Pebble is dead and hardware buttons are going with it | Hacker News Reader

Pebble is dead and hardware buttons are going with it

theverge.com

107 pointsallenleee86 comments

The author purposely ignores Garmin, who is one of the biggest player in Smart watches, after Apple and among Samsung and Fitbit. They make a strong case of buttons over touch screens, mostly because athletes prefer them, buttons are easy to operate without looking at the screen and the only way when the screen is wet, something that is meant to happen even if you don’t swim at all. But he even ignores the fact that Fitbit themselves always use a combination of touch screen and buttons, including their newest watch The Ionic. I hate when a headline is fabricated this way.

I sort of consider real fitness watches, like the Garmin line to be in a different category from smartwatches. My Fenix 3, especially when paired with a chest strap feels like an actual tool for me, whereas the smartwatches I've seen and tried were more like toys.

I don't think I can ever switch back to a touchscreen watch until there's one that still has the physical buttons, but also lets you disable the touchscreen functionality during workouts - beyond the difficulty getting the touches to register, sweat has enough minerals that the screen sill start registering false touches, which can wreak havoc during a workout when it starts pausing things!

And, of course, with my Fenix 3, I normally charge it less than once a week unless I need to use GPS on it. Touchscreen smartwatches simply don't get that type of battery life.

Capacitive touch screens don't work well if your hands are sweaty. I couldn't understand for the life of me why Garmin ever introduced a capacitive touch screen watch.

I thought my old Garmin GPS watch was amazing when I first got it around 2010.

I certainly can understand why they released a watch with a touchscreen. They're trying to appeal to people who aren't necessarily as serious about fitness (or rather, don't feel the need/desire to closely track their workouts), but do want to start doing more, and want some of the benefits that they've heard smartwatches are supposed to offer.

I think the smartwatch fad is actually good in some ways, because it is forcing Garmin to look at what they can realistically add into their core watches to help make them more appealing, while still not turning them into a full smartwatch until the technology is there.

And I'm calling smartwatches a fad for now because they really are at the moment. The potential for them to be more than a fad is there, but the technology, specifically battery life, isn't there, and the current lineups don't offer a compelling story about why we should consider them an integral piece of technology to keep with us all the time.

See also: FitBit Blaze, which also has real buttons

> The author purposely ignores Garmin, who is one of the biggest player in Smart watches, after Apple and among Samsung and Fitbit.

How did you conclude that it was intentional?

What’s the proof athletes prefer Garmin over Apple?

Op says that athletes prefer hardware buttons

Touchscreens are awful on a device that you might want to use in the rain... like a watch.

I have a Garmin sport watch with a touch screen (plus two physical buttons). If you're out in the rain and need to change modes on a run or bike ride, it's nearly impossible, you need to stop, bend over to shield the watch with your body, dry your finger on your shirt (assuming you have a dry spot), then then you can usually use the touchscreen.

Once it's set to the right mode, the 2 physical buttons work well, but anything that requires the touchscreen is nearly impossible without stopping what you're doing.

(at least that's the case with whatever touchscreen technology Garmin uses, maybe there's a better option for use in the rain)

I've found that the touchscreen on my vivoactive works perfectly when wet and in light rain (not under the shower).

However to get it to work it's necessary that some metal part of the watch (either one of the buttons, or the charging contacts underneath) to be touched (either by the wrist, or another finger) while touching the screen.

You must have a different Vivoactive than me, I have the Vivoactive HR with no metal buttons. The charging contacts are on the back and recessed enough that they probably don't contact my wrist.

I have the original 1st gen. vivoactive, the buttons are metal and the charging contacts recess is less than 1mm, so it certainly touches the wrist. You can clearly see the metal button on this picture https://urbanwearables.technology/wp-content/uploads/2016/02...

Older resistance style touchscreen s would work well here, this is where the capacitance screens fail easily.

I believe resistive screens are also better for battery life, which you'd think would be critical for a watch.

