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I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C
(shkspr.mobi)
Wicked!
Honestly, it's baffling how good some of the stuff you can get off of AliExpress is, especially when taking the low price into account.
My ~$100 N100 server is a testament to that. Just need to score some additional storage for it
Which one do you use/have?
I got a GMKtec G3.
I wouldn't say aliexpress stuff is good, but rather that amazon stooped down to aliexpress-levels of quality, to which we got ourselves used to.
It's more that AliExpress is all over the place, which is probably because manufacturing in China is itself all over the place (small and pretty much amateur-hour cottage factories doing plastic molded stuff or pretty simple electronics right next to much bigger professional companies designing their own smartphones and computers) plus there is very little in the way of established brands and without a brand to defend, manufacturers don't really care if customers get a bad impression of whatever product name they're using today for their, at best, badly made stuff.
It also doesn't help that in a lot of domains competition in China is mainly on price: the manufacturers might even know how to do a good product, but they have to use inferior parts and cut corners on their designs to stay competitive on price.
(At some point I looked into importing LED light bulbs into Europe from China and got and evaluated several samples and then went back to the manufacturers and at least one e-mail exchange was very enlightening on this and on just how little extra money it actually costs to provide a much better product, but to compete they have to advertise - this was in Alibaba, the B2B site that gave birth to Aliexpress - the cheapest product they have which is kinda crap but only a domain expert doing a teardown of their product will spot it).
Also the fraud prevention in AliExpress is pretty much non-existent and anti-fraud there is entirelly reactive, so product listings with fradulent claims which are hard for customers to validate just stay there forever (for example, almost all powerbank storage claims or solar power bank supply claims are complete total bollocks, insanelly so at times - I've seen listings for small powerbanks claiming more power storage than actual EV cars have).
So for some things you can get really decent stuff at a good price - best place to buy switches or push-buttons for Electronics and as the above poster mentioned mini-PCs, to which I will also add Single Board Computers - whilst in other areas it's a bit of a crap shoot if you'll get something decently made or not - for example clothing - and in yet others the scams are more than the honest listings - such as external digital storage, solar power or power storage.
I've had the same experience you did but didn't feel like writing it all out. Thanks !
I meant to steer the conversation on amazon being worse quality than it used to, not quite to aliexpress...
I get the impression that Amazon has become the same ever since it openned the store to the same kind of salesmen, at that's for likelly the same reason.
Then again I've been boycotting Amazon for a decade so I wouldn't know for sure.
You'd be surprised, actually. You have to be careful, yes - the default option is that you get crap - but all of the high-quality cycling gear/running gear/variety consumer electronics I've scored is a testament to the possibility of getting great stuff.
I'm familiar with it, I've ordered more than 100 items off aliexpress.
And I feel like the modern amazon experience got worse and is closer to the intense searching required to find the good stuff at the right price from aliexpress.
I suppose I never actually had a good experience with Amazon to be able to compare against.
It was pretty good 10+ years ago I'd say, then it slowly got worse and worse
All I want is a smartwatch which will let me own all my personal health data, I don't want to get locked in to some monthly subscription just to access my own health metrics
Get something which works with GadgetBridge. You'll be in complete control.
I have a rule: I never preorder anything. I broke that rule recently. https://www.repebble.com/
Their website has a question at the bottom "Are you still interested in Pebble?" And if you click yes, it'll show you their new models, but there's also a button for No, which takes you to Google's latest smart watch. The "we're not a big tech msgacorp" vibes are strong with this one.
I mean this project was made by Google engineers (some of whom are ex Pebble engineers) so it's not exactly a unbiased decision to link to Google smart watches
The FOSS app GadgetBridge, has a number of supported smartwatches.
Supported watches can sync your health, activity, GPS, heart, O2, sleep data to GadgetBridge locally on your phone, instead of sending it online to who knows where.
May need to use the watches app to set it up, but then all happens locally.
Neat! I was looking for one of these things for health monitoring, but there's so many that I have no idea where to even start.
On a side note I wish hybrid smartwatches were still a thing. Most of the product lines are discontinued, but I liked the idea of it.
I really really like my Garmin Instinct 2. It a kind of hybrid but between old digital clock and smartwatch, instead of analog.
It has strong Casio Pro Trek vibes. One color, no touch LCD screen. Solar charging, more than 3 weeks battery life, GPS, all health sensors and smart stuff.
Garmin makes excellent watches
I feel like withings cornered the market on hybrids. They are a little pricey but they are built very well.
Pretty wild that the author didn't set up app notifications. Getting specific notifications from specific people on my wrist is a big part of the reason I use a smartwatch. But to each their own.
It'd be pretty cool to get a significant use case of my pricey pricey Garmin for ~CAD$40.
