I’ve said it for years on Reddit and I will continue saying it here on lemmy. I miss Pebble.
I use a galaxy watch 4 now but while it can do some more thing it still doesn’t fully match the functionality of my pebble time. So many stupid software limitations that shouldn’t exist.
If the battery hadn’t degraded I’d still be using it.
I’ve looked at fossil multiple times and they’ve never matched the functionality I need. No current watches really do.
I upgraded from a Pebble Time to a Garmin Vivoactive 4. Quite a bit more expensive but I’m really liking it.
I’m just sad that Garmin is slowly replacing their Memory-in-pixel display in favor of AMOLED screens. MIP displays seemed to me to be the next best thing to e-ink type displays - always on with minimal battery drain.
I’ll just need to keep my watch for as long as I can.
Garmin is making the best smartwatches by far and has been for a while. I’ve been through Samsung, Google, and Apple offerings and I’m not leaving the Garmin lineup for the foreseeable future.
PineTime, ~25$, is the spirit child of Peeble. Its OS InfiniTime is on github. And boy that battery, I can go way past 1 week, close to 2 weeks.
I have the always on screen turned off and the only way to turn it on is the button or when a notification comes in. My battery lasts almost a month.
I have a Garmin Forerunner 55. It’s light on my wrist and the battery lasts 2 weeks. I don’t think it’s lacking any functionality I had on my OG pebble, but it’s got a few more bells and whistles.
Not the same person, but I greatly enjoy my (now second) Pebble classic for several reasons, which I imagine some are shared between Starayo.
- Always-on Display
- Week-long battery life
- High contrast display that can be read easily in low light as well as in direct sunlight
- Simple notifications support, with quick canned replies
- physical button navigation that make the watch easy to use without needing to look at it
- Isn’t obscenely large
- quick launch application shortcuts from holding side buttons
- simple media playback control that is responsive
- Doesn’t attempt to be another smartphone, but rather as a local companion to your existing smartphone (doesn’t thrive on individual apps, but rather companion apps to complement smartphone usage)
- Customizable and relatively simple to write applications and watchfaces for.
Unfortunately for me, fossil’s watches do not match up. Looking at the gen 6, still uses an ill-suited AMOLED display that is bound to have poor contrast in direct sunlight unless the brightness is cranked so far that it will blow through the battery. Even then, the average battery life on the gen 6 is atrocious compared to most Pebble models as many reports say it can make it through one day. I’m sure by now, WearOS devices have worked out some of the kinks to make them easier and faster to use, though I am not sold on needing a personal assistant in order to do basic tasks (as Fossil markets their gen 6 smartwatch; I do doubt that this is necessary for general function).
Also, this might be controversial, but I personally feel that a device that has Bluetooth and is intended to communicate with a device that is often within ten feet of it really doesn’t need to waste resources and probably become more of a privacy nightmare by including Wi-Fi, LTE, and other data communication methods (beside NFC). Furthermore, pretty much every WearOS device I have seen has had a struggle to keep battery life for more than a couple days, and everyone deems that devices that can should be praised for whatever reason. Seeing as my ancient smartwatch that does most of what these newer watches do yet can effortlessly hold a six day battery life at worst, I seriously question why newer watches that have so much compromise and are incredibly misguided as to what a complementary wearable should be are what are being developed. Not to mention that the Pebble classic on launch was $99 USD whereas one can easily find $400+ smartwatches that still have way too much compromise in comparison.
Second the hybrid. I had a nice one - bronze face and the gold hands would move to indicate notification type etc. had some complications for step count etc. It looked great, I reckon it’d be even better with a small eink screen to show who the message was from etc. Kind of like the withings
Their 6th gen hybrid does indeed have a 1.1in 240x240 E-ink display that can display the message! :)
I loved the design of their watches, they looked like a watch first and foremost, but their speed and battery life was atrocious and I owned 3 generations of them before switching to Apple.
With the state of wearos where both the os maker and the chipset maker aren’t believing in the platform, it’s difficult to blame them.
The best way to do a smartwatch is using an embedded dedicated os that uses minimal resources to save battery. It’s the reason a ten year old pebble smartwatch with 128k of ram and a 64 MHz CPU feels faster than a brand new wearos smartwatch with 2gb of ram and a 2 GHz CPU.
If for example you want to show a barcode for a membership card on the watch screen, you shouldn’t run a full 100mb app on your watch with a database, internet connection, 2mb high res PNG files for icons and other shit. There’s a powerful smartphone in the pocket that can do all the hard work like syncing, adding, editing or deleting cards and so on, and when a card need to be showed on the screen the phone just tells the watch “ok so using the embedded library just show this barcode, and to make it fancier use a green border because it’s Starbucks”
But when people are purchasing it they’re directly comparing it to the Apple Watch with beautiful display, fancy animations, and the numbers on the spec. “What? This watch only has 128k of RAM? LOL this other one with 16000 times more memory gonna be much better”
So, instead of doing it the right way and investing millions on an embedded os with fancy animations everyone took the shortcut of using wearos. “The chipset and the operating system is already done for us, just need to customize it!” And spend millions in customizing it.
But then, those Qualcomm “smartwatch” chipset are just ten year old smartphone CPUs in disguise and the operating system it’s the full android os with a different skin. Congratulations, you got a ten year old smartwatch sized smartphone with bad performance and short battery life! Good luck selling that shit. Ah, forgot to mention that the company that is selling you the operating system is directly competing with your sales and at the same time it’s holding exclusive features for themselves and/or delaying them for months. And they’re using an exclusive chipset that’s way better than whatever you can get. Yeah, customers gonna be pissed that your expensive smartwatch sized smartphone doesn’t have all the features of the pixel watch.
My pebble was the only “smart” watch I’ve had that I liked. I’ve given up on wearing a watch for now.
I should introduce you to the Bangle.js 2
Oh wow. How had I not seen this before? This looks super fun. Thanks for the link.
Good. They fucking sucked, and they never supported them.
We bought 2 of their watches, brand new. The gen 4 literally had like 6 months of life in it before they stopped supporting it, and apps stopped working on it.
It had abysmal battery life and performance, basically unusable.
We also had the Sport. The front fell off. Which is not very typical, I’d like to make that point. The screen kinda opened up, flopped over and ripped itself off when going to bed. We got a replacement, horrible customer service, we had to hunt down a store that had the watch in stock, and then argue with them to make them understand that we’re here for a warranty replacement, and they didn’t know what to do.
That watch then proceeded to live for 3 months before they suddenly cut support and new apps stopped running on it.
I had one that also had some sort of charging reliability issue, and I decided to return, so I agree it isn’t a huge loss. Still, a lack of competition is usually bad in terms of prices for the rest of us. And WearOS getting even smaller means even narrower dev community. Easier to fully wall off the garden and close the OS when there are fewer and fewer people in it
