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More than a fitness tracker but not quite a smartwatch, the Steel HR fits a sweet spot for me during my daily sweat sessions.

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I spent a lot of years wearing a lot of smartwatches. Until I didn't. At some point, I just gave up having one more thing to charge every night. Or maybe being able to swipe away an email at a moment's notice just wasn't important anymore. And, so, I went analog. (Thanks to my lovely wife for this Christmas present.)

But I screwed up. I wore my Shinola (this one, since folks will ask) to the gym, twice, and very quickly ended up with sweat stains in the leather. (Let that be a lesson to you!) Time to be smarter about things. And one of the best pieces of advice I think there is when it comes to fitness tech is to try to stay in a single ecosystem. I was already using the Withings Body scale and Wireless Blood Pressure Cuff.

Time to try its fancy watch, too. This is the Steel HR.

See at Withings

The short, short version: The Steel HR is what I'd call a semi-smart watch. It's got an analog face and an indicator for activity level gauge, dialing up from 0 to 100% (or beyond) as you go throughout your day. It's also got a small digital display for basic notifications.

On the underside is a heart-rate monitor — the HR part of the Steel HR.

It'll check your heart rate once every 10 minutes or so when you're just walking around. But hold down the button on the side of the watch and you enter "workout mode," and the watch starts taking heart rate measurements continuously. Press the button again and you can see how hard your pumper is pumping and how much time has elapsed in each session.

You're forgiven if you look at the Steel HR and don't see it as a smartwatch. I don't. For one, it doesn't have the telltale color display. That's actually a good thing in this case, for two reasons. The first is that when I'm doing the fitness thing, I don't want to be futzing with the watch all the time. Back when I was wearing full smartwatches, I was always swiping at the darn thing. The Steel HR, however, doesn't bother me much, if at all. It tells the time, it tracks me in the background, and it notifies me of important incoming events — but those are pretty few and far between.

The other thing is that because it doesn't have a big, color display lit up all the time, the battery lasts for what feels like forever. As I type this, I honestly couldn't tell you the actual capacity of the battery, because I simply don't care. I haven't gone less than a week before I even thought about getting near a charger. Actual run time will vary a bit depending on how much you're using the active workout mode. The literature says you get up to five days' use in workout mode and up to 25 days in normal mode. And that's really not an exaggeration. The only times I've charged is when I've felt like it — not because I had to. And the watch charges pretty fast, too, quoting up to 80% in an hour, with another hour to hit 100%.

Hardware is nothing without software, of course. And so this all (like the scale and BP cuff and other products) ties into the Health Mate app, available on Android, on iOS, and on the web.

When you use the "active workout" mode, the watch will sync back to the phone and try to figure out what it is you were doing. Walking and running are the obvious ones. Swimming, too. I usually have to edit things when I'm on the elliptical, but that's sort of the point. It makes importing your workouts pretty seamless. You just need to double-check the activity and maybe calories expended. Elapsed time and heart rate are handled for you.

(The Nokia folks tell me the Steel HR also will try to automatically recognize tennis, ping pong, squash, badminton, weightlifting, basketball, soccer, volleyball, dancing, and boxing. And if it doesn't figure those out, it's got a bunch more you can select from yourself.)

If you work out without the Steel HR on your arm, did you actually exercise? OK, yes. But it's just not the same.

I've been wearing the Steel HR for a few months now. Not 100% of the time (I don't wear my Shinola 100% of the time either), but almost every time I exercise. I'm to the point where I kind of kick myself a little if I forget to strap it on in the morning when I walk — gotta have my steps counted!

But the Steel HR absolutely comes with me to the gym, every time I go to the gym. I love having a log of my exercises and how hard (or not) I was working.

But mostly I love having a semi-smart connected watch that can stand up to my sweaty body (I'll let that visual sink in for a minute) and run for weeks at a time. That it looks decent — more than decent, actually — is an added bonus.

See at Withings

Regardless of the Android phone you're carrying, make sure it's clean enough for you — and your loved ones, too.

You've seen the statistics, but have you seen the evidence? Awhile back, Buzzfeed kept a lively bunch of Petri dishes colonized with the same bacteria found on the smartphones of several colleagues. The unfortunate discovery was that there were actual pathogens found on the phones; essentially, potentially disease-causing strains of bacteria.

Whether you're a germaphobe, or someone who doesn't mind a bit of rolling around in the dirt, surely we can all agree that anything that can potentially cause disease is bad news. There are some quick things you can do to keep your Android devices clean and disinfected, however, and free of what could be harmful to your health.

Make a cleaning kit

The necessities for cleaning your Android smartphone are actually quite basic.

You have a kit for all your various USB charging cables and gadgets that plug into your Android device, so why not make a kit for cleaning your smartphone? At home, stock up on 70 percent or higher rubbing alcohol, finely pointed cotton swabs, and a barrel of toothpicks. You should also consider stocking up on a pack of microfiber cloths, as well as a few cans of compressed air. Most of them come in packs of two or three anyway.

Why not make a kit for cleaning your smartphone?

