Hacker News Reader

Comment by tedajax | Hacker News Reader

As someone who quite likes their time steel and who was patiently waiting for their time 2 this is incredibly frustrating. No other watches do what I want so I guess my foray into smart watches is over. It's a shame too because I appreciate the convenience it offers but I probably won't miss it much after a couple of weeks

View on HN

I agree with this being frustrating. I had to explain to so many people that even though my watch doesn't have a SIM card, integrated 4G, GPS or a memory card slot for music it is still exactly what I wanted. Pebble watches do what smart watches should do, without trying to be a tiny phone on your wrist.

I guess I can only dream, but I hope they some day open up parts of it so that the phone app can continue working even with changes to Android/IOS down the line (if Fitbit doesn't want to keep the old Pebbles alive).

But with that said, a smart watch makes me feel hyper-connected. Putting it in quiet mode (and/or taking it off my wrist) every now and then is liberating and definitely makes me more productive.

Wow this is so true with me, I just want a watch that is a small extension of my phone. Not a watch trying to be a phone. Now I got to figure out wtf to get next if anything. A watch I have to charge every night isn't going to happen.

> But with that said, a smart watch makes me feel hyper-connected. Putting it in quiet mode (and/or taking it off my wrist) every now and then is liberating and definitely makes me more productive.

I feel that you probably did not configure notifications. Each time I received a notification that is not important I went to Pebble, and disabled it, after a while pebble was no longer as annoying.

Hear hear. I wish I could get the simplistic-but-effective features of a Pebble elsewhere. Track my steps, send me the notifications I want, and let me customize the watchface. The heart rate monitoring was what I was looking forward to the most, it would have made it /perfect/ for my use case.

I have an OG pebble steel and it does everything I currently want in a smartwatch. I don't expect it will stop working for some time, and I plan on using it as long as possible.

Has anybody managed to make a nice dissection of the device to see if it's possible to reimplement it ?

iFixIt does a teardown of the Pebble Time where it seems to have a relatively straightforward construction

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Pebble+Time+Teardown/42382

EDIT: there's also this post on the tech specs on reddit[0]. This looks pretty re-implementable if you're a hardware engineer looking to do something fun. The right component mix seems to have been figured out already.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/wiki/tech_specs

Firmware can be reversed, and as for the hardware, I suppose the teardowns iFixit did should be enough for a competent hardware engineer to replicate the design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com