Five Life Hacks Every Una Watch User Should Know
The Una watch is practically designed to be modified, thanks to its interchangeable parts and open development environment. However, at launch, it’s quite basic, and many features aren’t yet available. However, here are five things I’ve discovered I can do with it—and I hope to significantly expand this list as the device and its community develop.
Charge your Una watch from your phone.
Since the Una watch has a standard USB-C port, you don’t need to worry about any special cable, adapter, or power adapter to charge it. I knew this, but it only recently occurred to me that I don’t need a computer or a power outlet to connect the other end. I took a USB-C to USB-C cable—the same one I usually carry with me to charge my phone—and plugged one end into the watch and the other into my phone. It charged!
(You can charge other devices from your phone, including your Apple Watch, but you need a special adapter, so no one uses it.)
Use HabitLab to get a recovery assessment.
The Una watch doesn’t have built-in sleep tracking, but several community-created apps are trying to implement it. For example, the Slumber app will tell you how much time you slept and compare your last bedtime to your usual bedtime. It doesn’t track sleep stages (which is a relief, since watches rarely do a good job of that), and the analysis is performed directly on the watch itself.
But if you really need recovery data or overnight heart rate variability data, the HabitLab app combines this with habit tracking. Every evening, the watch will vibrate and ask you to note which habits or factors influenced your day. Options include alcohol and late meals, and the watch will automatically detect morning or evening workouts and add them to the list. In the morning, the watch will ask you about your sleep and then give you a score based on your resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and your subjective assessment.
The app is supposed to be able to analyze trends and draw conclusions based on that data, but I haven’t been able to do so. Perhaps it’s waiting for more data (I’ve been using it for a little over a week), or maybe there’s simply a bug.
Attach your library card to your Una watch.
On the contrary, the barcode scanning app worked even better than I expected. It’s designed for parkrun barcodes; every participant in the free weekly 5km run has a number that can be used to check their results online. But it works just as well with other barcodes.
I installed the Barcode app and entered my library card number. Perhaps thanks to the watch’s MIP display, I found that this barcode scanned more reliably than any other barcodes I’d previously tried on the watch. The library scanner recognized it the first time, and the phone scanner handled it without issue, too. You can store up to six barcodes, so I also entered a few others, like my grocery store loyalty card number.
The app supports both regular barcodes and QR codes. To enter a QR code, simply enter a shortened URL (up to 22 characters). This means the Barcode app also serves as a QR code generator, a truly convenient feature.
Look how little daylight you have left.
Watching how close the sun is to setting can be a bit frustrating as we transition to daylight saving time and enter the dark winter months, but it’s also useful for planning. The Sun & Moon Face watch displays a graph on your wrist showing how far the sun has traveled in its trajectory across the sky throughout the day. As evening approaches, you’ll see how little time you have left.
The app detects your GPS location once a day, which means that for the first few hours I wore it, the sunrise and sunset times were incorrect—6 AM and 6 PM. But unless you fly to a completely new location every day, the app does a great job. As a bonus, it changes the color of the sky on the screen to indicate daylight, night, or sunrise/sunset.
Download the developer tools and build something.
If you’re looking to hack this hackable watch, why not try building something yourself? Here you’ll find instructions for downloading development tools for Windows, Mac, or Linux, as well as guides on various features you might want to use and implement. There are also about a dozen sample apps you can use as a starting point, including activity trackers, watch faces, and quick overviews. I’m not very proficient in programming myself, but this is the most user-friendly system I’ve seen for anyone looking to start building their own watch apps.