You'll also want some sort of cleaning solution that will disinfect the phone. I've built my only little collection of pre-mixed spritzers based on whatever I'd find on sale at Amazon, though the Whoosh! brand cleaner was suggested by one of our iMore brethren, and it's a good deal since it comes with a travel spritzer and microfiber cleaning cloth.

You could also make your own cleaning solution with 8 ounces of rubbing alcohol and 8 ounces of distilled water inside a spray bottle. A 50-50 mixture of white vinegar and distilled water also works if you're into keeping things relatively organic and don't mind the intense smell of the vinegar.

How to clean your Android phone

Every Android phone is different — a special, individual flower, if you will. But cleaning it is generally the same as cleaning any other mobile phone. There are ports, buttons, a screen, and an entire chassis that could all use a bit of a rubdown with some grime-cleaning solution.

Be careful not to puncture any speakers or wriggle any ports.

Grab a large, clean microfiber cloth or soft towel and lay it out. Or, you can quickly wipe over a substantial bit of table area with a winged out soapy sponge or towel. Just making sure the "operating" area is clean. Then, lay the phone down. Grab the can of compressed air and start blowing out the charging port, ensuring that whatever little particles are in there are flying up and out. (If you have trouble seeing, use the aid of a desk lamp and take off the shade for more light.) You can pump air into the rear speakers to clear them out, as dirt and gross particles also collect there.

If you see that there's too much grossness to clear out with just the compressed air, grab a fine toothpick and carefully dig out the grime that's causing you stress. Be careful not to puncture any speakers or wriggle any ports. If you see debris collecting elsewhere on the phone — like in the cracks around the frame, and in the top speaker grill — you can clear those out with a toothpick, too.

Cotton swabs can be helpful on the edges, but don't use them inside ports or speaker grilles.

Spray your microfiber cloth with cleaning solution and wipe it down — as often as you possibly can.

Now that you've primed the device for disinfecting, grab your alcohol- or vinegar-based cleaner. Spray it on the microfiber cloth and wipe it down. Then, take a cotton swab and dip it inside the bottle of rubbing alcohol. Trace it around the edges, the buttons, and any other crevices of the chassis that require cleaning, but take heed not to use them inside ports or speaker grilles. Wipe it all off with the microfiber cloth when you're finished.

Cleaning on the go

For a quicker cleaning experience, a pre-moistened cleaning cloth is just as apt at cleaning your smartphone as the multi-tool cleaning process. Grab a brand like these Wireless Wipes, which smell nice and clean your device. Sephora also offers a batch of stylishly-packed screen cleansing towelettes for those who like a little flair with their cleaning supplies. Or, just get into the habit of cleaning your phone once a week at home — maybe even designate a night of the week as phone cleaning night. Make it excited by adding music.

A pre-moistened cleaning cloth is just as apt at cleaning your smartphone.

Also, consider using hand sanitizer between meals and before touching your phone. A little can go a long way, and I've often found that something as simple as a travel bottle of Purell hand sanitizer can work miracles at removing dirt from the fingers.

Your methods

What are your methods for keeping your phone and other gadgets clean and germ-free? Let us know!

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Make your Android fast again — it is possible

Updated May 4, 2017 to make sure these tricks work with the latest and greatest Androids!

We've all been there. You have a fancy, new, highly complex Android device that can do everything from checking your email to surfing the web to controlling your microwave so your popcorn doesn't burn. It's shiny and screaming fast while doing all the things we wanted it to do. Everything is roses all around.

Fast forward a year down the road, and besides the shiny wearing off, things aren't as zippy as they used to be. Apps take longer to open and run. Transitions between screens take longer to redraw than we would like. The speed demon that your device once was is starting to get a little frustrating to use. Your Android is slow.

Don't fret. This happens to every computer, even the Android one you carry in your pocket. The good news is that there are a few things you can do to alleviate your pain and get back to Speed Racer mode again. None are difficult, and we're going to take a look at the five best things you can do to "fix" a slow Android.

Delete all those apps you're not using

You know the ones I mean. We all download apps on a whim, try them a time or two, then forget they are even there. They sit in the app drawer, counting their days and plotting ways to make your phone slow by using resources like CPU cycles for background services, taking up memory blocks and fragmenting your storage, and generally cluttering the place up. It's not you, dog whistle simulator app, it's us. Things just aren't going to work and we have to say goodbye. We're still the best of friends, right?

To delete any app you've downloaded, you can head into the device settings to find the App "manager." The people who made your phone might have buried it inside another section (hello there, Samsung!) but poke around or ask somebody and you'll find it.

Once open, you'll see lists of apps that are installed on your phone with various sorting options. When you find an app that needs to go away, tap the list entry to open the application's info screen. At the top you'll see a button to Uninstall it. Tap. Boom. Bam. Goodbye unwanted application.

Be vicious here. You can always download an app again if you decide you needed it after all — and that includes apps you paid for — but getting rid of the stragglers and hanger-on apps can make a big difference in how your phone runs the apps you do want.

Clean up that device storage space

After some time, you'll find a literal crap-ton of "junk" in your storage. Remember all those times you said, "Wait, let me take another one" while you had the camera open? All those pictures you didn't want are still there. So are the screenshots you took to share then promptly forgot all about them. Add in the Downloads folder and you just might have one hell of a mess. I know I do.

