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Kochise , I would take a look at watchX as tinkerers wearable for the moment. Given the time and motivation, you could make some very interesting things with it
Battery life is a problem - especially when the biggest part of what a watch
should do is to first and foremost tell the time. Getting displays to be always-on and energy efficient is hard as hell. Pebble got it right back then (I won't lie the TickWatch Pro has caught my eye though I'm considering even the Sony Talkband SWR30 for affordable solution)
The Garmin smartwatches are feature rich when compared to the competition at getting the basics down - for the smarts the other companies can take their cake. It's worth a look what they have to offer
As 1st gen Android Wear owner, my point of view is that cramming lots of functionality is useless for such devices. Not because it won't be cool or there won't be enough performance, it's entirely due to the size limits as of how we - people, can interact and perceive information from such small devices. It's cluncky to say the least...
How badly Google and the OEMs miscalculated with Wear, is a rant for another time (or the Wear app searching for updates... Why Google? WHY?!)
As for speech-to-text, I'm always baffled why no one just added the short voice recordings instead?
Why cram additional hardware for AI and NPU module to analyze the speech when a small audio recording would suffice and give better results? I guess it has something to do with the "SMS is still a thing" crowd - the same one that is overzelously protecting iMessage
Sorry, I'm straying way off topic here as I'm very opinionated when it comes to wearables and how they shouldn't be abused with the same disregard for longevity like smartphones. Especially by going for more features that will be underutilized because of biomechanics (we - big, smartwatches - tiny). Most smartphones can at least be repurposed
Either way, pick your battles with smartwatches/fitness trackers wisely - you won't win many of them for the foreseable future