Casio G-Shock Digital GBD-H1000-1ER

Product Information

There’s a steep learning curve for the watch’s proprietary OS, too. With six faces and seven mode screens to delve through, it takes time to understand the role of each button, which can change depending on the mode. After several weeks of testing, certain inputs still felt unintuitive – and it’s telling that the user manual requires a flow chart to illustrate how to navigate the interface. The final piece in the puzzle is the ability to sync this data with third party services, which currently is not possible. That will change soon: Casio is promising to add Strava and Google Fit connectivity in a few weeks – but it needs to be offering more than this. How accurate is it? In the screen department, you're getting a 1.2-inch dual layer display similar to the one Casio employs on its ProTrek Wear OS watches. So you're getting a 360 x 360 resolution LCD color TFT screen and a monochrome LCD one that's used to preserve battery life. Interval measurement (up to 5 timers); measuring unit: 1 second; countdown range: 60 minutes; countdown start time setting range: 1 second to 60 minutes; 1-second accuracy; auto-repeat

These are similar to the kind of insights you can attain from a Garmin watch, though the sheer size of this watch and the unreliable heart rate monitoring just doesn't make it the ideal watch to trust those insights and want to exercise with this watch on a regular basis. It's not the first Casio smartwatch – the Pro Trek watch range has used Wear OS to power outdoors features, with mapping and atmospheric sensors for life out in the wilderness.The GBD-H1000 doesn’t feature a touchscreen, so all interactions are relegated to five physical buttons that encompass the watch. These buttons are quite large and feature tactile grips of their own. It’s unlike anything you’d expect to see on a typical smartwatch and so there’s a definite learning curve to using this layout, but after some time with the device it becomes easy enough to wrap your head around. The PRO-TREKs didn’t quite have the aesthetics for my liking but many of you LOVE these robust watches. The physical specs of the earlier watches were great and the default spec of the software that comes with every Wear OS smartwatch is also usually great. However, most Wear OS watches also come with an additional manufacturer’s app both for the watch and for your smartphone. It was this custom software that was previously one of Casio’s problems…it was buggy and not well thought-through from a design perspective.

While the battery life is quoted as 12 months of simple timekeeping, or 66 hours with continuous heart rate monitoring enabled, the truth is that if you’re an outdoorsy type who wears the watch everywhere you’ll get a whole lot more than that.There is an always-on display mode, which will impact on battery life, though with the dual display in place you can still view time and some additional metrics on the monochrome screen without having to enable it. The challenge of essentially offering two different software approaches is an interesting one and it's been done with mixed results on Wear OS watches. Full auto-calendar; 12/24-hour format; button operation tone on/off; vibration function; airplane mode