The thing is, I saw a touch screen attending the "embedded world" embedded technology conference in nuremberg a few years ago...multitouch included. Why is this not more common? Especially for "rugged" devices?

Or with gloves on. This is one of the reasons why I still use my Garmin GPSMAP 62s with a heart rate sensor when I go for longer bike rides, despite having an Apple Watch (the others being: more detailed maps and being able to 'recharge' the GPS by swapping out two AA batteries).

I commute by bike. I understand I'm not a huge market segment but I love my Pebble Time Steel. I'm definitely not looking for fitness tracking or an obvious fitness watch: who really wants to record every single minute of their _commute_ anyway? I just want a smartwatch that does smartwatch things with zero fuss while outside. I can read it in direct sunlight, interact with it in the snow with heavy gloves, and not worry about it when it's pouring rain.

I bought a spare PTS when FitBit bought Pebble. I was concerned there'd be no replacement when the time came to retire the current watch. So far, I'm unfortunately correct.

I still have a Pebble Steel. I hope the services get open sourced, because if not, it will never work with another phone after the cut-off in July. It's one of the huge disadvantages of how we distribute software today; the bastardization of the Linux software repository into these stupid non-mirrorable/non-free app stores.

It's also sad no phone has slide-out keyboards any more. I'm sure there are several people who would take the thickness trade-off. If a major manufacture produced a physical keyboard phone, there probably would be demand. One of the earliest HTC android devices, after the Evo 4G, was a version with a slide out keyboard. Now the only option seems to be BlueBerries.

No argument regarding the app stores, but for Android you can (usually?) make a backup of the APK and then move it to another device.

Alternatively: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/nodomain.freeyourgadget.gadg...

Funny story: I did this a lot when I had Android, but offloaded the APKs to my computer for storage purposes. This became a lot buggier and irritating when Android switched USB handling from mass storage (like a flash drive) to MTP (like a digital camera). I once tried to talk to Dianne Hackborn about this difficulty at Google I/O, and the moment I mentioned 'APK file', she said Google 'didn't support piracy' and walked off.

That day I learned backing up your own apps was 'piracy'.

Tangential, but:

> when Android switched USB handling from mass storage (like a flash drive) to MTP (like a digital camera).

This is how, step by step, computers become even more difficult to use by regular people, and how computing becomes balkanized. All the attempts at fucking with the hierarchical filesystem are ass-backwards and create inconsistent abstractions, which make learning hard.

I don't get your concern; MTP is an hierarchical filesystem, with directories and files. It's just that it works as a kind of network filesystem rather than allow the computer direct access to the storage device.

It may be hierarchical, but it abstracts away what's actually stored, and as a result of this translation it feels different. Hard to put my finger on every aspect here, but in the various combinations of desktop and mobile OS-es that I've experienced, MTP feels slower, more klunky, more prone to fail during data transfer, and most importantly - over it, devices expose only a small part of the stored data, which leads regular people to wonder a) where their transfered files end up on the mobile device, and b) how do they transfer e.g. downloaded documents.

I just ran into this trying to copy files off a current Android phone. Windows10 simply wouldn't select all files in the camera directory so I couldn't alt+enter to see the total size.

Tried to copy all user-accessible directories, spent a while calculating size then failed with 'unspecified error'.

I hope I can find a way to enable standard file access. I did manage to make a backup with ADB and then decrypt it with a java tool... and it only included two of the directories. Maybe my internal flash storage is corrupted?

MTP is super unreliable. When copying a lot of files off a phone, I usually have to disconnect and retry at least once or twice.

MTP/mass storage may be switchable. At least on my older CyanogenMod device, Settings>Storage>menu in upper-right>USB computer connection, gives a "Connect as..." selection of MTP, PTP, Charge only, UMS (mass storage).

Mileage may vary based on device and age. This was going on seven years ago now and not on a device that could run CyanogenMod. Google has significantly reworked their storage handling since this incident. I am still miffed about the accusation of piracy though.

> One of the earliest HTC android devices, after the Evo 4G, was a version with a slide out keyboard.

