small calculator watch as a gift a long time ago, and I was absolutely in love with it - granted, it was for all of two days, as it broke the first time I wore it, but still.
† It might not have been the case for Mi Band <=4, but you need to install Mi Fit and launch it at least once to get the auth key for the 5. I figured I'd do that and just use Gadgetbridge afterwards, but no dice: I can't get it to pair on either of the phones I tried.

I'm sorry but are people referring to watches as non-smart watches and "dumb" watches know? I know it's in quotation marks but still?

I love watches and spend too much time looking and searching online but it feels like a hobby and better time spent than on social media in general. I'm mostly into older cheaper watches because their affordable to me and I love the designs. The aesthetics is really important to me more so than anything else but I do appreciate a well crafted watch. Come to think about it my approach to watches resemble my approach to music. Nothing is off limits and I don't really care what other people think of it. It's for me and my enjoyment. I actually use a watch everyday for time keeping which might be a strange thing to say but a lot of people nowadays only wear it for the looks and that's fine by me because it's one of the only universal acceptable accessories for men. Only downside is that it's sooooo addictive.

I'm one of the three nerds that still thinks calculator watches are cool. 11 year old me would be proud.