I believe it was April or May of 2018, I had just gotten my F-1 visa after jumping through the hoops of administrative processing and I was preparing to move to College Park, Maryland later in the Fall for my graduate studies. As part of the prep, my dad bought me a new digital watch that I’d been quite excited about finding online. The venerable Casio AE-3000 1AV. I wasn’t really looking for this exact watch at the time, I didn’t even know that it existed. I was looking for a watch that:
had a big watch face and looked cool(I have big hands)
had a stopwatch, timer and an alarm
had backlight so I could use it in the dark
was durable enough to withstand daily active use(something with a well-screwed wrist-band that did not fail easily)
The Casio met all of these requirements and it also displays 2 other timezones in the display. It’s very difficult to put into words how perfect this watch has been for me. I’ve worn it all day, except when I am asleep, for 7 straight years without any maintenance whatsoever. I’ve never had to change the batteries or the wrist-band, nothing. It has exactly all the features I use on daily basis and nothing I do not.
Recently, in an effort to get healthier and after much research on the topic, I decided to purchase a COROS Vertix 2S and see if I could switch to it as my daily driver instead of my Casio. Now, this is essentially the best health watch you could purchase right now if you’re looking for something you do not need to charge every week and still lets you track almost every activity you can think of. And honestly, over the last 2 months of semi-daily use, it has been quite fun to see all the health metrics, taking it on runs and seeing stride length, monitoring my REM sleep cycles, reconciling my early morning heart-rate spikes with days when we are having a shitty market open etc. But, the novelty wears off fairly quickly and you are once again able to evaluate the tool for its actual benefits, and that’s not a bad thing. Here’s what I think about COROS Vertix 2S:
I am at a point in my life where consistency is more important to me than any detailed metric about improvements in my activity performance.
In order to get full benefits from the health metrics captured by COROS, you have to basically wear it all the time, even when you sleep, which you can get used to after a while, sure. But, the thought of my tool dictating how I live my life manifests like an unscratchable itch on the inside of my brain. Also, once you have all the metrics, you have to setup a workflow to ingest it and show you actionable insights. And all of this can just fuck right off. I will take the weighing scale to be my true north any time over all this extra hassle.
Losing the 2 additional timezones is such a significant disadvantage for me, given that my job requires me to work with colleagues in 2 different timezones and my parents live in a 3rd one, it has become an actual dealbreaker. Sticking with COROS here is actively making my life worse and having to do GMT math on the fly is too annoying to keep up with.
And so, I am switching back to my trusty Casio AE-3000 1AV. Probably going to give my COROS to my brother if he wants it. One thing I hope you take away from reading this is: if you find a tool that perfectly solves your problem, recognize it for the blessing it is instead of trying to chase something that might offer you additional features that potentially solve a problem you do not have while sacrificing features you actually use. This is of course not a knock on COROS, they have built a truly fantastic watch worthy of being on the wrists of every active person in the world. I am just too peculiar of an end-user for it. ⏳