The Pebble smartwatch finally does real fitness tracking | Hacker News Reader

The Pebble smartwatch finally does real fitness tracking

theverge.com

47 pointsakirk12 comments

Fitness tracking and notifications are the two "killer apps" for my Apple Watch. It's exciting that Pebble has now added fitness to its existing notifications capability, especially now that they are working with Stanford.

I'd never used a FitBit or similar fitness tracker before getting my Apple Watch, but I had been a huge Garmin GPS watch fan for running and biking in the days before my iPhone had enough battery life to last for a run with GPS enabled.

At first I thought I was mostly going to use the Apple Watch in conjunction with planned activities like running a few miles - I certainly use it for that, in conjunction with Runkeeper - but now I also use the passive activity tracking to keep track of how I'm doing throughout the day.

I won't say that it's strictly because of the watch, but I'm now about as fit as I've ever been, and I think the easy glance over to see where I'm at is really helping with that.

> I won't say that it's strictly because of the watch, but I'm now about as fit as I've ever been

I will gladly credit my Fitbit Aria scale for the same result.

Interestingly, it is less for the feedback if gives me in the short term and rather the long-term graphs. I know that if I want to manipulate the scale up or down in weight and fat percentage, I have to be consistent over really long periods of time. I almost never miss days running or at the gym, my days of heavy drinking are long behind me, and I feel orders of magnitude better than I have in years past. These systems really are fantastic tools, and show that the application of game mechanics can be a force for enacting strong positive change on a personal level.

Do any of these fancy fitness gadgets offer data analysis and reports without sending all my data to a remote server? Can't really fathom how few people seem have doubts about sending all their sleep and movement data to god knows who.

I'd really like to see autonomous watches with GPS, providing minimal smartphone functionality (navigation, calls and messages), plus serious fitness tracking.

But at the same time I'm hesitant to wear one of those devices without reasonable guarantees big brother is not collecting data. Therefore, something like AsteroidOS seems ideal: http://asteroidos.org/

>Thanks to an amazing library called "libhybris", AsteroidOS can re-use already existing Android drivers and be compatible with Android Wear watches.

Do they have a hardware compatibility list?

It boots on LG G [1], but there are no applications yet [2]. The project started recently.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_GJiQYTAIk

[2] https://github.com/AsteroidOS/asteroid/wiki/TODO-List

You know about the Garmin watches, right? They'll do navigation and (some) message notifications.

Some reading:

http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2014/11/winter-gadget-recommendat...

http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2015/12/garmin-forerunner-630-dep...

Polar, TomTom etc have similar devices, but Garmin are probably the default choice.

Thanks, I've used Polar HRM since the late 90s, and then switched to Suunto GPS-enabled watches.

But I'd prefer something with a bit more features. Something that can replace very very casual smartphone use. Receive a short call, navigate somewhere. And track my fitness all the time, including HRM w/o band and blood pressure.

The VivoActive is pretty nice.

But no mainstream[1] smart watches can replace a phone - they act to supplement it

[1] I think there is an LG watch with a SIM in it, but it has limited availability.

You need to invent a better battery then.

This is cool, but can I easily dump and analyze my own data? Hopefully there is some API to foster visualization applications or at least a way to dump it externally. Needing to rely on one or some assortment of predefined apps always makes me feel like it's not my data.

If you're on iOS, my understanding is Pebble will write to the Health app.

From there you can analyze the data. You can't export directly using the app, but you can view all records or find one of many apps that support HealthKit which may possibly export for you.

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