TL;DR
- Google has confirmed to us that the Pixel Watch 3 can’t be repaired and can only be replaced.
- This is bad news for environmental reasons, suggesting that broken watches will end up in landfills.
- This isn’t the first Pixel Watch model that can’t be repaired, though.
For all the sustainability push and saving the planet green talk. They like other manufacturers were quick to remove the charger from the box.
But, now nothing. Replace or throw the Pixel watch in the bin if broken.
These smart watches are garbage. Even Apple watches have rather short lifetimes
My Garmin is going strong 5 years later, and I’ve got no incentive to upgrade
I’ve worn my Series 4 every day since September 21, 2018. My son is still using the Series 3 I gifted him the same day. I bought that one September 22, 2017. I don’t baby my watch in any way
Thought about an upgrade a few times, but haven’t had a compelling reason to do so
I put it on at 7 am, it’s 12:19am now and I’m at 37%
And I’m still at work… fml
My pebble’s been running happily for nearly a decade and there’s actually nothing new that’s really a proper replacement
I’ve been using a pinetime for a while now. While it’s far from a full smartwatch, it does all I need it to do, which is pretty much just tell the time and show me notifications from my phone. Has been working great so far.
It’s also theoretically repairable, but the production models get glued shut so they’re watertight, so idk how easy that’s gonna be.
Would you recommend a pinetime? Controlling yt music, morning alarms, notifications, and replying to texts (if even possible) would be my main use case.
For those use cases I don’t think I would, no.
You can control music, but it’s very primitive and doesn’t have a home-screen widget for example. The watch itself has alarms you can set, but it won’t ring when one on your phone goes off afaik, and you can’t reply to notifications, only view them.
Irrepairable items are a hardpass for me. Ever since my surface pro 3, if it cant be user serviced im not even looking at it.
Smart Watches are pretty much garbage. I was contemplating getting one for years, but always decided against it. When I got my S23 Ultra about 2 years ago, they gave me an offer of a “free” Gear 3, but I had to pay $5/month for the LTE service. I decided it was a good deal and accepted.
It wasn’t. The battery on it doesn’t even last 24 hours so it’s always dead at some point when I would like to use it other than just to tell time, the UI is clunky, and the cell connection is slow as hell. Attempting to download an audiobook via Audible takes like 5-10 minutes.
This is my same complaint. I have been using Garmin watches for fitness, and when they got got a little less utilitarian looking I started wearing it full time to be a watch/track steps and continue tracking fitness activities.
I would like a better notification handling and ability to reply to notifications/message but not at the expense of battery life.
I got a Pixel 2 watch ‘free’ with the purchase of a Pixel 8Pro last year. I tried wearing it for a few weeks, and no surprise, the battery life is just not enough for me (non starter). Second, IMHO that watch overall is too small. My Garmin is the largest they have (Fenix 6X Pro) as it had the best battery life. Going down to the tiny screen/battery Pixel watch 2 was just never going to work for me.
The 3 has two sizes now which is nice, but the battery life is still way to short.
I had a Galaxy Watch 4 previously 40mm model and it’s battery barely lasted a day, especially with AOD enabled. Ironically, Samsung had released previous models like S3 Frontier with 3 day battery life, so their brand new smartwatch was actually a downgrade. Wear OS sucks so much at battery life.
To make things worse, GW 4 took nearly 2 hours to charge fully via it’s slow WPC based charging. To make things worse, it constantly throttled and overheated in hot summers.
Samsung stuck to it’s wireless charging mechanism even on GW 6 and 7. So, while Xiaomi’s smartwatch with ~500mAh battery can charge in 40 minutes while my GW 6 takes ~80 minutes to charge a ~425maH battery.
If you want simplicity and something between a smart and dumb watch, check out PineTime. The battery on mine lasts for about 8-10 days.
It has basic features like notifications, timers, and step counter. You can also customize the UI.
I just wrote a post lamenting there being no suitable replacement for a pebble, this looks like it might have immediately proved me wrong! Did you ever use a pebble and would you liken the pine to one?
I am confused, the gear s3 came out in 2016, so even 2 years ago it was already 6 years old.
That is not what I would consider new smartwatches these days.
I don’t remember the exact model, whatever one came out like 2 years ago.
One of the reasons I bought a steam deck is because it’s one of very few consumer electronics that allows the user to buy replacement parts and repair it themselves.
I was so mad at the video of Louis Rossmann being upset about valves repair video because valve’s the only tech company not actively making stuff harder to repair. Even if the video is cringy and overestimates lithium ion batteries, the help it’s given right to repair (what Louis fights for) is large and it’s upsetting to see him bash the deck as a whole. Here’s a comment that summed it up pretty well,
Valve:
-is safe from lawsuits because someone died while
handling a lipo battery with a knife.
I get:
-repair documentation
-replacement parts
-upgrade path
great device that has a potential to finally bring desktop Linux to the masses.
here’s the video btw https://youtu.be/2qVUlO8-cl4