The first Android phone (let alone the first HTC Android) was the HTC Dream, with a physical keyboard. Back in those days Android didn't even have a software keyboard -- you had to use the physical keyboard.

By the time the Evo 4g came out, hardware keyboards were already considered second class citizens. The Evo Shift 4g had a worse screen, worse camera, and a worse CPU than the Evo 4g despite being released a year later.

Thankfully a few companies have picked up the UMPC market, with products like the GPD Win and the Gemini PDA. I don't need a hardware keyboard on my phone, but I do need a portable device with one for emergency SSH sessions while on the road.

I continue to retain the belief that hardware vendors intentionally killed keyboard sliders by making them worse phones than their non-keyboard counterparts, then claiming they didn't need to build them because nobody wanted them. They sat a full year behind in hardware specs in most cases.

I don't believe it is the only reason, but it certainly significantly hurt them. They're also less attractive/bulkier, have less room for battery, are more expensive to design/manufacture, have higher failure rates, etc. I would still pay ridiculous amounts for a phone with flagship specs and flagship build quality, with a physical keyboard.

God I miss my Pebble (had a Pebble Time 2)... I took it off when it was bought and haven't put it back on (pull of the bandaid).

It was pretty much better than any of my friends watches. We used to trade to try them out. I hate the iWatch because the bettery died all the time and I hate the touch screen (I love dials too). The android wear was a bit more my style, but again battery life sucked and I didn't like it wasn't eInk.

Honestly, give me an option to pay double for a pebble and I would. The Pebble Time 2 was the best watch I've ever owned bar none.

Wait, you had a Pebble Time 2? And you didn't wear it?!!

The Time 2 is legendary with Pebble fans, as it was cancelled and never sold commercially, and Kickstarter backers were given refunds. Only a handful went out to employees & reviewers:

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/12/7/13864804/p...

I still use my Pebble Time Steel and love it, and I'm not sure what I'll move to next. The Fitbit Ionic is meant to be the successor (and it has hardware buttons too, despite what the Verge article says). But it doesn't have a microphone, and I use that a lot on my Pebble. It's useful for dictating SMS replies when I'm out running, or for setting quick reminder alarms with Snowy (Pebble's version of Alexa / Siri).

>I took it off when it was bought and haven't put it back on (pull of the bandaid).

That seems needlessly masochistic. I was bought a Pebble Time Steel for Christmas just after the FitBit buyout. I use it with Gadgetbridge, never even touched the official app. It's wonderful, and the hardware shows no signs of slowing down.

The hardware will run for a long time. Consider that you recharge once a week. That's about 208 recharges in 4 years. Or 416 recharges in 8 years. That's the lifetime I expect a normal watch to last while the batteries either had to be replaced or it was "self-winding".

> I took it off when it was bought and haven't put it back on

I don't think I understand this.

If it was such a great watch why did you not wear it? Why did you take it off immediately after it was bought?

Judging from context I would guess he/she meant: "I took _the watch_ off when _the company_ was bought"

I lost the ability to just plug in my headphones and skip between songs on my iPod while drifting off to sleep on planes.

Where has he been for the last 10 years? You've always been able to use headphone buttons to skip between songs on iPhones/iPod touches.

My wife just started teaching fitness classss. She uses this to control music while she is teaching:

https://www.amazon.com/Satechi-Bluetooth-Button-iPhone-Samsu...

Small footnote: the iPod Touch comes with Earpods without controls.

I just bought a Pebble 2 SE and it's absolutely phenomenal. I'm hoping over the next few months an open source OS comes out, otherwise I'll have to look for a worse alternative.

https://rebble.io will eventually become usable. But honestly even the stock firmware is fine. Like, it still runs any applications you want.

There's 2 main alternatives for smartwatch OS:

For Pebble there is Rebble [1] and for touchscreen smartwatches there is AsteroidOS [2]. You wanna look at the first although most functions of the stock firmware should remain working. They'll for sure stay running till June 2018.

