One thing I've never understood (and hopefully some Casio geek can shine a light on): why do almost all old Casio models have a 24/12h time switch taking the premium spot as one of the main 4 buttons, instead of having it buried deep in the (awkward) menus. Seems to me that something like alarm or stopwatch setting or a second menu action button would have been far more useful.
I spoke with a Casio engineer about this. It's so that your bending wrist can accidentally switch it to 12h time when you actually really want it on 24h time or vice versa.
Those buttons are the menu. The idea of menus on watches is a modern ux extravagance.
I don’t have the satisfying answer as to why they dedicated a button to 12/24 hour time but my guess is that it’s simply a cool digital feature and stands out against the limitations of analog watches.
They had modal menus back then, they just didn't display them. You had to memorize which obscure symbols to press, to change various settings. For example, in the 1970's, HP's calculator watch required pressing ⯅• to switch between 12 hr and 24 hr modes, or A⯅A to clear an alarm.
In the 80's and 90's, when sixteen-segment and dot-matrix displays made displaying text easier, calculators started displaying menu items, so you didn't have to memorize the sequence.
Since then, we've moved on to full-color high-resolution displays that can handle any text of any language, and the menus have more-or-less switched back to memorizing a sequence of which obscure symbols to press, I guess because some people think they look cool? Sometimes there's no menu at all, and you just have to memorize finger movements.
I always followed trial and error until I reached my target and I had the feeling that my results were much better than if I were randomly clicking buttons. That is, some memory always remained. Or the menu is well thought out and has some consistency.
The button press sequences are still combo-style; when I set one of the alarms on my ABL-100WE, it always ends in trial and error. I mean, basically it's logical, but when the buttons change what they do (e.g. when the display says "SET", the light button becomes "up"), it throws me off.
In my country, 30-40 years back, people who needed a watch were those ones who travel regularly. And travel was mostly using public transport, trains and planes. Most or all of it operated using a 24h time. That button was very useful.
Compare that to the mute/silence/DND physical button in iPhones today.
Also people who worked in confined spaces who wouldn’t know if it was day or night outside after a days job. My father who worked in an oil rig in Abu Dhabi used one. He gifted me one.
My F-91F I replaced the Casio module with an Ollee watch and pretty much disabled all of the features, I can sync the time when reconnecting to Bluetooth on my phone which I do about once a month.
Really hoping this will include the ability to sync information from the internet via the BT tethered phone. But probably not
Similar to the current weather feature that grabs the weather for the next 5 days on every sync, I just want to push the local time train schedule just once per day to my watch.
I'll take some solace in mine supporting lots more alarms (beep when school recess ends) and a bunch of geeky stuff like sunrise, moon phases, tides, and stuff.
I really like my F91W case with a Sensor Watch Pro board and accelerometer sensor.
My favorite features:
- Piezo alarm is much louder.
- Countdown time can be incremented by tapping the watch.
- LED color can be changed by adjusting RGB values.
- It features sunrise/-set and moon phase info/calendar.
- I changed the week day names to German abbreviations.
- There are lots of intriguing watch faces that you can compile into your firmware.
Sadly, the project is in some disarray as the originator apparently lost interest and the community isn't moving uniformly. Would love to see such a project for Casio with 4 buttons as this would allow for a lot more interesting use cases ... the pinnacle would be a board for their calculator watches. That would be rad.
The Sensor Watch forum on Discord is pretty active.
Like their G-Shock watches, the actual area dedicated to showing the time is overwhelmed by superfluous elements. Must be barely 20% of the top surface that actually performs its primary function.
When I look at my watch I want to see the time, not wasted space announcing "Casio Step Tracker" or "Water Resist" ( which isn't even proper English).
I moved to Timex a few years ago as their basic digital watches have nice big numerals for the time display.
On the principal menu of my G-Shock, I have the time on ~80% of the screen. The rest is 8/19, WED and the seconds. Of course the time is smaller when I go to the tide screen.
Yes, it seems to be a repackaging of the ABL-100WE and has a long battery life. Unfortunately, their app is horrible, only works after signing up for an account, and only works if given every tracking permission possible to vacuum the maximum amount of data to the cloud.
would some Casio/watch expert know if it's possible to replace the face plate on these watches? I love the simplicity but I don't like all the text outside the watch itself like "Step tracker" and "Water Resist".
Bluetooth is watch initiated, and only turns on 4 times a day (or when the user explicitly requests it with a button press). The pedometer is probably a special chip.
You should compare this with the F-91W that gets 7 years on the same battery, and hobbyist hardware mods that get years out of the same battery running ARM chips.
Nice thing about BLE is that it can be really cheap and stateless, you don't need to keep polling. If it was sending each and every step count to the watch (or even every minute) that would be one thing, but a semi-daily sync for time and steps could easily fit in one BLE packet.
My little temperature and humidity sensors that show an LCD 2x the surface area of a watch and broadcast a BLE packet every minute lasts about 12 months on a CR2032 (~200mah). A CR2016 is ~90mah little less than half. And receiving a BLE packet takes way less energy than sending.
Then you have the on-demand stuff that costs a packet or two, like the lost phone finder -- which is what I'm most excited about.
I had the same thought--speculating, perhaps it's like you say and we'll see a disclosure somewhere that it's "Up to 2 years, with 1 weekly Bluetooth pairing, 1 second of backlight use per day, no step counter."
Though, the CR2016 is a pretty big battery vs typical watch batteries, and in some other Casio watches are used as 10-year batteries.
I have one of these, there is an open source project called gshock_api that supports it. I think that makes it a much more interesting device. I don't use the app, I tag alarms in remind, and sync them from cron - works great.
This is great, as is the CasioGShockSmartSync Android app. I wish there was an iOS app, as the official app is horrible, only works after signing up for an account, and only works if given every tracking permission possible to vacuum the maximum amount of data to the cloud.
