Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

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I bought the original Pebble on Kickstarter. I jumped on the Time on Kickstarter when it was announced. I changed my order to the Time Steel when it was made available. I bought an original one for the wife, I bought her a Time as well.

And I'm going to wait on this one. If they're going to delve into the fitness category, I'll be looking at Garmins (of which I have several, albeit older ones with no smart watchy stuff) which are more durable (my $DEITY, does the Pebble get scratched up), go forever on a charge, and I'm willing to bet just plain do the job better because Garmin has been at it for a while.

Given the hurdles on iOS that Pebble can't seem to overcome (for which they are not entirely, if at all, to blame), I'll also wait and see what Apple has on tap. Apple has some shortcomings to eliminate, maybe they'll do that next round.

It's not because I'm unhappy with my Pebbles, I love my current Time Steel. But if I'm going to spend money on a watch that does what Pebble is currently advertising, my options open up to include established competitors in that space. I'm not willing to bet real money that Pebble can outdo those competitors right out of the gate. So I'll wait until it hits retail, see what it really does and what the experiences of others are. Maybe I'll get one, but it's not guaranteed like it was for previous versions.

I think Garmin is way underrated as a (hardware) technology company.

Given that they were a GPS company that people wrote off as being irrelevant in the age of smartphones and Google Maps they have done a great job carving out multiple niches in sports devices (and that ignores their "Smart Glass" airplane business).

I have 2 Edge cycling computers and a Garmin running watch and love them all.

The Edge 520 is the type of device that I'd see the specs of and expect to be a half-implemented heap of junk (connects to my phone to receive notifications while I ride? Automatically uploads rides when I finish them? This will never work). And yet it really is rather good.

Their motorcycle products have gotten much worse over time (specifically, Zumo 550 to 350).

They've lost physical buttons (it's much, much safer to get back to map view via tactile sensation) and added horrible drag-based panning to the overhead map view. The device can't reliably distinguish between a tap to initiate a drag and a tap to select a point. Selecting a point recenters the map. The two fight one another, usually going in the wrong direction.

It no longer supports an ad-hoc routing workflow. Before, you could select start and end points to your journey, then randomly select waypoints to visit from the map view, and they'd be added in the most sensible order. Now, if you manage to force the map view to point at where you want to go, then it forces you to select the insertion point of the new waypoint in a list, where you can't tell whether you'll be doubling back on yourself. I have to do all my routing in Google Maps now and then add villages to the route using the city finder. Ad-hoc routing by the roadside looking for curvy roads used to be a 60 second activity. Now I need to take off my gloves, pull out my phone, try and find relevant waypoints by name, type them in - it takes 10x as long.

The hardware is woefully underpowered. It feels just as slow as the Zumo 550 first released ten years ago. It can't route distances longer than about 400 miles if it doesn't involve motorways. Recalculation takes up to several minutes. Redrawing the screen in the middle of London after a zoom change can take nearly a minute.

"I think Garmin is way underrated as a (hardware) technology company."

Can't agree more! I just wish they had a decent SDK so we could have apps on Garmin devices just like Pebble OS.

My wife got a pebble time last year after upgrading her OG pepple. It scratched like crazy and had tons of issues.

She bought a Garmin Vivoactive after xmas and both of us havent looked back. We get 2-3 weeks pf battery with moderate gps use. Alerts work way better then the Pebble watch. I highly recommend the garmin. I forget I have to charge it, but it takes 2 hrs to go from 20%-100%.

Also, I only know one person who wears a pebble, and it was a hand me down. Eveyone I know who owned a Pebble switched to Appl, Android Wear, Microsoft Band or Garmin.

Thats interesting. I wanted alerts as my primary reason for getting a wrist device.

I agree the garmin was very sharp but mine for whatever reason lost bluetooth connection constantly.

The pebble on the other hand has been great for notifications.

I really wished the garmin had been better about that. YMMV.

Alerts are my primary reason also; the only time I do any vigorous exercise I certainly won't wear a smartwatch due to the risk of damage, so that functionality isn't of much use. I don't want to wear a watch in bed or in the shower either. I'm not keen on biometric data being collected anyway so it's good that the latest version of Android Wear allows denying sensor permissions.