As for the subject (I skimmed through the article), I think its true. I own a Pebble 2 as well and I'd love to buy a smartwatch with similar features (7 days battery life, music control, customisable watchface, stepcounter, calendar, alarms, Google Drive app, workout app, 2FA app, to-do list app, and 4 hardware buttons or some inventive way to be easily usable during sports (the scrollwheels don't cut it)). I haven't found any (nevermind the price of the Pebble being very competitive). Mind you, I did find some devices which were very good at some of these features.

[1] https://rebble.io

[2] https://asteroidos.org/about/

Battery life keeps me from buying a successor to my pebble. The Samsung Gear watches are alluring except for daily charging.

Fitbit Ionic is the spiritual successor to the Pebble, and has a five day battery life. Has been as low as $229 on sale. Not enough apps for it yet though.

This former Pebble owner is quite happy with his Garmin Fenix and it’s week-long battery life. You’ll pay through the nose for it (US$500), but Garmin might have less expensive options with good battery life. I paid the money because I actually use the stuff that makes it cost $500, but something like a 620 might suit you for less dosh.

Vivoactive 3 also has a week uptime if you do not use GPS [1] Vivoactive HR can do with 8 days even. Both assumes you don't use the GPS. When you use that, battery life is far less, but you don't use that 24/7.

I'm quite lost with regards to Garmin as in which devices do what. I feel like I'm lost in a forest. If anyone has a comparison website, I'd love to read such. From what I can tell it appears the Fenix has hardware buttons which the Vivoactive's doesn't.

[1] https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/571520

Maybe for screen equipped wearables we'll see buttons disappear. Though I doubt keyboards on laptops and game controller buttons will be replaced any time soon. Consider the move from tablets to laptops and paper in schools.

Pebble was a terrible device, and riddled with horrble design decisions.

From the word “go” you knew Pebble was trying to lock you in, register and count you as a user, log demographic information about you, and tether that information to unique device identifiers.

You could not simply use Pebble as a watch, if so desired. Pebble enforced specific behaviors onto the user.

For example, you couldn’t just like the looks of the watch, buy it, take it out of the box, wear it, and use it to tell time. No.

Open the box, and the watch directs you to an internet connection, so it can phone home to the mothership. Really? Really?

To me, that reeks of exploitation, and the goal was never to provide people with a good watch that does stuff. Open the box, and push people around. Make them clap their hands and sing along.

Sorry guys. You made serious mistakes. People notice. Good riddance.

Turning off Bluetooth and uninstalling the app (or stopping it from running in the background) after the initial update worked just fine when I tried it.

Not sure why you’d want that, though.

The vast majority of users will buy a smartwatch expecting it to be smart, so giving them instructions for how to enable those features seems logical to me.

>lock you in

Wait, how?

>demographic information

...which is optional?

  after the initial update

See, there’s your problem.

  Wait, how?

The decision to ship the watch in an inoperable state is coercive.

  optional?

Still, this is a dark pattern. Forcing the conversation represents an inductive stance. Going in blind, the user has to judge whether they should yes-to-death (at their own risk) a lengthy sequence of interview questions, to explore further, or attempt to reject the possibly optional activities, and feel the tug of a leash later on. The preferred behavior is obvious. Do you defy the preference? What ramifications will that have?

Unboxing it, you find there are strings attached, puppeting your actions.

> The decision to ship the watch in an inoperable state is coercive.

Actually it's merely practical; the OS ships with a known save OS that's capable of booting up and connecting to Bluetooth to get an update. It's also the OS that it reverts to if it gets stuck in a boot loop.

It's a perfectly reasonable engineering choice.

No, it’s pretty unreasonable, and obviously a business decision.

Got any facts?

Your opinion regarding the descriptive qualifier of this problem as an “engineering” problem, thus special (a no-true-scotsman) and exempt from all other requirements certainly isn’t based on facts. You first.

But hey, choices are choices. Feel free to make as many bad decisions as you like. How many replies have I put forward? How many obstinate retorts are there? Read them all and listen or don’t.