Here is a fun fact; the US believes owning and wearing an F-91W is evidence that you're a terrorist so much so that they can place you in Guantanamo Bay without trial[0]:
> In a handful of cases the detainee's possession of a Casio watch or the wearing olive-drab clothing is cited as evidence that the detainee is an enemy combatant. No basis is given to explain why such evidence makes the detainee an enemy combatant.
It's not quite as simple as "if you have one of these you're a terrorist" of course; it's one indicator based on long-standing patterns, but never used as sole proof.
AQ training/bomb-making manuals from the 1990s–2000s recommend cheap, reliable digital watches like this as timers for IEDs as they're extremely inexpensive and widely available worldwide, durable, water resistant, and easy to modify as delay timers.
Often these guys would get picked up with two or more watches of the same model, for example. We recovered them in bomb-making facilities and on fighters throughout the GWOT. Ramzi Yousef (Philippine Airlines Flight 434) and Ahmed Ressam (the 'Millennium Bomber') both had them.
> Khaled El-Masri is a German, Lebanese and French citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
> While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, raped, and subjected to other forms of torture.
> After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA admitted his arrest was a mistake and released him.
Trick question! It was actually that his name is one letter away from someone else's name, and some manager in the CIA had "a hunch":
> At the end of 2003, El-Masri travelled from his home in Ulm to go on a short vacation in Skopje. He was detained by Macedonian border officials on 31 December 2003, because his name was identical (except for variations in Roman transliteration) to that of Khalid al-Masri, who was being sought as an alleged mentor to the al-Qaeda Hamburg cell, and because of suspicion that El-Masri's German passport was a forgery.
> CIA agents discussed whether to remove El-Masri from Macedonia through an extraordinary rendition. The decision to do so was made by the head of the al Qaeda division of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, on the basis of "a hunch" that El-Masri was involved in terrorism; his name was similar to suspected terrorist Khalid al-Masri.
> When the Macedonian officials released El-Masri on 23 January 2004, American security officers immediately kidnapped him. El-Masri later described them as members of a "black snatch team." They beat him and sedated him for transport using a rectal suppository. "The CIA stripped, hooded, shackled and sodomized el-Masri with a suppository—in CIA parlance, subjected him to "capture shock"—as Macedonian officials stood by."
> Ramzi Yousef (Philippine Airlines Flight 434) and Ahmed Ressam (the 'Millennium Bomber') both had them.
This is like a statistics 101 question. Google says that Casio has sold over 100M F-91W's since 1989. Let's round down to an average of 2.5M a year, or 25M over the 10 peak years of the global war on terror (GWOT).
You named two terrorists who wore them. Let's say that's an understatement by 200X. Some quick math shows that the percent of terrorists who wore F-91W's is 400/25000000 = 0.0016% positive rate, or conversely a 99.9984% false positive rate. Not good!
Now I never actually took a statistics class, so maybe I got this question wrong. But it's obvious that using the possession of an F-91W as a sign of being a terrorist is a mistake.
Well, your argument might be valid but calculation of course has nothing remotely to do with truth. If we’re talking about the US, person has to be in the US/travel to US. That dramatically cuts down the amount from 25M. Second - the person has to be.. how do I put it, non white? Probably muslim. That also cuts it down by far. I can believe that people who fall in these two categories might have some subcultural groups. And in most of them they might just.. not wear Casio watches. It’s not like probability of wearing/not wearing Casio watches is equally likely for every person on earth. They have their target groups.
The wording doesn’t seem to me like owning the watch was the only evidence and that was enough to put people in Guantanamo, it sounds to me like it was a contributing factor. Still a bit crazy but I don’t think they just arrested everyone with this watch.
> In a handful of cases the detainee's possession of a Casio watch or the wearing olive-drab clothing is cited as evidence that the detainee is an enemy combatant. No basis is given to explain why such evidence makes the detainee an enemy combatant.
How does the Tacoma differ from the Hilux? I know there are some slight styling and engine differences for different markets, but pretty sure its still mostly a Hilux.
> the US believes owning and wearing an F-91W is evidence that you're a terrorist
No they don't, please don't spread misinformation. If this were true, the watch itself would be banned in the country and/or nobody would sell it.
Your own source says the Pentagon refuted the author's claims because they did not have access to classified information, which I believe would suggest that there is more to the story than merely owning a very common watch and nothing else. Otherwise millions of innocent Americans would be in jail.
There is a very, very good reason this was only "in a handful of cases" and never again.
If you want a Casio watch and are traveling to Japan, just get one at a second hand shop there (WonderEx, Second Street, ...). They are tend to be well stocked on the Casio cruft.
I have a Casio PHYS STR-800, nonworking. I got it two decades ago because of the large lap memory (and unusual look, too); I was doing a lot of running, including track training and such.
It short circuited one day. Put in a battery, and it drained the thing in a minute. Put in another one, same thing.
It's been sitting in the top shelf of a bathroom cabinet since like 2011.
I feel the same about the apple watch. All I use it for is literally tracking steps. I do not care about any other feature. If my watch fails I will just get a casio watch.
Bluetooth stays on only for three minutes and then turns itself off once you're done syncing stuff. I have had one for nearly two years now (ABL-100WE). Absolutely love it.
I work with accelerometer chips, a lot of them have features specifically for pedometers. Keeping the accelerometer on will draw a few uA, then you can have the accelerometer keep track of the step count internally and have the main processor query it as necessary to update the step count display. When there's no motion for a while, you can also put it into a lower power sleep mode that doesn't track steps, then when it detects motion it'll wake up the main processor which will then put the accelerometer back into pedometer mode. I think 2 years on a CR2016 (90 mAh) is reasonable if Casio knows what they're doing.
If it's like the G-Shock, it's not a real step counter, it's a small accelerometer. It will trigger on every single wave when you're planing if you're windsurfing, which makes it quite useless.
