Ask Paul: August 22 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We’re moving from the slowness of summer into a far busier period with tech events, travel, and whatever else. But first, a pause for another great selection of reader questions. And then it’s back to the grindstone.
❤️‍? Healthy gadgets
Red09 asks:

Hi Paul, now that you are using the Samsung Galaxy phones a lot more and that you were also, if I recall, a user of the apple smart watch for health monitoring, would you look into trying the Galaxy Watch at some point? I would be interested in your take on it. I've been using the older galaxy watch 4 classic which does give me some insights into certain aspects of my health and sleep and was thinking of updating to the Watch 8 with the extra sensors and monitoring it has, but not sure if it's worth it. I always wonder how much a watch can realistically monitor and whether it's just marketing not to mention how reliable it would be. Wondered if you had any thoughts based on your previous experience with the health monitoring you did in the past.

I don’t have any plans to test a Samsung Galaxy Watch at the moment, but I do move between an Apple Watch and a Pixel Watch 3 when I switch between the iPhone and whichever Android phone I’m currently using. And while I like the Apple Watch more overall, both platforms–watchOS and Wear OS–are roughly the same functionally, at least in how I use this kind of thing. But they’re also different in curious ways.

As I wrote in Full Screen (Premium), sometimes you don’t realize how much you use or like something until it’s gone. In that case, it was the system clock in the Taskbar, which you can’t see if you auto-hide the Taskbar. So I use a third-party utility (that I wish was still actively supported to some degree, as it recently disappeared from winget) to display the time/date above any windows, and problem solved.

With a smart watch, obviously the time is important, but it’s also one of those things I miss when it’s gone. I will typically charge whichever watch when I shave and shower, but in the time I’m in the bathroom without the watch, I often wish I could see the time for whatever reason. And I just coincidentally commented about that to my wife. I’d like to get some kind of cheap time display, even if it’s just something you stick to the mirror or whatever.

But a smart watch is a bit like the lock screen on the phone (or, back in the day, the live tiles in Windows Phone) in that it can display these other things that may be useful to see at a glance. And this is one minor way in which the two platforms differ, though I always find it a bit off for a while after switching. Depending on the watch face, I can display things like the device’s battery life, the AQI (air quality), the weather/temperature, and whatever else. And I do like having at least some of that there, though what I can put there depends on the watch and the watch face. And so I twiddle with this constantly, no matter which device it is.

I like that...