What would be ideal would be a smartwatch that can manage to set Google reminders without having to have Google Now turned on; that, plus the occasional text message and even more occasional use of navigation, are all I use it for other than looking at notifications.

I wear a Pebble. I had the OG Steel, and now have the Time Round. I love mine, and haven't had any of the issues others have experienced (and neither of mine are covered in scratches, and I'm not particularly cautious with them?).

IMO it's not that Garmin's hardware is that great, it's that Garmin always got software right, in comparison with rivals like TomTom.

Unfortunately I can't second that. I own an Edge cycling computer with which I'm happy in general, but which already had multiple severe bugs (like simply displaying "memory full" and not resetting itself in a loop) which required either hard resets or even reflashing the firmware to recover. Things which the average consumer might not be able to do.

Maybe in the US. In Europe I found their offerings underwhelming.

I guess I'll be the lone naysayer. I use a 620 and have had a 910 and 405. Each one had major bugs that make me shocked that they shipped. It seems that the general feeling from my friends who use their products, is that Garmin does a less awful job than Polar at providing fitness tracking for athletes.

Just one example, it's a common and known issue that putting the 620 on the charger will sometimes drain it completely. There's magnets that hold it in place so there is no chance the proper connection wasn't made to produce a charge. Even if there wasn't any charge, it shouldn't drain it, but numerous times when I've gone to grab my watch off the charger, I've found it dead. For perspective this is a $500 top of the line watch that they offer.

Garmin's bike computers are the technology of 5 years ago, today! IMO the 520's display and user interface are garish and outdated. It's too bad they don't have any good competition in that space.

They do have competition (Wahoo for one) but the thing is most people who buy those devices don't care too much about the other bells and whistles of modern gadgets. They just want to see the numbers and have the GPS be stable.

I know I might sound against the current, but back in the age of portable car gps, in Europe Garmins were utter garbage compared to TomToms, maps were lousy, navigation perhaps worse. Has anybody experienced the same?

Agreed. I am glad they conceded that people use Strava. If I am going to upload and track results somewhere I would rather use Strava then their implementation.

Indeed. Their web based activity tracking thing isn't fantastic, but it works so seamlessly with Strava it doesn't matter.

My wife bought a Garmin Vivofit because it was water-proof and runs for months on a battery. I ended up buying the Vivofit 2 which has a better clasp, a backlight, and is supposed to sync automatically with my phone.

When I wore a watch, I would take it off as soon as I could because it got in the way. I'm really happy with the Vivofit 2 - I haven't taken it off in (literally) months because it doesn't need to be charged and does just fine in the shower or swimming.

I've been disappointed with the automatic syncing not working. Other than that, it's a great product.

PS: my parents-in-law were given Fitbit devices with HR monitors which they had me set up for them. I'd like the HR monitoring but not at the cost of having a thicker device and having to deal with a proprietary charge connection (one end is standard USB).

Heart rate and GPS take significant amounts of power, unlike MEMS accelerometers, Bluetooth low-energy, and watch displays. A thin, non-rechargeable battery is a possibility for watches without these features.

For watches with these features, it needs a rechargeable battery and a very thin water-proof connection to that battery.

The Vivofit looks really good in the sense that you don't really need to sync it with a smartphone to get the relevant information, it's just there on your wrist. You want something that will tell you at a glance how many steps you've done, and whether you really should be moving around now. I don't think the long-term stuff is so effective. It's a shame it's a bit obtrusive though, I'd prefer if it had the same indicators, but looked like a watch.

Not sure if it's of any interest (or if you've already seen it), but Garmin does have something comparable in an analog watch form with their recent Vivomove tracker.

https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/into-sports/health-fitness/v...

I hadn't seen that, thanks!

> I haven't taken it off in (literally) months

Your wrist must smell great.

Probably, if he showers regularly and doesn't wear the device to tight. :P. Waterproof is great.