I mean, airtags are doing radio stuff at a regular cadence. I've noticed they update once every 15 minutes, so they are turning the radio on to do whatever BLE triangulation they need to do 96 times per day. That's milliamps over at least a few milliseconds to wake the radio, do whatever triangulation is needed. It's amazing that they last that long considering what they are doing. I think they are using Nordic NRF54 internally so it's testament to the power efficiency those chips are capable of.
Airtags don't do any triangulation. They just send out a BLE beacon periodically to any iPhone within earshot, and also spend some time listening for new instructions that almost never happen.
They have no idea where they are or what their airtag/BLE neighbors, if present, are doing. They don't grok GNSS or wifi. There's nothing for them to triangulate or trilaterate or tri-anything when they're just sitting there.
So yes: They are indeed pretty tidy about energy consumption. They accomplish this in large part by being very simple in normal operation and leaving the heavier lifting to the world of iPhones with relatively enormous batteries that get recharged ~every day.
After wearing an Apple Watch for almost a decade, the F-91W became my new "never take off" watch. For daily use, the only thing I miss from a smartwatch is a weather+temp forecast complication. Interestingly, it doesn't seem like this F-B100W-1A provides that (yet).
i love the product design aspect of a product that only needs to have one thing set (in this case, the time zone), to be eternally a functional device
which is why i love gshocks, both for design but also specifically the ones with tough solar/multiband 6 (and bluetooth (optional))
they have battery lives in the range of decades (due to solar charging), set themselves (multiband 6 is using atomic clock radio signals) and via bluetooth
you can get gw-b5600-2 and gw-s5600u (auto backlight) for under $200, but usually closer to $100. there are many more models, of course
that sounds expensive, but it's insanely durable construction and battery life means it'll be the only digital watch you'll ever need to buy. and the only configuration it will ever need is the time zone.
My father wears Casio watches almost exclusively, he's been tempted by a Fitbit so he can start tracking his step count, but even though I've bought him the Fitbit, he's finding the whole setup and app usage too intimidating, and so he hasn't used it.
This, in the silver ABL-100WE-2AEF model, is exactly what he wants. Same Casio, same interface, just now it has step count. He doesn't even need / want the Bluetooth.
(Me, I'll keep rocking my Pebble Time 2. Absolutely love it.)
Of all the things "smart watches" do, the one thing beyond time that most people actually perceive daily is their tracked steps.
IE; My apple watch ais the only one that goes out of it's way to make sure I know my steps for the day, and is always "accurate". Which is nice, but gimmicky for someone like me who doesn't analyze my steps.
I imagine Casio went after similar low hanging fruit, as an acceleromater is cheap/old tech, while still being able to feature compete with something like an apple watch.
Sure, but we can't do sleep tracking well. Todays devices mostly guess and map to typical patterns. Might, might not, work reasonably for you. But chances are that if you want to track your sleep because you suspect irregularities then they are about as useful as a potato.
From other anectdata the apple watch seems to just as bad as everything else.
We just don't seem to have any idea how to track sleep quality even with better devices than just a watch/whatever. Even a binary, is the person I'm attached to sleeping, is hit and miss. And with that in mind you can be pretty sure that the sleep stages etc is even worse.
> Step counter seems like a bizarre thing to focus in on? are people passionately tracking steps without their phones?
Yup. I go for walks specifically to leave my damn phone at home. I do bring an Apple Watch w/ airpods in case I need to take an urgent call and for podcasts, but I don't bother with texts or alerts or any other nonsense.
And while step tracking is not critical, if you have health goals that include a minimum number of steps a day I find it incredibly nice to have. I can check my counter before bed, and take the dog for a 30 minute walk if I'm behind for the day. Just a means to hold myself accountable on those crappy low energy stressful days.
People are, absolutely, yes! In the tech world there is an ever-growing focus on devices which can operate independently of smartphones, even to an offline/local-first extent.
The trend is trickling down into other circles as well. People are beginning to correctly identify needless hyperconverged connectivity as a burden rather than a convenience.
I had this same reaction to past step counters. I keep my phone in my pocket, and it works basically perfectly as a step counter.
But then I realized that many people do not keep their phone in their pocket, especially women. For them, a watch, bracelet or ring really is the best option.
I am not passionate about it but I like to make sure I'm moving a lot. I like that I can at a glance just see how much that's happened each day. I have one of these. Had one a while now and its the only watch I've ever used that I've stuck with and kept using.
My phone is sitting on my desk now connected to a charger - meaning any pacing I'm doing at the moment it not tracked. When I cook I often set my phone on the counter with the recipe - again while I'm moving all over. I often go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without bringing my phone.
I hate watches, but one would be better for step tracking - it is more likely to be on me to track information.
Step tracking is for health reasons. Unless you do activities you describe 12h a day, every day, whether they are counted or not doesnt move the proverbial health needle a bit
From what I can tell health is about both quantity and quality. 30 minutes of exercise and sitting is not good for health. That is why 10,000 steps per day is so often a goal - I can do a few thousand steps in the 30 minutes of exercise, but other activities should also give steps and I want to know in general how active I am.
Step tracking is for people who like to pretend they are doing something healthy without actually exerting any dedicated effort above and beyond their normal routine.
"Walking briskly for 30 minutes" is a better measure of something healthy than how many steps you took.
I do try to get my daily exercise. However it is still interesting to know how many steps I've taken. (sometimes my daily exercise is bike or swimming which are obviously not steps)
Grandpa kept a pedometer in a little pouch for decades. I got him a Fitbit but he didn’t like that, and more recently another cheap pedometer off of Amazon.
Started looking at Casios. Now I am thinking of getting W-800HD-1AVEF. Old A159W is kinda broken or pain to get right. Not really using one often, but maybe a few times in 10 years clock would be reasonable.
I’ve seen some people put something like a Whoop on the opposite side of their watch, so theoretically the functionality is achievable, but I can’t imagine the form factor to work due to the demands on compute and battery heart rate and sleep tracking need.
