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I feel like I'm starting to sound like a fanboy - but it's because I've had other smart watches and it's just so much better. Why not consider garmin? Not sure if their SDK is going to hit the mark as I'm guessing you want complete control and it's definitely not that, but they have everything else you've asked for.

https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/sdk/

Well, they're three times the price. That's a bit hard to swallow, honestly.

A Pebble is a nice gadget. The Garmin (looking at garmin.com, clicking the first thing that looks like a watch) is close to a month of rent.

I believe you when you state that you're satisfied. On the other hand, I really don't feel that this is in the Pebble replacement league.

The Garmin Vivoactive HR (which supports their app platform, has GPS and optical HR) was on sale for $170 on Black Friday. It periodically will go on sale for this price.

Thanks for that. Looking at the specs it seems to have equivalent battery life (ignoring GPS, which is fair), is just as water proof and generally looks like an alternative.

I'm not sure I like the looks of the thing (but then again, pictures are bad and I should get my hands on one first) and I've no idea about their app platform yet.

Do you happen to know if this works completely offline, ignoring cloud offerings? Can I track whatever I want to track and keep it on the device and/or my phone only?

> Well, they're three times the price. That's a bit hard to swallow, honestly.

Exactly, people keep bringing up Garmin as a replacement but I don't think it is. I was into Pebble for the open C API and price, which did everything I wanted. The Pebble 2 was at the limit of what I would ever pay for a smartwatch, Garmin I just won't consider as I only want a few features.

I'm sad that it is almost certain that the Pebble/fitbit blend that we will see in the future will be completely closed/proprietary which definitely doesn't help me "make awesome happen".

The fenix 3 does look nice, and 2 weeks battery in 'smartwatch' mode is a reasonable amount.

Been badly burned by Garmin in the past, but maybe I'll take a look. They seem to be competing with Suunto, but without that ridiculous iOS only thing.

Thar Garmin watches are so much more expensive and do an excessive amount of stuff. In Canada, for $150 I could have a pebble time with a color screen, great battery life, sleep tracking, step tracking and that can do notifications. That's all I use it for, I might like a heart rate monitor on occasion, but paying way more for extra stuff I'll never or rarely use doesn't appeal to me at all. The only Garmin smartwatch I can find in stores is over $800. This isn't a real alternative.

You've tried several different brands of smart watches and you like Garmin the most? Can I ask what you actually use your smart watch for?

I've always had nice wristwatches (and prefer to look at my wrist for the time instead of my phone) but I've been thinking about buying one recently. Most of them seem centered around health / fitness tracking, though, and that's not something I need or want. Mostly, I just want a "regular watch" (date/time) and perhaps notifications of incoming calls/messages (not necessarily even the content of messages -- just, for example, "SMS from Alice" or "Call from Bob", enough to let me decide whether to go pick up my phone). Garmin's API/SDK looks pretty cool, though.

I looked at some devices a week or two when purchasing a new FitBit for the girlfriend but, like I said, they had loads of features I didn't want. I'm tempted to just continue to wait on purchasing a "smart watch" and get a new wristwatch instead. I'm not really thrilled at the idea of having to charge my watch all the time anyways.

Tracking when I workout, notifications (I carry two phones and during the day my personal phone is in my bag most of the time). And just using it as a watch. I hated that most of the "smart watches" out there would either run out of battery in 8 hours, or have the screen off by default (with a wrist action or a button to enable it).

I don't use the sleep tracking at all, hate having a watch on at night, but the step tracker is fairly accurate and useful.

It's one of those things where I initially bought it for the notifications and the (supposed) battery life. And every now and again I'll find some random new cool use.

There are Chinese companies working on similar products, for example WeLoop[0], Goclever[1].

People are already working on open-source firmware for some of these watches[2], so I think there's a reasonably good chance that either some of these companies will create a decent alternative to pebble, or at least good enough hardware which can be used with community-developed firmware (and even more importantly: apps on the phone side).

[0]: http://www.weloop.cn/

[1]: http://www.goclever.com/uk/products,c1/smart-wear,c114/

[2]: https://ossw.github.io/

Are the Goclever products actually released? They look quite interesting to me.

