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Comment by akhilcacharya | Hacker News Reader

The Pebble ran on a Cortex M3. These days the new Mi Bands offer somewhat equivalent specs for $40 with 15 day battery life on color displays with heart rate monitors.

I'd be really excited to see something similar in a more traditional watch form factor.

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There is some talk of the recently announced PineTime (https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PineTime) running RebbleOS. Should be cheaper than the Mi Bands with a more traditional watch form factor and decent battery life!

If it behaves even remotely like a pebble and runs on Rebble then I'm sold, my current pebble has a dying battery and there isn't much replacement on the market...

Mi bands don't support always-on-screens, third party apps, watchfaces, or integrations with apps outside their tightly controlled ecosystem. From my pebble I could get the weather at a glance, control my smartlights, pick the music to play on spotify, reply to messages, surreptitiously browse reddit, control my camera, and track my sleep with Sleep as Android. You can't use Mi to do any of those things.

That was the magic of Pebble: fitting an honest-to-god smartwatch on the hardware of a fitness tracker.

Mi Band 4 has watch faces and recent update brings always on screen. Has weather and can control music on phone. But yeah Mi Bands are fitness trackers with some additional features, but it does work very well for that use case with extremely good battery life.

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