I'm the author. I've now set up notifications on the advice of just about everyone. It's pretty cool!
Nice!
I enjoyed reading your blog. It's been a while since I looked at an honest to goodness enthusiast blog. Thanks for writing it!
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I had no idea USB C charging was such a rarity for smart watches
I'm curious about the reliability of this port on a sweaty wrist exposed to dust and general labor environments. My phones, even back to the proprietary plug days, have had the charge port covered and my wrist watch would get wrecked.
It has a small rubber lug - which has worked so far at keeping out the grime. But I don't have a manual labour job.
Should I Buy One?
That's up to you, champ. I'm not your real dad and I'm not trying to take his place. But I'm here for you if you need me.
Love it. 🤣🤣🤣
I was able to pair it with GadgetBridge by pretending it was a Colmi V79. Most of the functionality worked - I was able to see heart rate, steps, change some settings etc. I've requested GadgetBridge support which should make it possible to get notifications etc.
Proper GB support and this is seriously attractive.
Happy to say the latest nightly does support notifications. My wrist is buzzing with action!
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Loved the article.
One pet peeve of mine: PD plugs are too powerful to charge puny devices. Not the first time I've run into this problem.
So sad that we've finally gotten a good standard (USB c) but there are still things that look like they should fit together and work, but don't.
The thing is that USB type C is only about the physical plug/socket, and the USB standard and version that uses it is a separate thing.
In this case it's probably a PD only charger and the device only supports plain old 5v 500mA USB power
too powerful? what do you mean? USB PD by default supplies 5v the same as USB A and increments from there
5v is pretty low - 3v is pretty common logic voltage, but i doubt anyone would use voltage that low for battery charging?
do you mean you don’t like to “waste” a perfectly good powerful USB C port? you can get some pretty low watt USB C plugs, but honestly i much prefer to just have a brick with 7 big ports
The person you replied to is referencing findings made by the author, in the article.
The author tried plugging a PD charger into the watch to charge it, and it wouldn't work. It's probably not PD as a specification couldn't work, but that the watch failed to negotiate with the charger.
Whatever the reason, the findings were that plugging your PD laptop charger into this cheap little watch does not result in any charging.
And the author wrongly said
PD will not negotiate down to 1W power levels
The correct way ro ask for 0.8 W (5 V, 0.16 A) is to request 5 volts, any current. Doesn't matter if the charger is capable of 500 mA (legacy USB), 1 A or 3.1 A. The PD standard can accomodate the watch, it's just that the watch lacks active electronics that are required to talk to the charger (and even the supplied C-C cable is non-compliant by being power-only).
Edit: apparently PD allows 0.1A steps between 0.1 A and 3 A for 5 volts so it's technically possible for a PD charger to deny power to the watch if it's VERY underpowered and can't even put out 1 W. Still, it's the watch's fault for lacking correct PD implementation.
right… i think that’s less of a problem with PD chargers and more of a problem with non-compliant A chargers (and the device itself being non-compliant): wattage/amperage at these has nothing to do with the protocol (other than auto shutoff under a given current draw, but that’s not instantaneous)
i believe that the USB spec says there needs to be a resistor bridging one of the pins to receive power? i can see USB-A chargers just dumping 5v through the cable no matter what and USB-PD more reliably implementing the spec because it’s more complex, so less reason to cut corners
The device is probably just using a USB-C format connector to get power, without using the data connection at all, and a strict implementation of the USB protocol on the other side (the so called Host) would mean the device gets from the host only the minimal power levels (100mA @ 5V, if I remember it correctly) meant to merelly power enough a connected device which has no batteries (say, a mouse) for it to actually do the initial USB connection negotiation, and that current will only get increased by the host it if during that negotiation the device tells the host it requires high-current (which in different USB versions has a different value - in USB 1.0 it was 500mA but latter versions increase it), a negotiation which that device can't do because it doesn't actually do USB data at all and just treats the whole thing as a dumb power cable.
Dumb charger bricks don't care at all because they themselves only do power and not the USB protocols, so really just treat the USB cable as a power cable into which they always make available whatever current the other side pulls up to the brick's max supply capacity (usually 1A or 2A) with no "USB negotiation".
This is why even in the times of USB-A some devices would charge fine from a dumb USB power brick but charge really slow if connected to a host which is a data device that can also do charging (like, for example, a notebook).
This is even without getting USB PD into the mix.
Because USB PD is a comms and power protocol, were the device tells the host the characteristics of the power it expects to get (not only current but even voltage) the USB PD brick has a proper USB implementation were it acts as a USB host.
I expect the USB PD brick has a strict implementation of the USB protocol which, in the absence of USB negotiation, just provides that minimum current that per the protocol a USB host is expected to provide pre-negotiation, which is too low for properly charging most things.
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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