The best smartwatch, buds and set-top box not made by tech giants
By Tim Biggs
Since most personal gadgets are connected to or controlled by your phone these days, it can be easy to grab accessories from the same ecosystem – especially because Apple, Google and Samsung make sure their watches, earbuds and other tech works best with their own phones (and sometimes don’t work with other phones at all).
But there are plenty of options available that will play nice with your phone and other gadgets no matter the brand, and you’ll even find features and benefits the big tech players don’t match.
The ScanWatch Nova is a hybrid watch, with an analogue face over digital smarts.Credit:
Fitness wearable: Withings ScanWatch Nova: $800
French health tech Withings has been making smartwatches for a long time, and while it’s kept its devices up to date with ever more complex and accurate sensors, the main reason people love these watches is the form factor. These are hybrid watches, which have the look of an analogue timepiece but almost all the advantages of a digital smartwatch. Combined with the fact they work with all kinds of phones, this makes them a genuinely interesting alternative to Apple and WearOS watches.
The latest model is the ScanWatch Nova, which I wore for a few weeks and loved. It’s comfortable, it looks great, and it never needed a charge (the battery lasts at least a month). Most impressive of all, I hardly missed having a big touchscreen on my wrist. There’s a small monochrome OLED on the face that you can use to show your steps, check your heart rate or track your workout, and you can also have it show incoming calls and notifications from your phone, along with a vibration. I love how the hands will jump away from the screen temporarily if they need to.
Screen aside, this looks like a nice analogue watch from the front, with a shiny steel case, sapphire glass and a 42mm dial. There’s a complication that looks like a stopwatch, but it’s actually a measure of your progress towards your daily step goal. There’s a crown for moving through settings, a rotating ceramic bezel, and glow-in-the-dark hands that work well. It’s swim-proof and comes with a rubbery buckled strap for regular wear or exercising, plus a metal bracelet for dressing up (with a little set of tools for adjusting the links).
Under the hood, though, there are sensors for heart rate, oxygen saturation, ECG and skin temperature, plus the usual motion-sensing and GPS, which let the watch track various aspects of your health and exercise. It’s all crunched into insights in the Withings app, but you can set it to hand off to Apple Health, Google Fit or other apps. It is pricey, at $800, though the less-stylish ScanWatch 2 has practically the same tech features at $500.
Nothing’s Ear Open look weird but sound pretty good.Credit:
Wireless buds: Nothing Ear Open: $250
Apple, Google and Samsung all make excellent earbuds, and British tech firm Nothing makes something similar to the AirPods with its idiosyncratic twist. But Nothing also makes something that the others don’t; open-ear buds. Released last year, Nothing’s Ear Open look like mechanical parasites from The Matrix, but as long as you’re not interested in noise-cancelling, they offer a premium experience and a comfy fit.
The drivers are designed to hover just outside your ear canal, while a flexible cord loops around the back of your ear and a counterweight keeps them secure. They’re surprisingly easy to put on, despite their strange look, and while at first I felt as though I was wearing earbuds that were constantly almost falling out, I got used to it. The sound is surprisingly full despite not actually being in your ear, and I was soon listening to music and podcasts as usual.
Since air is still freely entering your ear, there is no noise-cancelling whatsoever, which is good if you want to stay present in the world around you but bad if the world around you is intent on drowning out your music with its racket. The buds last about eight hours on a charge, and I found I could go quite a long time without getting any ear fatigue compared with in-ear buds. Nothing says that its charging case holds another 20 hours of charge.
The Ear Open are $250 and work with either Android or iPhone via the Nothing X app. They use AirPod-style pinch controls, and I had no problem pairing and operating them on both kinds of phone plus my Mac.
The Fetch Mini’s latest software update has made it a useful and powerful set-top box.Credit:
Streaming set-top box: Fetch Mini G5: $160
Fetch has always offered a decent alternative to Apple TV and Google Chromecast (or these days, the Google TV Streamer), but the current Mini stacks up as especially good value. The G5 is even smaller than previous Minis, and in fact I find it very funny to look at because it’s as though someone made a toy version of my first Fetch box from a decade ago. But it’s what’s inside that counts.
This $160 box is 4K HDR capable, and it offers a lot. You can plug in your aerial and make use of its comprehensive TV guide (though the Mini can’t record programs for you), but the system also organises a lot of content from the free-to-air catch-up apps so you can flick between them as though they’re live. There is a range of other free channels too, and while I can’t say they really offer anything more compelling than what you’d get from searching “ghost hunters” or “extreme sports” on YouTube, they do occasionally grab me.
Of course, the good channels come in four packs, which you can pay $8 a month for, or $24 a month to get all of them. If you prefer video on demand, Fetch has all the major apps. It also has a very comprehensive store for buying or renting movies and TV shows, which has come in very handy for those titles that just don’t seem to be on any streaming service. Many movies show up within weeks of leaving the theatres, but expect to pay a decent amount to rent them.
The Fetch software had an overhaul earlier this year that cleaned up most of my lingering issues with the box; namely, the menus run a lot faster now, and the universal search is more comprehensive. If you search for a title, either by typing it in or with the remote’s microphone, it now usually does a good job of finding it and giving you your options for watching it.
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