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Comment by ak217 | Hacker News Reader

For me, the single biggest problem with Apple Watch is battery life, and they seem to have done nothing to improve it.

Garmin has always-on, reflective screen watches that can last for weeks on a single charge. I shouldn't need to babysit my watch.

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Different ideas for different people.

The general concept is, either it lasts for weeks or it lasts for one day, if it lasts for 3 days you'll forget to charge it, if it lasts for weeks it's okay if you forget, a small reminder can tell you to charge it enough for a day in a few minutes.

The trade off is insane in comparison, the Apple Watch is capable of a ton of things you just can't do in a longer battery-life product, things like phone calls, cellular connection, sharp graphics and quality voice replies. Meanwhile the garmin products have fantastic readability outdoors on their low res, low power transflective LCDs.

They simply are on a different roadmap and each roadmap has its own constraints.

I would almost prefer the daily charge over even weekly charging. My Kindle lasts for what seems like multiple weeks, and I have it run out of battery pretty much every cycle. Yet I almost never get anywhere near low battery on my smartphone.

My pebble watch gives me warnings when it has less than a days worth of charge. The only issue is I usually get the warnings when I am not at a charger. An improvement would be to only give the warnings when I am at home.

If it lasts for 3 days, that means I can hammer it with full brightness and cellular, and not have to worry about it not lasting a full day because the marketing speak doesn’t live up to my usage limits.

That's exactly what I do with my apple watch. They do last 3 days with normal usage.

18h is a conservative estimate, anyway. It assumes heavy use.

Apple doesn’t bullshit with battery estimates.

5th generation of the Apple Watch and it still doesn't come close to replacing my Pebble, unfortunately. At least it's closer to an actual watch now, with an always-on screen, but it still can't last 24 hours on a charge.

I miss my old Pebble watch

Why did Pebble go under, anyway? They had a solid product that people enojoyed

Probably a lack of good marketing.

I don't have insider knowledge of their financials, but my impression is if they stayed lean and focused on their core product they'd have been a sustainable small company. Instead, they grew too big in typical VC-backed fashion and it wasn't sustainable.

They spent a lot on R&D and bet the company on kickstarters. Their direction also constrained them to Garmin-like products rather than heading off Android Wear or Apple watch (even fitbit can't compete after buying their guts)

I would imagine that not enough people enjoyed it for the price they asked for.

> still doesn't come close to replacing my Pebble

Does Pebble have a sim? The biggest benefit of apple watch for me is that I can take it anywhere without my phone, play sports, shopping, running, the sim card in the phone is the best thing that keeps me away from staring at my phone screen while I am going out.

It doesn't have a sim. The Pebble's purpose-in-life was to be a good watch first. It complements your phone with smart features like notifications, automatically setting the time on your watch based on your phone, and syncing your calendar to Pebble's timeline. It's not a phone replacement like you're looking for, so Apple Watch is a good fit for you.

Still, I found my Pebble greatly reduced the time I spent looking at my phone because I didn't need to take my phone out of my pocket upon receiving a notification or to check the next item on my calendar.

My Series 3 watch easily lasts more than 24 hours on a charge. The 18-hour battery life, I think, is being very overly conservative.

I mentioned this in another comment, but I see battery life as solved for most people. I wear my watch all day and all night with a third party sleep tracking app. I then charge it in the morning while I shower and get dressed. That is always sufficient to keep my battery charged for 23.5/7 usage.

I had two Pebbles and the first thing that went wrong with them was the battery. If I didn't charge it every night it would die in the middle of the day.

I'm curious, does anyone with more knowledge know how Garmin are able to get so much more battery life out of their watches? Their official spec definitely lists "2 weeks" in "Smartwatch Mode" (which seems to be GPS disabled, but still heart rate tracking and similar).

It is impressive and I'm curious why Apple cannot compete.

Probably at least part of it is that, at least the Garmin Fenix watches are pretty big. The newly-announced Fenix 6 apparently slims down a bit but they're still basically big hunks on your wrist. Personally I don't really mind but big difference from an Apple Watch.