> Given the hurdles on iOS that Pebble can't seem to overcome (for which they are not entirely, if at all, to blame)

That says more about iOS than about Pebble. Get an Android. The experience is much better.

But that requires changing your $600 piece of hardware in order to better serve your $200 one - let alone the other disruption changing platforms would bring.

Don't get me wrong, Android is the clear answer here but it's still difficult to justify switching. It would be great if Apple just opened up their smartwatch functionality, but alas...

Get an Android. The experience is much better.

Believe it or not, I actually went that route. My Pebble experience was better, but there's a reason I'm back on iOS. In retrospect, it was incredibly stupid to change my mobile OS just to support a watch. Shoulda just bought a different watch.

The only watch iOS gets along with is Apple's Watch. And that's the point. It locks you into Apple's ecosystem, being defective by design.

If you already have a Time Steel, you should wait on this one. Your watch is less than a year old and the new ones are an evolutionary upgrade.

True, yet as someone who went from the Steel to the Time Steel (and had his Steel stolen), the display readability was a big downgrade;the old Steel was simply far easier to read.

The new Time 2 fixes this, from what I can see, in addition to making the display bigger (two sides of the same coin, but still worth the distinction).

Adding the HRM feature, and the fact that I love everything else about my Time Steel (the readability being the exception), I buddied up for a 2x order.

It's worth mentioning that the Pebble team have been doing some fantastic work on the OS on the past few months; the continuous updates are great.

Also I still get 9+ days from each charge with my always on display; nothing else in the smart watch market comes close.

I have a garmin forerunner 235 which is perfect for running, and functions as my everyday smartwatch with all day heartrate monitoring and basic notifications from my iphone. Do you still wear your pebbles?

Do you still wear your pebbles?

I'm not OP, but I've had the opposite experience: I'm not using mine anymore.

I have both the original Pebble and the Pebble Time, but I've abandoned them in favor of a Suunto Ambit 3.

It functions well enough as a basic smartwatch (it can receive notifications, and that's about it) and fitness tracker, but is far better as a running watch: it records and displays more metrics, with far greater accuracy. Since it is also my fitness tracker, I'm wearing it every day instead of the Pebble, because I don't want two sets of incomplete data.

It's far more important to me to have a watch that functions as a running watch than one that has smartwatch features.

I got the original Pebble from the Kickstarter, and the Time as well. I don't use them for fitness* but I do like the sleep tracking. I've pretty much had a Pebble on my wrist 24x6.5 (I charge it overnight once a week-ish) - after pretty much stopping completely wearing a watch shortly after I got my first cellphone with a clock in the '90s.

Do you still wear your pebbles?

Wearing it as I type right now. But that's because all of my Garmin watches (610 and 910, IIRC) are old enough to not have the smart watch stuff. If I had a 920, I'd ditch the Pebble. I just can't yet justify the $400 simply to aggregate my wrist-worn devices.

What's the battery life like? I heard it's not quite as good as reported and honestly it's a bit hard to believe a device without an e-ink display would fair as well.

It's decent, but using it in outdoor running mode (the only exercise mode I've tried) depletes the battery quite fast. I enable the optional GLONASS, I'm not sure how much effect that has.

Big handfuls, you'll get about 8 days out of it, less a day for every 30 minutes of running.

Garmin have released a few firmware updates for the watch which may account for the difference between my findings and those of early adopters.

GLONASS on most devices that speak both is enabled only when GPS signal quality is poor enough, and it just uses it to improve the accuracy of your position.

It uses more battery life, but in a lot of cases it's the difference between accurate positioning and not.

So, yeah, I'd try doing same day runs on clear days, with GLONASS on and off, and compare drain rate.

To be honest, it doesn't bother me enough to run any sort of rigorous trial. Going by some trusted reviewers, GLONASS sucks an extra 20% during activities. I'm never so far away from being able to charge it that such a small difference bothers me.

It lasts atleast 2-3 days, honestly I charge it every other day and run 3-5 days a week and it works great.

I'd guess it depends a lot on how much you use the GPS. I've had mine for about six weeks, and I charge it once per week.

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