I am extremely skeptical that this is the reason Pebble failed. Most consumers are not privacy oriented, and all of the major competitors in the market require the same activation process that Pebble "forced" onto users. If you wanted a watch that doesn't forcefully tether you to a phone, you didn't want a smartwatch.

That’s funny, because I’M a consumer, and I’m TELLING you that’s what I want in a smart watch. I guess I just don’t exist. Hilariously, neither does the Pebble.

Yes, that is why I said most consumers, not all consumers. I am sorry Pebble did not fit your use case, but it is a tad hyperbolic to assume that is why the company failed or that your ethical requirements represents the majority of consumers. As a Pebble developer and extremely active member of the community I can assure you that isn't the case.

Look at how the watch’s community failed to grow beyond certain limits, and how small the community remained, despite insistent proclamations that the device is well-designed. I think that speaks for itself.

Honestly it failed to grow with general consumers but it's been a pretty huge it with those who know about it. I got one for my wife and she loved it but literally nobody knew what it was and most people mistook it for an Apple watch.

It's a smartwatch -- the watch didn't have a full OS installed when you first turn it on. It's meant to be paired with a phone. If you just want a watch without smart features then just get a watch. This complaint is ridiculous and nobody who owned a Pebble would take it seriously.

Pebble failed because they needed better marketing, took VC money so they needed to grow fast, and focused on unnecessary hardware addons that nobody wanted (smart straps).

There are still plenty of people buying out the remaining Pebble hardware. It was a good device and pretty good ecosystem.

> and focused on unnecessary hardware addons that nobody wanted (smart straps).

Frankly, for me the "nobody wanted" part was the fitness focus - I initially got my Pebble precisely because they didn't try the sports angle like everyone else, but instead went for a hacker-friendly device and architecture. I'm not even sure if they put much resources into smartstraps - they just added and described a communication protocol. It wouldn't surprise me if this was just repackaging of a debugging functionality they needed.

It's hard for me to say where things went wrong. Maybe they just tried to grow too fast.

Actually the part general consumers wanted was the fitness part -- this is what put them seriously behind other more poorly designed watches like the Fitbit. They didn't see the fitness angle until it was too late.

Certainly there's no reason why a fitness angle had to interfere with the hacker-friendly architecture.

I remember reading a post mortem interview of th founder around these lines, but can't find it anymore. They went all-in on the fitness thing when they found out the big market was there, thinking of it as their last chance for survival. Ironically I think that was what killed them in the end. Since they had a very loyal customer base (yes maybe not very big but enough so every kickstarter they launched was a massive success) they probably could have lived aside Fitbit, Apple etc. Reducing their burn rate by focussing on their market segment (productivity watch) and not trying to launch several products every year would probably have kept them afloat.

Unfortunately since they took VC money they couldn't just sit by and be a small player with a loyal customer base. That would have been the ideal position for them and could have kept them going for a long time. But that doesn't satisfy their investors that wanted to see a high return on their investment.

They never even really got their fitness side off the ground before they died. The Pebble 2 was their first fitness focused watch and they were already dead when it came out.

The Pebble Round with a heart-rate monitor would have sold like hotcakes to women with the right marketing.

If you’re selling me something, and you call it a “kind-of-thing” I want it to be an actual thing first and a “smart kind of thing” second.

Pebble was kind of not a thing. A little too smart for its own good.

It's a smart watch -- a watch that is smart. If you don't want the smart bit, just get a watch. I'm not sure why this is so surprising. What did you want it to do?

No. Wrong. If I don’t want the smart bit, the device’s degradation into an ordinary version of a watch should be graceful, and without barriers or punishment.

I’m not sure why this is so hard to understand and design toward. Why would anyone buy something that bricks itself if one refuses to play the mother-may-i game?

Bricks itself? You can run the watch untethered if you want, it even has a perfectly serviceable airplane mode.

It’s shipped in a locked state. A factory reset reverts it to that locked state. The device is rendered inoperable through a factory reset by design.