This is also an easy fix. To delete the pictures you no longer need, simply open the gallery app and choose the ones that need to go, and delete them. The same goes for videos. And doing it this way, through the gallery, means you have to see each picture or video before you delete them to be sure you really want to delete them.

Next, open the Downloads folder from your app drawer. There's a good chance you'll find it's filled with images, zip files, sound clips and any number of files that you no longer need. If you don't need them, there's no reason they should be taking up storage space, right? Zap them to oblivion. Again, doing it this way makes sure you look at files before you delete them.

Finally, open the storage page in the settings and move down the list until you see an entry for "Misc." or Other. Tap it, and you'll see a list of miscellaneous files that applications have created on your device storage. If you see something you know you no longer need, you can delete it here. If you don't know what a file is for, don't delete it.

If you root and ROM, be sure to look at your backup files and toss any that you no longer need. Those suckers can be HUGE.

Clear your cached data

Cached data is generally a good thing and unless you think you have an issue it's best to just leave it alone. Intelligently keeping some things in a local storage, like the post thumbnails for the Android Central app, means you don't have to download or generate them each and every time you open the app itself. And a well-written app knows when to clear its cache and start it all over again. But like all good things, there are drawbacks.

Apps you rarely use will have cached data that not only takes up space, but is always out of date and will need flushed and rebuilt anyway. Sometimes, cached data can be buggy and cause apps to misbehave — especially when it's woefully out of date. You can clear the cache for an individual app in the Application's info page (see section one about deleting apps above), but if we want to freshen things up so that our Android runs faster we want to wipe the cache all at once.

That's also easy!

Open the settings on your Android, and go into the device storage page. Scroll down the list until you see the Cached data entry, and tap on it. You'll see a pop-up telling you that you're able to clear out all cached data. Say yes with no fear — there's nothing here that an app needs, and anything important will be re-cached the next time you open the app.

Look at your SD card

Not all Androids have one, but if you do, a messy slow SD card can really make your Android chug. We can fix that to some extent. What we want to do is backup the card, format it so that it's clean and ready, then put our files back into place. The easy way to do this is with a computer.

Warning — you can lose game progress, app data, coins you paid real money for in Tiny Tower and other things you may not want to lose by doing this. If your favorite application doesn't use Google Cloud save, think about this before you do any tapping clicking or popping.

Power down your Android, then take the SD card out of the device. Place it in an adapter so that it can go into either an SD card slot on your computer or into a free USB port on the computer, and insert it in the appropriate hole. Your computer will take a second then mount it so that you can see all the file on the card itself.

Next, make a folder on your computer desktop to put all the files in. Name it something you'll remember, like sd-card-backup or the like. Using the file manager on your computer, copy all the files from the SD card and paste them into this new folder you created. Double check that they are all there. Then triple check that they are all there. Once you know all the files were copied, unmount the SD card from your computer and pop it back into your phone.

Fire up your phone, the dive into the storage section of the settings again. This time, we're going to format the SD card. This wipes all data off the SD card. Make sure you have everything backed up, or you'll be sorry. Go ahead and format the card, then power the phone off again.

Formatting your SD card will erase everything on it. Back up all your stuff before you click or tap any buttons!

Pop the SD card back into the computer and open the backup folder. Go through and delete anything you know you no longer need, but be sure you don't need it first. I might have three DVD images for Red Hat on the SD card in my phone. Those don't need to be on my phone, so I wouldn't copy them back over to the freshly-formatted card. Err on the side of caution here, and if you don't know what a file or folder is, copy it back over. Once you have everything you want and need copied back to the SD card, place it back in the phone and power it back on.

Once everything is up and running again, go into the app drawer and say "Dammit, Jerry, what happened to my apps!?" Some of your apps were partially installed to the SD card in a secure image when they were installed. Find those apps in Google Play and reinstall them to fix it.

Pro tip: This step is sort of a pain in the butt. It also can make a huge difference, so it could be worth doing. Either way, it's not something you want to do very often, so think about upgrading that SD card when you do it. This is a perfect time to move to something faster and bigger than that Class 4 16GB card you bought when you first got your phone ...

If all else fails, factory reset

Trust me: I hate resetting a device as much as you do. They take hours to set back up, and no matter how careful you were backing things up you always lose something. Not to mention all the game progress you are going to lose. But sometimes, things are so FUBAR that you just have to go here. Especially if you're the type of person who just has to root and mess with things to make them "better."

Factory resetting makes everything go away and returns your phone to the same condition it was in when you first opened the box. Firmware updates will still be in place, but things like your text messages and other data not in the cloud are gone forever. But sometimes, a fresh start is the best way to go.

You'll find a way to reset your phone in the device settings. Look for words like backup and restore or privacy to find the exact entry. Once you find it, tap away and wave goodbye to all those Knights of Pen and Paper levels.

When things boot back up into Android, you'll be nice and fast again, which is good because you'll be spending plenty of time swiping and tapping to set everything back up.