I like my sports gadgets and I have a few favourites. Currently, my go-to for cycling is the Hammerhead Karoo, followed by the Wahoo Roam. In last place, for cycling are Garmin bike computers - that’s a topic for another day. That said, for general-purpose use, Garmin’s smart watches are excellent, the best in the industry, and I think they rival their bike computers. These days I use a Garmin Enduro 3 for everything not-rowing or cycling.

Garmin watches can accommodate third-party apps, but they’re really locked down and require you to build for them using some crappy Garmin-specific language (Monkey-C, what!?). And if Garmin doesn’t like what you’re doing, they lock you out (it used to be possible to scuba dive with a Fenix 3, for instance, using a scuba third-party app, until Garmin neutered the barometer API).

Before Garmin there was the Pebble watch series, which went through various stages of availability and pain, but had a cult following. I had the original Pebble and it was super cool and I’m so happy to see it having been given a new lease of life as an open source enthusiast project - but it is first-and-foremost a notifications platform and is far too limited for athletic use.

So when I came across the UnaWatch my interest was piqued, especially because it was touted as “open” and having a developer kit available. “Wow”, I thought, “maybe I could write my own firmware for this thing”.

Yeah. No. You possibly could, but they don’t make it easy and they don’t want you to. They want you to use they’re lackustre firmware.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I created an eBay advert and eventually an UnaWatch Kickstart-backer’s kit plus the developer kit became available. Initially the price was too high for me, but two weeks later the seller dropped their price by 40% and…

Cool!

Now, dear reader… if you look on the incredible edible internet today you won’t find any real reviews of the UnaWatch. Nothing that isn’t obviously paid for, and you definitely won’t find anything about this developer kit.

Anyway, some pics, here we go!

I bought this device to be able to run custom firmware on it, but they haven’t made it easy as this “Developer kit” only gives you serial debug output.

The watch itself is… meh. The USB-C port is super dodgy, in use I’d worry about water getting into it. Inductive charging would be truly clever. I don’t have to worry about my Enduro 3 getting wet, I will worry about this watch getting wet.

In terms of the existing firmware the menu interface is very clunky compared to the Enduro and the display is small. I might try and do a run with the UW, but yeah, not convinced.

I suspect this watch will go like every other smart watch in recent times; it’ll hang around for a bit and then the company will fold - which makes the lack of open source firmware so much more unfortunate.

Either do it properly and do a Garmin or do it open source - no one is going to mess around with a half-baked product that is neither.

And the repairability angle is dodgy too: maybe it’s repairable now, but will it be so in 6 months? And you will need that repairability because of the USB-C port 😆