I feel that the smartphone connectivity feature is a departure from the philosophy of the F-91W. Is having a smartphone for "Easy watch setting" not a flaw of the watch, rather than a feature?
I'd love if it was radio controlled and charged with solar. And without phone connectivity.
Personally not at all interested in these new features - an F-91W that needs a smartphone to operate properly is madness to me - but I do appreciate the way they implemented them, with a focus on longevity and simplicity.
I'm a huge fan of the Casio F-91W, have two of them on my desk right now. Maybe it's just me, but for this specific model I feel like it becoming bluetooth enabled breaks the spirit of the simplicity of the model.
But hey, seems like people are excited for that, happy for them! Mine will last another 10 years without it.
It's still powered by a coin cell so it's probably for power conservation reasons. Way cheaper to periodically power on the BT radio and sync steps to your phone than it is to constantly listen for notifications.
It's not just power, if it where, they'd fit a USB C rechargable cell in there.
Its still a cheap casio resin watch at the end of the day. If this where to be able to push/pull notifications, the watch would be completely different in cost, ui, marketing, etc.
It would go from being charming retro tech with modern features, to dime a dozen bloatware/fitness tracking hardware.
That's an interesting take. I wear a non-smart watch specifically because I don't want notifications or any smart features. I wore an Apple watch for years but went back to a dumb analog watch when I got tired of the distractions.
If you want a coin-cell powered watch with a couple of years battery-life, but still want notifications, the G-Shock GBD-200/300s have this feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCq1ei5cT_8
Nice move! I wish it would support even more activity / health features in the future like GPS tracking, sleep tracking, etc. As a full package in the classic design it would make a great alternative to Garmin / Polar / Whoop / Oura etc.
One thing I've never understood (and hopefully some Casio geek can shine a light on): why do almost all old Casio models have a 24/12h time switch taking the premium spot as one of the main 4 buttons, instead of having it buried deep in the (awkward) menus. Seems to me that something like alarm or stopwatch setting or a second menu action button would have been far more useful.
I spoke with a Casio engineer about this. It's so that your bending wrist can accidentally switch it to 12h time when you actually really want it on 24h time or vice versa.
+1 I use this all the time and can't live without it
Those buttons are the menu. The idea of menus on watches is a modern ux extravagance.
I don’t have the satisfying answer as to why they dedicated a button to 12/24 hour time but my guess is that it’s simply a cool digital feature and stands out against the limitations of analog watches.
They had modal menus back then, they just didn't display them. You had to memorize which obscure symbols to press, to change various settings. For example, in the 1970's, HP's calculator watch required pressing ⯅• to switch between 12 hr and 24 hr modes, or A⯅A to clear an alarm.
In the 80's and 90's, when sixteen-segment and dot-matrix displays made displaying text easier, calculators started displaying menu items, so you didn't have to memorize the sequence.
Since then, we've moved on to full-color high-resolution displays that can handle any text of any language, and the menus have more-or-less switched back to memorizing a sequence of which obscure symbols to press, I guess because some people think they look cool? Sometimes there's no menu at all, and you just have to memorize finger movements.
To add to it, I always kept the manuals around, because remembering the key press sequences was akin to doing combos in arcade fighting games.
A few months without doing them, and it was hopeless trying to remember how to do them again.
I always followed trial and error until I reached my target and I had the feeling that my results were much better than if I were randomly clicking buttons. That is, some memory always remained. Or the menu is well thought out and has some consistency.
The button press sequences are still combo-style; when I set one of the alarms on my ABL-100WE, it always ends in trial and error. I mean, basically it's logical, but when the buttons change what they do (e.g. when the display says "SET", the light button becomes "up"), it throws me off.
I have a 6.30AM alarm on my FW-91, and I'm too lazy to figure out how to switch it off.
15 beeps, btw, till it turns itself off for the day.
In my country, 30-40 years back, people who needed a watch were those ones who travel regularly. And travel was mostly using public transport, trains and planes. Most or all of it operated using a 24h time. That button was very useful. Compare that to the mute/silence/DND physical button in iPhones today.
Also people who worked in confined spaces who wouldn’t know if it was day or night outside after a days job. My father who worked in an oil rig in Abu Dhabi used one. He gifted me one.
This was 1998.
Yes but why not just always use 24h time (or 12h if that’s what you like).
It’s a little strange that a dedicated button would be needed to switch between them, especially when the math to convert between them is so simple.
OK, but who would use 12h time ? I never understood, this seems so backwards.
How about someone who was raised on 12h time and has used it for 70 years? Sure, the math to convert is pretty easy, but why?
How about just leaving it on 24h time all the time?
My F-91F I replaced the Casio module with an Ollee watch and pretty much disabled all of the features, I can sync the time when reconnecting to Bluetooth on my phone which I do about once a month.
For anyone interested in modding the F-91W there's also The Ollee Watch, a replacement PCB which adds even more "smart" features.
https://www.olleewatch.com/
Sensor Watch is the non-phone-connected OG:
https://www.sensorwatch.net
not just OG ... also OSS as opposed to Ollee
It has ... uuuuuh ... blackjack?
Is it did that get implemented solely so someone could say "I'll make my own watch, with blackjack and hookers"?
The developer also recently posted on Reddit that he’ll soon be adding third party app support
Really hoping this will include the ability to sync information from the internet via the BT tethered phone. But probably not
Similar to the current weather feature that grabs the weather for the next 5 days on every sync, I just want to push the local time train schedule just once per day to my watch.
It seems to me that it's a slightly more affordable repackaging of the ABL-100WE. The features are the same, so is battery life.
That said, I really like this because the ABL-100WE comes with metal bands and I'd really like another watch with a rubber band :)
https://www.casio.com/de/watches/casio/vintage/product.ABL-1...
Right when I started building a custom F-91W with/for my kids based on sensor watch: https://github.com/joeycastillo/second-movement
I'll take some solace in mine supporting lots more alarms (beep when school recess ends) and a bunch of geeky stuff like sunrise, moon phases, tides, and stuff.
