Everyone who has ever wanted a smartwatch that does not look like one has had the same idea. This is the version where somebody built the board.
Ollee is a replacement movement, not a new watch. You take the guts out of a Casio and put these in, and from three feet away nothing has happened: same resin case, same strap, same LCD, same four-button grammar. The compatibility list is by movement Module 593 rather than by product name, which is why it covers rather more than the F-91W — F-84W, A158W, A159W, A163W, A164W, A171W and W-59 are all tested.
What you get for the swap is a lot, and most of it is the boring-in-a-good-way kind. Bluetooth keeps the time correct without you ever setting it. World time, five daily alarm slots with snooze, a 1/100-second stopwatch that logs its splits, a timer with ten presets, a ten-entry databank, a tally counter that timestamps every press. A five-day weather forecast with highs, lows, feels-like, humidity and UV. And — the detail that gives the whole thing away as a labour of love — sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, moon phase and local tide times, computed on the watch and working with the phone nowhere near it.
The hardware is a Cortex-M4/M0+ with Bluetooth LE, an accelerometer with gesture sensing, an RGB backlight you pick the colour of, and a buzzer you can load alarm tunes onto. Thirty days of activity data live on the watch. Firmware updates arrive over the air. There is a ball-and-paddle game, blackjack and five-card draw, because of course there is.
Two honest limitations, and the first one matters. Heart rate is measured by the pulsometer technique — you hold still and it counts, the way a nurse with a second hand does — not by an optical sensor pressed against your wrist. It is a real feature and it is not what “heart rate on your watch” now means to most people, and the site’s own asterisk says so. Second, the optional programmable NFC tag only works in the resin-cased F-91W family; the metal A158W cannot have it.
Prices are the last pleasant surprise: $54.99 for the DIY kit if you are happy opening a watch, $99.99 for one already installed, $114.99 for a limited A158WEA-9 build. Designed, programmed and assembled in Canada, and unaffiliated with Casio, which it says plainly on the page.
Ten months of battery with tracking on. Three years if you turn the motion sensor off and let it be a watch.