Started looking for a comparable smartwatch: always on, good battery life, and Android notifications, there's just nothing there.
Ended up ordering a Pebble Time Steel from eBay. I feel like a part of my life and sanity was restored.
You can still find Pebbles for sale in various places and I'd recommend getting one over any of the Android Wear watches. They're just that much better.
I keep looking at the Fitbit Versa, which is clearly Pebble's spiritual successor, but it doesn't have an always-on screen or the Time Steel's 7 - 10 day battery life. I just hope Fitbit keeps the Versa around by the time I need to replace my Pebble.
But the killer feature to me is notifications. I can keep my phone completely silent with no vibration and never miss an important call or text or calendar reminder. I never have to pat my pocket to see if my phone is vibrating. I can decline spam calls and decide whether to respond to messages without taking my phone out. I can even leave my phone in silent mode on the counter across the room and not miss calls or texts.
I also love the Google Maps integration (third party app). Being able to see my next turn on my wrist is very useful and the navigation screen is more informative and easier to read than the native Google Maps Android Wear integration. When I get in my car that doesn't have Android Auto, I can still say "OK Google, navigate to X" and without taking my phone out of my pocket I get voice directions through car Bluetooth audio and visual directions on my wrist.
It's also just a good watch. There are lots of faces to choose from, some with extra information like weather or stock prices or step count or whatever. It's far thinner than any other smartwatch and you don't have to flick your wrist just to turn on the screen and see the time.
I couldn't find an email address for you, mine is HANEEF at PDX dot EDU. I've never actually had a smart watch before, but hearing all these people talking about the pebble is making me really interested to try this one.
We run every day.
The battery life is pretty phenomenal, the step counter and weather bits are handy, the GPS just works, you need the AmazTools app if you want to share your runs to Strava (but it works great), I have an alarm set to shake my wrist every morning at 7am, and if I destroy the watch.. it was all of $70.
The continuous heart rate monitoring is also handy for our gym and zone workouts. I wish it had multiple levels of heart zone alarms, like the TICKR FIT app -- which is amazing for more refined zone training, but it will tell you when you pop out of zone 2 on a run, so it's still useful.
Sleep tracking works great for my girlfriend, doesn't work great for me. So I turned it off and that doesn't bother me.
I think it's a great starter watch, I can see upgrading to the Garmen vivoactive 3 Music, since I'm not very interested in an Apple Watch.
It genuinely is really great, if it had an app ecosystem, slightly higher resolution and was a little smaller / more stylish it would be perfect. A FOSS OS and support for emojis would also be nice
I used to be big into those dorky digital watches when I was growing up, and I've been tempted by fitness trackers. My concerns are:
A) Is the Bluetooth connection secure? Are they taking steps to make it so the Bluetooth connection isn't easily trackable? How easy is it, for instance, for me to set rules to turn off the Bluetooth when the watch isn't actively syncing?
B) Does the watch send any data to someone else's remote servers, at all? Do I need to go through a 3rd party to get access to my own data (ie. what Fitbit does)?
I already have a Smartphone, I don't want my watch to act like one. I don't want to have to do a bunch of syncing through a 3rd-party server that will get shut down and sold off with all of my data someday. I'd pay a lot of money for a device that uses my Smartphone as an access-point/hub, but that largely just works offline and independently.