The sensor watch is actually awesome, if only for turning a cheap casio into a super-accurate quartz watch with temperature compensation.
I really like my F91W case with a Sensor Watch Pro board and accelerometer sensor.
My favorite features:
- Piezo alarm is much louder.
- Countdown time can be incremented by tapping the watch.
- LED color can be changed by adjusting RGB values.
- It features sunrise/-set and moon phase info/calendar.
- I changed the week day names to German abbreviations.
- There are lots of intriguing watch faces that you can compile into your firmware.
Sadly, the project is in some disarray as the originator apparently lost interest and the community isn't moving uniformly. Would love to see such a project for Casio with 4 buttons as this would allow for a lot more interesting use cases ... the pinnacle would be a board for their calculator watches. That would be rad.
The Sensor Watch forum on Discord is pretty active.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-wa...
Like their G-Shock watches, the actual area dedicated to showing the time is overwhelmed by superfluous elements. Must be barely 20% of the top surface that actually performs its primary function.
When I look at my watch I want to see the time, not wasted space announcing "Casio Step Tracker" or "Water Resist" ( which isn't even proper English).
I moved to Timex a few years ago as their basic digital watches have nice big numerals for the time display.
On the principal menu of my G-Shock, I have the time on ~80% of the screen. The rest is 8/19, WED and the seconds. Of course the time is smaller when I go to the tide screen.
And what percentage is the screen of the top surface of the watch?
You might wanna take a look at Casio AE-1500WH.
Upon seeing "Bluetooth" and "Daily steps" I'd assume this is another watch that requires daily charging, but wow 2y battery w/ CR2016!
Yes, it seems to be a repackaging of the ABL-100WE and has a long battery life. Unfortunately, their app is horrible, only works after signing up for an account, and only works if given every tracking permission possible to vacuum the maximum amount of data to the cloud.
Yup, the ingenuity to pull this off fascinates me every day, too.
I have two of these (wearing one right now!!) and several other cheap Casio watches. Some of my favorite purchases ever. I'm so in.
Not the first new F91W-ish model in 40 years but still neat, I hadn't heard about this one yet, thanks for sharing.
would some Casio/watch expert know if it's possible to replace the face plate on these watches? I love the simplicity but I don't like all the text outside the watch itself like "Step tracker" and "Water Resist".
I think the appropriate way in this case is to cover it up with black tape.
the face decal is printed on the inside of the crystal (plastic). it can be removed with solvent and replaced if you find/make a replacement.
How are they getting 2 years on a CR2016? Is that with step tracking and Bluetooth disabled?
Bluetooth is watch initiated, and only turns on 4 times a day (or when the user explicitly requests it with a button press). The pedometer is probably a special chip.
You should compare this with the F-91W that gets 7 years on the same battery, and hobbyist hardware mods that get years out of the same battery running ARM chips.
To be fair, the hobbyist hardware mod variants that do step tracking only last for days, not years AFAIK.
Nice thing about BLE is that it can be really cheap and stateless, you don't need to keep polling. If it was sending each and every step count to the watch (or even every minute) that would be one thing, but a semi-daily sync for time and steps could easily fit in one BLE packet.
My little temperature and humidity sensors that show an LCD 2x the surface area of a watch and broadcast a BLE packet every minute lasts about 12 months on a CR2032 (~200mah). A CR2016 is ~90mah little less than half. And receiving a BLE packet takes way less energy than sending.
Then you have the on-demand stuff that costs a packet or two, like the lost phone finder -- which is what I'm most excited about.
I had the same thought--speculating, perhaps it's like you say and we'll see a disclosure somewhere that it's "Up to 2 years, with 1 weekly Bluetooth pairing, 1 second of backlight use per day, no step counter."
Though, the CR2016 is a pretty big battery vs typical watch batteries, and in some other Casio watches are used as 10-year batteries.
I doubt that, I have a ABL-100 and its step counter cannot be turned off. It even beeps at you when you sit on your butt for too long.
However, the manual recommends to be sparing with the backlight.
I have one of these, there is an open source project called gshock_api that supports it. I think that makes it a much more interesting device. I don't use the app, I tag alarms in remind, and sync them from cron - works great.
https://github.com/izivkov/gshock_api
The full lifelog (what Casio calls the steps and other metrics) is an opaque binary blob, but we mostly understand it now, so you can access that too.
https://github.com/izivkov/gshock_api/pull/3
This is great, as is the CasioGShockSmartSync Android app. I wish there was an iOS app, as the official app is horrible, only works after signing up for an account, and only works if given every tracking permission possible to vacuum the maximum amount of data to the cloud.
If you want to retrofit your existing watch: https://www.olleewatch.com/
I got one earlier this year, pretty awesome project!
Here is a fun fact; the US believes owning and wearing an F-91W is evidence that you're a terrorist so much so that they can place you in Guantanamo Bay without trial[0]:
> In a handful of cases the detainee's possession of a Casio watch or the wearing olive-drab clothing is cited as evidence that the detainee is an enemy combatant. No basis is given to explain why such evidence makes the detainee an enemy combatant.
This is also noted on the F-91W's Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W#Usage_in_terrorism
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seton_Hall_reports#Detainees'_...
It's not quite as simple as "if you have one of these you're a terrorist" of course; it's one indicator based on long-standing patterns, but never used as sole proof.
AQ training/bomb-making manuals from the 1990s–2000s recommend cheap, reliable digital watches like this as timers for IEDs as they're extremely inexpensive and widely available worldwide, durable, water resistant, and easy to modify as delay timers.
Often these guys would get picked up with two or more watches of the same model, for example. We recovered them in bomb-making facilities and on fighters throughout the GWOT. Ramzi Yousef (Philippine Airlines Flight 434) and Ahmed Ressam (the 'Millennium Bomber') both had them.
