Wear and Tear
If you wear a watch every day, it gets banged up a bit. I wear it when I exercise, I wear it to work, I wear it to bed (for sleep tracking), I wear it to church (it looks good with my suit), etc. I've banged it on walls and railings, I've submerged it many times, I've had kids play with it and dogs chew on it. In short, I have not babied my watch. What has been the result?
The watchband is still going strong. It looks as good as when I bought it and has no discernible signs of wear. I'm really surprised because I tend to wear out watch bands so this has been a definite plus.
The watch face is scratched up. I'm not going to lie, the watch face has some pretty noticeable scratches and tons of tiny ones you have to look really closely to see. However, I can still read the time and the display works great. It's held up as well as can be expected.
The worst thing that has happened was that I got a little fog on the inside of the watch last summer. I assume a little water leaked in while I was swimming. However, it's been months and the watch still works great and the fog hasn't come back (granted it's winter and I'm not swimming right now). I'll be looking out for that next summer.
All in all, I think the watch has held up really well and I hope to get another year (or more!) out of it.
Reliability
The watch still tracks my steps, automatically logs exercise sessions longer than 15 minutes, syncs with my phone, and gives me reports on sleep, steps, and my best days of the last week or two.
The watch still gives me calendar notifications, call notifications, and text notifications most of the time. It's never been a 100% of the time function but I'd give it a 90% of the time. The one major exception is right after I upgraded my phone to Android 8. After I did that, notifications stopped working for about a month - but I don't think that was the watch's fault. As of this writing, it's back to its 90% reliability.
I did have some issues about 6 months ago where it wouldn't sync information to my phone. It was weird because notifications would work but my steps, sleep, etc. wouldn't. I reached out to support and they had me reset the watch. That fixed the problem for a while but it came back a few weeks later. So I reset it again. I think I ended up resetting it 3 times over a period of a month or so. However, it's not had a problem for the last 5 or so months so I whatever bug caused it, has been fixed.
Support
In the year I've had the watch, it's had several operating system updates and the phone app has been completely re-written. It's also endured the change from Withings to Nokia without a hiccup (Nokia bought Withings so now it's the Nokia Steel HR watch).
I've only had to reach out to support once (via email) and found it to be responsive and helpful.
The watch still works like a champ!
Final Thoughts
If you're looking to get a nice looking watch that also doubles as a fitness tracker and sends you phone notifications, I highly recommend the Steel HR. I love mine and, if it were to break, I would replace it with another one - one with a white face though (I still think the black face - although it looks better - is harder to read).
It's a great watch!
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