You need a remote server to reactivate this watch. If you try to reset the watch, erase your own private information, and sell it, the person that receives it will need to engage in some problem solving to reactivate it. Or they’ll demand a refund, because they don’t know what to do, to reactivate a watch that can’t validate its own existence.

I agree devices should let you use their offline functions without remote activation - a featurephone owning friend wanted a Fitbit and the one we picked was reviewed as "does not require a smartphone". She couldn't do anything with it before installing a desktop utility to activate it.

Actually you don't. When the servers go offline in June, you'll still be able to update the watch. You will still need a phone running Pebble software to do it but since most of the functionality requires a phone with that software anyway this isn't much of a loss.

Pebble has done very well by it's customers for a company that didn't exist anymore. They definitely put in 110% to make sure nobody is left with a brick -- they didn't have to do that. The lights are off and nobody is there anymore. Honestly, given how much they've done I find you complaints even more misplaced.

The tenacity of this evasive posturing is pretty tedious. I suppose the odds of some non-technical user wiping their phone or destroying it, thus losing their last working copy of the app (after Pebble’s IP is dropped from the walled-garden markets and itunes app store), combined with the need to perform a factory reset on their watch is, somehow to be regarded as a six sigma impossibility, yes?

If the intention is to skip songs and change volume when listening to music, can't you just use the buttons on your headphones?

I understand that there may be value for hardware buttons, but the example given by the author is a pretty much covered by simple headphone buttons.

Not if you have Airpods...

Buttons on smartwatches isn't dead. There are just a bit more niche: https://www.kronaby.com/

I have touchscreen gloves - never had any problems even for the 5 years I spent in Buffalo.

I recommend Agloves because they have awesome customer support incase your gloves have knit issues. They sent me a pair of the thicker ones for free when I asked for help with a pair that had some stray threads.

Here is an amazon link: http://amzn.to/2Eg8MUc

I have a Gear S3 now (used to own a Pebble) and I rarely touch the screen to do anything (except to treat it as a big button). You can do most navigation with the buttons and the ring around the outside.

Between that and the always-on-display it's a good replacement for the Pebble.

Use a Casio G-Shock with bluetooth if you want control your music. 2 year battery time too.

I've never heard of these. Do you have any links to store pages? Everything I find seems to be crazy expensive/discontinued.

Casio watches tend to be "crazy expensive", or more than everyone else anyway.

So far as I can see G-Shocks range from $200-$1100 [0], which is about normal for a Casio. The one with bluetooth, the G'MIX, is around $350, [1] which sounds about right for them (their famous calculator watch is 50+, even though its fairly basic).

[0] https://www.bevilles.com.au/watches/g-shock

[1] https://www.bevilles.com.au/casio-g-shock-bluetooth-g-mix-se...

That's insane. Are there any similar BT enabled watches with a long (2+ year) battery life? Being able to configure from a smart phone and control actions from the watch sounds cool.

Are you talking American dollars? Don't know about the others, but Casio's awesome calculator watches can be had for less than US$16. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000GB1R7S/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=...

This article explains part of my rationale why, later this week when I get my new MacBook Pro, I'm going to opt for the non-Touch Bar version.

Watch hardware buttons come back in a mainstream product in 5-10 years, and be touted as a revolutionary new feature.

Does on touchscreens help with driving more engagement metrics and/or advertising screen time?

I doubt it. It's more about consumer perception. Hardware buttons aren't futuristic, touchscreens are. And smart watches are largely a futuristic niche product. Pre-purchase consumers want better specs and often neglect the practicality of those decisions (battery life of OLED panels and touchscreens, usability of a 1 inch touchscreen interface, etc).

Classic verge bullshit where they assume everything apple does is innovative and "the future". If you look at the general market you will find things like note8, which adds a hardware button, pixel2 which adds a hardware squeeze detector, gear s3 which adds a physical circular wheel.

I promise you verge will soon publish an article indignantly explaining how every touchscreen needs a notch on the top that looks ugly and obscures viewing area.

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