How many watches did Khalid El-Masri have?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri
> Khaled El-Masri is a German, Lebanese and French citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
> While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, raped, and subjected to other forms of torture.
> After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA admitted his arrest was a mistake and released him.
Trick question! It was actually that his name is one letter away from someone else's name, and some manager in the CIA had "a hunch":
> At the end of 2003, El-Masri travelled from his home in Ulm to go on a short vacation in Skopje. He was detained by Macedonian border officials on 31 December 2003, because his name was identical (except for variations in Roman transliteration) to that of Khalid al-Masri, who was being sought as an alleged mentor to the al-Qaeda Hamburg cell, and because of suspicion that El-Masri's German passport was a forgery.
> CIA agents discussed whether to remove El-Masri from Macedonia through an extraordinary rendition. The decision to do so was made by the head of the al Qaeda division of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, on the basis of "a hunch" that El-Masri was involved in terrorism; his name was similar to suspected terrorist Khalid al-Masri.
> When the Macedonian officials released El-Masri on 23 January 2004, American security officers immediately kidnapped him. El-Masri later described them as members of a "black snatch team." They beat him and sedated him for transport using a rectal suppository. "The CIA stripped, hooded, shackled and sodomized el-Masri with a suppository—in CIA parlance, subjected him to "capture shock"—as Macedonian officials stood by."
> Ramzi Yousef (Philippine Airlines Flight 434) and Ahmed Ressam (the 'Millennium Bomber') both had them.
This is like a statistics 101 question. Google says that Casio has sold over 100M F-91W's since 1989. Let's round down to an average of 2.5M a year, or 25M over the 10 peak years of the global war on terror (GWOT).
You named two terrorists who wore them. Let's say that's an understatement by 200X. Some quick math shows that the percent of terrorists who wore F-91W's is 400/25000000 = 0.0016% positive rate, or conversely a 99.9984% false positive rate. Not good!
Now I never actually took a statistics class, so maybe I got this question wrong. But it's obvious that using the possession of an F-91W as a sign of being a terrorist is a mistake.
Well, your argument might be valid but calculation of course has nothing remotely to do with truth. If we’re talking about the US, person has to be in the US/travel to US. That dramatically cuts down the amount from 25M. Second - the person has to be.. how do I put it, non white? Probably muslim. That also cuts it down by far. I can believe that people who fall in these two categories might have some subcultural groups. And in most of them they might just.. not wear Casio watches. It’s not like probability of wearing/not wearing Casio watches is equally likely for every person on earth. They have their target groups.
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The wording doesn’t seem to me like owning the watch was the only evidence and that was enough to put people in Guantanamo, it sounds to me like it was a contributing factor. Still a bit crazy but I don’t think they just arrested everyone with this watch.
> In a handful of cases the detainee's possession of a Casio watch or the wearing olive-drab clothing is cited as evidence that the detainee is an enemy combatant. No basis is given to explain why such evidence makes the detainee an enemy combatant.
And yet they remain so popular, curious how an egregious claim completely contrasts with reality.
...evidence that you're a terrorist
Or more recently, to some officials, showing up at a No Kings rally.
The western obssession with wrist watches popularized the mujahedin insult: "You have the watches, we have the time."
I guess Toyota Hilux drivers are next in line with similar smart rules
Well America doesn't get those, so makes sense.
(they did have one called "pickup")
How does the Tacoma differ from the Hilux? I know there are some slight styling and engine differences for different markets, but pretty sure its still mostly a Hilux.
Hilux has leaf springs and significantly higher payload capacity for technical mounts. You can uparmor a Hilux. Taco will break.
It's the same body with worse everything else.
> the US believes owning and wearing an F-91W is evidence that you're a terrorist
No they don't, please don't spread misinformation. If this were true, the watch itself would be banned in the country and/or nobody would sell it.
Your own source says the Pentagon refuted the author's claims because they did not have access to classified information, which I believe would suggest that there is more to the story than merely owning a very common watch and nothing else. Otherwise millions of innocent Americans would be in jail.
There is a very, very good reason this was only "in a handful of cases" and never again.
One of those reasons being you can walk into any Walmart across the country and walk out with one for about $22 USD.
If you want a Casio watch and are traveling to Japan, just get one at a second hand shop there (WonderEx, Second Street, ...). They are tend to be well stocked on the Casio cruft.
I have a Casio PHYS STR-800, nonworking. I got it two decades ago because of the large lap memory (and unusual look, too); I was doing a lot of running, including track training and such.
It short circuited one day. Put in a battery, and it drained the thing in a minute. Put in another one, same thing.
It's been sitting in the top shelf of a bathroom cabinet since like 2011.
Neat. Note that battery life is reasonably good (2 years) even with Bluetooth sync feature.
That's an amazing battery life these days. Love my Apple Watch, but having to charge it at least once a day, is a chore.
Might take another look at these - given the price, it's not a huge gamble to try it out for a few weeks.
I feel the same about the apple watch. All I use it for is literally tracking steps. I do not care about any other feature. If my watch fails I will just get a casio watch.
I was about to ask that - I somehow doubt it will last 2 years if you keep the step counter + Bluetooth on.
Bluetooth stays on only for three minutes and then turns itself off once you're done syncing stuff. I have had one for nearly two years now (ABL-100WE). Absolutely love it.
OK, but what about the step counter. Can it really last 2 years with the step counter continuously on?
I work with accelerometer chips, a lot of them have features specifically for pedometers. Keeping the accelerometer on will draw a few uA, then you can have the accelerometer keep track of the step count internally and have the main processor query it as necessary to update the step count display. When there's no motion for a while, you can also put it into a lower power sleep mode that doesn't track steps, then when it detects motion it'll wake up the main processor which will then put the accelerometer back into pedometer mode. I think 2 years on a CR2016 (90 mAh) is reasonable if Casio knows what they're doing.
