An Apple watch costs £300 - so should you buy a £50 Pebble instead?

That, at least, is the etiquette being promoted by the makers of smartwatches, some of whose products have fallen in price to such an extent that they now qualify as impulse buys.

Just £50 currently gets you an entry-level Pebble watch, which connects to your phone via Bluetooth and gives you “polite” at-a-glance notices of incoming texts, emails and other goings-on you don’t want to miss.

Smartwatches are all about notifications – in fact, it’s pretty much all they do.

Think of them, as wearable remote controls for your phone, since if you wish to act upon any of the information you must retreat to your handset.

But the Pebble watch is also a good toy, and at its new low price is quite an appealing proposition.

Unlike Apple’s much publicised but ultimately disappointing £300 first-generation effort, it can’t be passed off as jewellery – and its chunky plastic body sits uncomfortably on a small wrist.

Yet it’s arguably now a better buy than similarly-priced old-school digital watches.

The primary function of a watch is to tell you the time, and in this respect the Pebble is peerless. It synchronizes itself from the internet so it’s always accurate to the second, and you can customize the display using dozens of freely downloadable analogue or digital faces.

The display itself is black-and-white and only one and a quarter inches big: you’ll have to pay much more for a colour one. But it’s bright enough to read in sunlight, and in the dark you can snap your wrist to turn on a backlight. If you don’t like the rubbery strap it comes with, you can substitute any 22mm watch band.

At this price there is no touch screen – you control it like an ordinary watch, with tactile buttons on the side of the casing. There’s also no inbuilt microphone, so sending messages to your handset – a feature of the Apple watch – is out of the question.

But the Pebble does let you control music playback, and works with messaging apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and your calendar.

Fitness tracking is another obvious use for a wrist device, and the Pebble is capable of syncing with many third-party monitoring apps. iPhones and newer Android models are supported, though not Blackberries or Windows Phones.

There is a catch, though: unlike regular watches, the Pebble needs charging every few days to keep it running.

This is a simple job of snapping a magnetic cable to the back of the case, but it’s an extra bit of kit to remember packing when you go away, and a throwback to the days when we’d look at our watches in the morning only to discover we’d forgotten to wind them.

The battery issue may also impact your phone, as the need to keep Bluetooth switched on will discharge it faster – though newer models are less susceptible to this.

The Pebble is of course, only £50 for a reason: it will soon be supplanted by newer models. But as long as it’s this cheap, it’s a bargain.