It doesn't look like either of these are in production anymore. :(

One problem for open source HW watch is that a lot of other folks will just use their factories in ShenZhen to clone the HW sell it for cheap without any R&D and marketing.

Similar to how OrangePI leverage Raspberry Pi situations.

It becomes race to the bottom ($5-10 pi zero) and no one can make $ in the market in both short and long term.

There seem to be a lot of sub $20 watch base on following links - not sure how good/bad are they.

https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product...

Yeah, there are a bunch of crappy "let's see how much we can pack into this for under $20" smartwatches coming from companies in SZ. Most have terrible UI, terrible battery life nad terrible apps on phone side.

However I think that brands focused on quality will emerge. Xiaomi for example don't make the cheapest gadgets but instead focus on quality. If they decide that there is a market for pebble-like smartwatch, I'm certain they would execute well.

Check out the Vector Watch [1]. It's a monochromatic smart watch with 30 days of battery life.

[1] http://vectorwatch.com/

I have a Vector watch and really enjoy it, but I was also going for more of a watch with some smart features rather than a full on smart watch.

That is exactly the sort of watch I'm looking at. It's a watch first, a smartwatch second - those notifications look ideal.

How does it hold up "out there" in the real world? Is it too focused on the suit/office crowd?

Not totally sure what you mean by "out there", but it holds up just fine for me. People comment that I have a good looking watch and only really notice that it's a smart watch when they try and see why I'm fiddling with buttons to read and dismiss notifications.

My only complaint is they try and be clever and detect when you move your wrist up to look at it, so it auto-shows you notifications. This sucks because it's not totally reliable (so half the time I press the button to bring up notifications and it ends up dismissing them because they are already in view, and other times it triggers due to an incorrect motion). I wish you could turn that off but I haven't found a way yet.

I've had this watch for about 3 months now. The first charge only lasted about 2 weeks but after that I actually got more than 30 days on the 2nd charge and going strong on my 3rd charge now, so the battery life claims definitely are true (though I did uninstall the weather app cause it was useless).

The build quality is good. People say it's a little thick but I guess my arms are big enough that I don't notice. I got the leather band and it's never felt uncomfortable to me.

I would recommend a screen protector (Amazon has some good fitting ones for cheap) but that's probably because it's been a decade since I wore a walk and got a tiny scratch because the first day I wore it I accidentally flailed my arm towards a brick column at work. It scratched the face a tiny bit (not really noticable) but I feel much safer with a screen protector.

Any other specific things you'd like to know I'm happy to answer.

By "out there" I mean things like hiking, biking, travel, etc. Away from a sterile lab/work type environment. Things like scratches, rain, dust. Most smartwatches work ok only if really babied.

Interesting to know about the display of the notifications. I was wondering how cleverly they did that, and if it was a check box. Sounds like it needs to be a checkbox or something.

The only scratch I have on it so far is from hitting the watch face against a brick column, but I don't even notice it anymore even looking for it.

Even as careful as I try to be with it I know I still hit it against things and it hasn't scratched up at all. Wheither that's due to the screen protector (not tempered glass, just a standard plastic protector you'd lay on a phone) or not I don't know, but it's held up pretty well. That includes biking and running outside.

I literally only take it off if I go for a swim or at night when I sleep (I don't like having something on my wrist while sleeping)

Very cool, I will certainly keep an eye out for them!

I also do want to say that looking at the Vector Watch SDK, everything with the watch is done through there servers. So that means that if they do go out of business I don't have much faith in the real smart functionality (outside of notifications) still working reliably.

That being said, as long as time and notification works I'm good.

> My only complaint is they try and be clever and detect when you move your wrist up to look at it, so it auto-shows you notifications. This sucks because it's not totally reliable (so half the time I press the button to bring up notifications and it ends up dismissing them because they are already in view, and other times it triggers due to an incorrect motion). I wish you could turn that off but I haven't found a way yet.