If it's like the G-Shock, it's not a real step counter, it's a small accelerometer. It will trigger on every single wave when you're planing if you're windsurfing, which makes it quite useless.
I was surprised to see it uses CR2016 batteries and still manages to get two years of advertised battery life.
Apple airtags last maybe a year on a CR2032, from experience.
I mean, airtags are doing radio stuff at a regular cadence. I've noticed they update once every 15 minutes, so they are turning the radio on to do whatever BLE triangulation they need to do 96 times per day. That's milliamps over at least a few milliseconds to wake the radio, do whatever triangulation is needed. It's amazing that they last that long considering what they are doing. I think they are using Nordic NRF54 internally so it's testament to the power efficiency those chips are capable of.
Airtags don't do any triangulation. They just send out a BLE beacon periodically to any iPhone within earshot, and also spend some time listening for new instructions that almost never happen.
They have no idea where they are or what their airtag/BLE neighbors, if present, are doing. They don't grok GNSS or wifi. There's nothing for them to triangulate or trilaterate or tri-anything when they're just sitting there.
So yes: They are indeed pretty tidy about energy consumption. They accomplish this in large part by being very simple in normal operation and leaving the heavier lifting to the world of iPhones with relatively enormous batteries that get recharged ~every day.
Problem would be replacing it properly while maintaining it being waterproof.
With silicone gaskets this is not an issue.
It's not waterproof, merely resistant.
No vibration...what a missed opportunity! The reason that I got into smartwatches is the vibration wake-up alarm
I'd guess it's likely battery and size consideration.
The only thing keeping me on my apple watch is the wakeup.
Most notably, it's a bit bigger in size, so finally wearable by adults. I love the ABL100. It's my favorite Casio watch.
After wearing an Apple Watch for almost a decade, the F-91W became my new "never take off" watch. For daily use, the only thing I miss from a smartwatch is a weather+temp forecast complication. Interestingly, it doesn't seem like this F-B100W-1A provides that (yet).
i love the product design aspect of a product that only needs to have one thing set (in this case, the time zone), to be eternally a functional device
which is why i love gshocks, both for design but also specifically the ones with tough solar/multiband 6 (and bluetooth (optional))
they have battery lives in the range of decades (due to solar charging), set themselves (multiband 6 is using atomic clock radio signals) and via bluetooth
you can get gw-b5600-2 and gw-s5600u (auto backlight) for under $200, but usually closer to $100. there are many more models, of course
that sounds expensive, but it's insanely durable construction and battery life means it'll be the only digital watch you'll ever need to buy. and the only configuration it will ever need is the time zone.
Step counter seems like a bizarre thing to focus in on? are people passionately tracking steps without their phones?
My father wears Casio watches almost exclusively, he's been tempted by a Fitbit so he can start tracking his step count, but even though I've bought him the Fitbit, he's finding the whole setup and app usage too intimidating, and so he hasn't used it.
This, in the silver ABL-100WE-2AEF model, is exactly what he wants. Same Casio, same interface, just now it has step count. He doesn't even need / want the Bluetooth.
(Me, I'll keep rocking my Pebble Time 2. Absolutely love it.)
Of all the things "smart watches" do, the one thing beyond time that most people actually perceive daily is their tracked steps.
IE; My apple watch ais the only one that goes out of it's way to make sure I know my steps for the day, and is always "accurate". Which is nice, but gimmicky for someone like me who doesn't analyze my steps.
I imagine Casio went after similar low hanging fruit, as an acceleromater is cheap/old tech, while still being able to feature compete with something like an apple watch.
I guess it's a more complicated thing to implement (!= low hanging fruit), but I'd be more interested in sleep tracking than step tracking.
Sure, but we can't do sleep tracking well. Todays devices mostly guess and map to typical patterns. Might, might not, work reasonably for you. But chances are that if you want to track your sleep because you suspect irregularities then they are about as useful as a potato.
The Apple Watch is quite accurate (according to Apple's own research, at least), and it doesn't guess or map to typical patterns: https://www.apple.com/health/pdf/Estimating_Sleep_Stages_fro...
From other anectdata the apple watch seems to just as bad as everything else.
We just don't seem to have any idea how to track sleep quality even with better devices than just a watch/whatever. Even a binary, is the person I'm attached to sleeping, is hit and miss. And with that in mind you can be pretty sure that the sleep stages etc is even worse.
> Step counter seems like a bizarre thing to focus in on? are people passionately tracking steps without their phones?
Yup. I go for walks specifically to leave my damn phone at home. I do bring an Apple Watch w/ airpods in case I need to take an urgent call and for podcasts, but I don't bother with texts or alerts or any other nonsense.
And while step tracking is not critical, if you have health goals that include a minimum number of steps a day I find it incredibly nice to have. I can check my counter before bed, and take the dog for a 30 minute walk if I'm behind for the day. Just a means to hold myself accountable on those crappy low energy stressful days.
People are, absolutely, yes! In the tech world there is an ever-growing focus on devices which can operate independently of smartphones, even to an offline/local-first extent.
The trend is trickling down into other circles as well. People are beginning to correctly identify needless hyperconverged connectivity as a burden rather than a convenience.
It's always been this way. It adds to the charm, to be realized in a few decades. Camp-chique.
Indiglo WATER RESIST 69m ALARM Chronograph
I had this same reaction to past step counters. I keep my phone in my pocket, and it works basically perfectly as a step counter.
But then I realized that many people do not keep their phone in their pocket, especially women. For them, a watch, bracelet or ring really is the best option.
I am not passionate about it but I like to make sure I'm moving a lot. I like that I can at a glance just see how much that's happened each day. I have one of these. Had one a while now and its the only watch I've ever used that I've stuck with and kept using.
My phone is sitting on my desk now connected to a charger - meaning any pacing I'm doing at the moment it not tracked. When I cook I often set my phone on the counter with the recipe - again while I'm moving all over. I often go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without bringing my phone.
