Comment You DON'T have to pay big bucks for a smartwatch (Score 1) 331
And they are handy.
A couple of years ago I picked up a 'refurbished' Samsung Gear Live for $79 on ebay. Bestbuy had taken them in as returns and their elite geek squad refurbishers flashed it with the wrong rom. It worked but wouldn't update android wear. So those were sold and most came back again and they dumped them on ebay wholesalers. All it needed was to be hooked up to the pc with adb and flashed with the right rom.
Having gotten a perfectly well working watch for 1/5 the original list price, I put it to work.
It replaced my fitbit with android fit, told me the time, weather, charge state of itself and my phone, all my notifications came up on it, if I was in the car and the phone rang I could answer it, and with 'ok google' I could trigger my phone to do a lot without picking it up. Lastly, wink ran on it so I could open/close/lock my front door and garage door.
Fast forward to this year. Verizon abandoned their $400 wear24 smart watch after just a few months and they've been on ebay for $75-80 for months. Running android wear 2.0, with internal LTE and GPS, more ram than most smart watches and included wireless charging dock it was a steal. Took me 20 minutes to get it doing everything my old smart watch did. I can also run google maps with navigation on it and it vibrates and announces the turn by turn with a mini map on my wrist.
I can also activate it on verizon for 5-10 bucks and use it as a standalone phone, although the little speaker on it sucks for phone calls. It has NFC but verizon only allows it to work with verizon pay. Morons.
It won't get any more updates but my gear live was stuck on android wear 1.3 and still does everything fine. In 2 years I'll replace the Wear24 with someone elses deeply discounted mistake where the issue doesn't really impact me.