The Pebble watchface Time Orbit by Spectre Collie has the very same problem. I love the watchface looks, but if you tilt it, it decides to show other info such as date. It is a usability problem.

There's a rather large difference between the Vector and Pebble though. I checked various Vector watches and saw most at 500 USD, with one at 400 USD. So the cheapest Vector appears to be about 4 times more expensive than a Pebble 2 Classic. I don't know, that just doesn't seem like a fair comparison.

I bought mine from Amazon 3 months ago for $180. So not sure where you are seeing those prices, sheesh.

Their site:http://vectorwatch.com/vector-luna-smart-watch#luna-steel-bl...

The watches seem to start around 350 euros

I'll take a look on amazon :)

The exact one I got was: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0169MX7CK/ref=oh_aui_sear... which shows for me $199 US. I don't know the euro conversions though.

If you do actually purchase one, the screen protectors I got were: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01L03TF7Y/ref=oh_aui_sear...

That is an awesome looking watch, thankyou

How bad / hard is it to put our own software on a pebble? I think that would promote longevity more than looking for another "unicorn of Kickstarter"

And when the current generation of pebbles die from planned obsolescence?

I'm not understanding the downvotes. Pebble devices, as well built as they are, are using components that have definite lifetimes. They are not designed to last forever or be fully user serviceable. What do you do when the components fail?

Components having definite lifetimes and planned obsolescence are two different things, the latter implying artificially limiting the useful life of a product. If that's what you meant, others may be down-voting you because they don't think Pebble in fact did that, especially as you haven't provided any evidence to that effect.

My primary worry is that at some point, the hardware will die.

And by crowdfunding I meant crowdfunding of manufacturing; the hardware would be open source, ensuring you could (with enough skills or good enough friends) make your own instead of buying one, and the software ecosystem would be compatible with it.

I guess my inkling is the opposite. It's like video games, even if the hardware dies, you want the software to be able to run, then you can figure out what hardware you can acquire.

A good example of this is the raspberry pi's with all the NES/SNES/etc games. Withing needing to make sure cartridges and old NES's still work, we use a new piece of hardware to give a very similar experience.

Smart watches and other small worn devices will be changing a lot. I'd rather have hw builds posted to something like massdrop as they are iterated, once the software is mostly saved.

I've been working on a DIY watch off and on a bit.

One of the bigger obstacles for me personally has been bluetooth notifications. I have found surprisingly few examples online of people getting it to actually work, and if you read through their work more closely, it only very barely works. I've tried to reproduce what other people have done and had it actually work even less than that.

I was thinking of selling a pre-programmed bluetooth module with apple and android notifications etc. if I ever got it working, figuring there must be other people in the same situation with this pain point. So far the idea that I could do a better job than others that have tried has turned out to be hubristic, though.

You might want to reverse engineer the current Pebble app and see what they do?

Apple and Android have docs on how you're supposed to subscribe to notifications over Bluetooth. It's just the Bluetooth implementation + drivers + hardware module nitty gritty on an embedded system that's the hard part.

I'm really looking forward to something like a Trivoli [1] or Chronos [2]. It gives me most of the things I use the watch for (alarm and silent notifications) and allows me to use a nicer watch (or different watches, even). I don't get screen that allows me to deal with notifications, but over time I've found that to be 1) kind of rude if I'm talking to someone. 2) For the most part if there's something I need to deal with, it's easier to take the phone out. Mostly I just want to be notified if certain, important notifications come in (SMS, Google Hangouts, possibly one of my email addresses). Your use case may vary, of course.

Obviously we all need something different, but that's what I'm waiting for.

[1]: http://www.trivoly.com/en [2]: https://wearchronos.com/

Count me in, as long as it has a mic, accelerometer and health sensors.

I was planning on getting the Time Round for myself this Christmas, and I'm pretty bummed that this is happening.

I'd be pretty interested in making something like this happen and figuring it out and leading the charge so-to-speak. It'd be an awesome experience, at the very least. However, I have no experience on the hardware side of things. I'm down to learn, but the software side is what I do have some experience with.

You just described Garmin devices (though I'll admit to being sketchy on how "open" their SDK is).