I hate watches, but one would be better for step tracking - it is more likely to be on me to track information.
Step tracking is for health reasons. Unless you do activities you describe 12h a day, every day, whether they are counted or not doesnt move the proverbial health needle a bit
From what I can tell health is about both quantity and quality. 30 minutes of exercise and sitting is not good for health. That is why 10,000 steps per day is so often a goal - I can do a few thousand steps in the 30 minutes of exercise, but other activities should also give steps and I want to know in general how active I am.
Step tracking is for people who like to pretend they are doing something healthy without actually exerting any dedicated effort above and beyond their normal routine.
"Walking briskly for 30 minutes" is a better measure of something healthy than how many steps you took.
Just go run or go on a walk every day.
But that doesn't give me data...
I do try to get my daily exercise. However it is still interesting to know how many steps I've taken. (sometimes my daily exercise is bike or swimming which are obviously not steps)
Not sure how old you are, but I am pushing 40. In order to stay healthy I need to track my steps and calories(somewhat), otherwise, I gain weight.
Tracking steps helps me stay on track.
Grandpa kept a pedometer in a little pouch for decades. I got him a Fitbit but he didn’t like that, and more recently another cheap pedometer off of Amazon.
> are people passionately tracking steps without their phones?
The least apps on my phone, the better. And the least I've got my phone on me, the better. I often leave the house without taking my phone.
I don't track my steps but the wife does... Using a watch.
Why do you automatically assume everybody on earth is as tied to his phone as you are?
You must be unfamiliar with the cult of the 10,000 steps a day.
Started looking at Casios. Now I am thinking of getting W-800HD-1AVEF. Old A159W is kinda broken or pain to get right. Not really using one often, but maybe a few times in 10 years clock would be reasonable.
I love Casio watches, perfect blend of utilitarian and nerd. Wearing my 5000U-1JF right now.
I would love a watch in the F-91W form factor that does heart rate and sleep tracking. Maybe one day…
A Pebble is probably the closest option. Casio doesn't seem to put much effort on their watches that have health or fitness tracking.
I’ve seen some people put something like a Whoop on the opposite side of their watch, so theoretically the functionality is achievable, but I can’t imagine the form factor to work due to the demands on compute and battery heart rate and sleep tracking need.
Another alternative is a smart ring.
How does it do step tracking with a 2 year battery life? A purely mechanical step tracker?
They won me over at fixing the light.
I feel that the smartphone connectivity feature is a departure from the philosophy of the F-91W. Is having a smartphone for "Easy watch setting" not a flaw of the watch, rather than a feature?
I'd love if it was radio controlled and charged with solar. And without phone connectivity.
How hard did you look?
https://www.casio.com/us/watches.filter.solar-radio_adjust-K...
You can buy that watch
Nice, still have my original Casio and Timex ones though.
Personally not at all interested in these new features - an F-91W that needs a smartphone to operate properly is madness to me - but I do appreciate the way they implemented them, with a focus on longevity and simplicity.
Why the hell is there bluetooth in it?!
To sync activity tracking data with your phone
Can it show the date in the European format, like the GW-M5610U-1ER?
I'm a huge fan of the Casio F-91W, have two of them on my desk right now. Maybe it's just me, but for this specific model I feel like it becoming bluetooth enabled breaks the spirit of the simplicity of the model.
But hey, seems like people are excited for that, happy for them! Mine will last another 10 years without it.
i don't want my casio to be smart. been rocking my mq-24 for a decade
doesn't mean others can't want a smart casio, but, it's not for me :D
Great. Now, please re-release nokia 3310
It's also a bump up in overall size. The OG F-91W wears very tiny on a larger wrist.
F-91W (old): 38.2 × 35.2 × 8.5 mm
F-B100W-1A (new): 41.9 × 38.1 × 8.8 mm
Does it fix the terrible backlight on the F-91W though..
The old Illuminator model has a much better backlight. https://www.amazon.com/Casio-F105W-1A-Illuminator-Sport-Watc...
The G shocks have the same new abysmal backlight.
I bought one with a slick (new) dark red face....which lights up bright pink from the one white LED on the left side of the face.
Even in the marketing/landing page for this watch which is linked in post.....they show the backlight feature, looking like it's missing an LED.
If it's the same movement as the ABL-100WE, I think it may.
The ABL-100WE has an orange light that stays on for either 1.5 or 3 seconds (configurable) and provides some decent light.
The display contrast doesn't seem to be quite as good as it used to be with older movements, though.
NOPE! No wirelesso in my watch, and there's no way you're getting 2 years on CR2016 when we compare stuff like AirTags.
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shame it doesn't have notifications, otherwise it would be perfect
so I guess I'm staying on my third Amazfit Bip since Pebble Time 2 has insane price
It's still powered by a coin cell so it's probably for power conservation reasons. Way cheaper to periodically power on the BT radio and sync steps to your phone than it is to constantly listen for notifications.
It's not just power, if it where, they'd fit a USB C rechargable cell in there.
Its still a cheap casio resin watch at the end of the day. If this where to be able to push/pull notifications, the watch would be completely different in cost, ui, marketing, etc.
It would go from being charming retro tech with modern features, to dime a dozen bloatware/fitness tracking hardware.
I'd argue the coin cell and the power budget limitations that come with it are part and parcel of it's nature as a cheap casio resin watch.
That's an interesting take. I wear a non-smart watch specifically because I don't want notifications or any smart features. I wore an Apple watch for years but went back to a dumb analog watch when I got tired of the distractions.
If you want a coin-cell powered watch with a couple of years battery-life, but still want notifications, the G-Shock GBD-200/300s have this feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCq1ei5cT_8
It's not great... but it's something?
So it's the suckless watch but with a built-in botnet?
Nice move! I wish it would support even more activity / health features in the future like GPS tracking, sleep tracking, etc. As a full package in the classic design it would make a great alternative to Garmin / Polar / Whoop / Oura etc.