Also, I haven't looked recently because I ultimately found my Fenix 5 wholly unsatisfactory for hiking distance tracking with GPS but the watch with GPS only lasted for about a day. (Which is what I basically care about for a smart watch.)

My Garmin Forerunner is about the size of the larger Apple Watch. While it only lasts 3-6 hours with GPS/HRM/Bluetooth on, it goes for at least 3 weeks on standby, which is what I want from my watch.

I have the Fenix 5x Plus. I effin love this watch. 100m water proof. Weeks without charging. Easy to read, always on display. Sapphire screen. Tons of fitness metrics (even more on the 6). And as far as size. I love the look. I bought a watch. Not a mini phone that is missing functionality. Garmin Pay. Wireless music. Takes calls. Up to 72 hours of GPS. 72 f-cking hours of gps. Not 18 hours of normal use. That is GPS.

I'm guessing it's because Garmin has a lot of excellent embedded hardware folks.

I think it’s more that Apple prefers a powerful OS on a slim devices over long battery life.

Even if they don’t already have a lot of excellent embedded hardware folks, which I doubt, I don’t think they would have trouble hiring them, if they wanted to.

I worked on a smart watch team. Turns out writing a simple while loop and a simple task model, cooperative scheduling, let us sleep our processor more often. It was also very light weight in terms of memory. Basically not having the burden of traditional heavy weight OSes really helped get good battery life.

Feature set.

I have a Garmin FR645 "smart" watch. It lasts two weeks between charges if I don't use GPS a lot; if I run 5 times in the week (w/ GPS on) it'll go most of a week between charges.

But, it doesn't have much of an app ecosystem. Just a few widget-type things. Notifications are basic, and mostly unidirectional. The screen is nowhere near as nice as an Apple Watch. And no cellular.

But, for basic smart things - GPS, simple notifications, and telling time - it's excellent. And costs less than the Apple.

Until Apple can make their watch last most of a week, I'll stick with slightly dumber smart watches that I don't have to think about too much.

Another difference is the CPU, which is really bad on 645 (and all the others). If you play music from it it dries up the battery pretty fast. It goes nowhere near 2 weeks, as you say, for me at least. I’m keeping all the features active, though (bluetooth, gps, glonass, garmin pod, heart rate monitor).

Feature wise I honestly think that Garmin makes better sport watches, while Apple does better smart watches.

I only use HR and GPS when I'm exercising. Otherwise, they're off.

> I'm curious, does anyone with more knowledge know how Garmin are able to get so much more battery life out of their watches?

Yes, I can.

I have a Garmin 5 Plus and the reason it can get such great battery life is it's ####ing massive, with most of the volume devoted to battery. It also doesn't do a bunch of the stuff that the Apple Watch does, with all wireless connectivity requiring Bluetooth sync to your phone.

It's fairly rugged and a decent enough watch but, unless you're outdoors all the time, I wouldn't recommend it: it's bulky and somewhat ugly. I've stopped wearing it because I didn't find it that motivating in terms of keeping fit: ironically I did better before I got it, and am doing better again now I've stopped wearing it.

Also, that battery life tanks the moment you switch on GPS: then you'll be down to about 24 hours.

Overall I'd describe Garmin smartwatches as highly overrated.

I could also never get my Fenix 5 to give me acceptably accurate distances on twisty mountain trails. And, as you say, even as a big guy it’s just too bulky a watch to wear day to day. Maybe I’ll get another someday but my tracking needs are mostly just hiking distances and the Apple Watch eorks for that plus being nice as a day to day watch.

It is the screen, and the discipline. I read a review that said they don't allow 3rd party watch faces that update every second, for example.

Garmin just introduced a watch with an AMOLED touchscreen, the Venu. According to the reviews I've read, it is basically the same watch as the Vivoctive 4. The Venu gets 2 days of battery life, the Vivoactive 4 gets 7.

not even remotely the same feature set, display quality and size. Garmin doesn't have magic batteries. It's all about trade off.

I charge my Apple Watch 4+lte every 2 days. I use them on bicycle (workout app + music over bluetooth, around 2-3 hours) and take them off before I go into the bed. 35% charge is enough for one day.

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