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Comment by Yaggo | Hacker News Reader

Promising specs! I'd rather have multi-day battery life than fancy graphics, maybe even an e-ink display.

Agreed, it's too bad they didn't go for something like the Sharp Memory LCD found in the Pebble watches.

Agreed. I moved from smart watches back to an old Casio sgw-100. Battery life is the main reason. It's nice just to always have a watch that works, and be able to go on camping trips and really be able to rely on the device.

I've changed the battery once in 2 years (and that was simply preventative). The fact that it just keeps on working for years at a time is a nice contrast to basically every other modern device.

Highly recommend the so-called "hybrid" smart watches from Fossil, Withings, etc. The're analog watches with a minimal digital display and all the basic functionality of a smart watch. But since they don't waste power on a big color screen, wifi, or other extravagance, battery life is on the order of a month.

I love mine. I get my notifications, pulse, step, and sleep tracking, in a classy looking package with a grown up battery life.

I got one (Fossil) as well. I love to have the e-ink off, that way it looks like a classic watch. Disadvantage is you cannot put Bluetooth off. I really don't want it on, unless when I specifically turn it on. I probably want a kill switch for it. Which Pebble had.

Same here. Not only does it save battery life; it ensures the display is always on and looks way better.

The Pebble Time had a Sharp Memory LCD, I'm not sure what the Amazfit Bip uses.

It's baffling that there are so few electronics in general that use E-Paper/translective displays. Does anyone know?

The reMarkable tablet, Supernote A5/A6 are some pretty hackable e-ink tablets.

E-Ink is great, but the main point about it is reflectivity/transflectivity (optional backlight), right? You can do that with LCDs, right (see mentioned smartwatched)?

Sure, the image quality isn't super amazing, but it displays color, uses super little energy and still updates quickly. That's pretty much my point.

The HiSense Q5 is a tablet with a transflective display, but for some reason that is black and white.

It doesn't say, but since it mentions IPS, it doesn't have an always-on LCD ?

It says it’s a raise to turn on type of display. How the original Apple Watch worked.

My Xiaomi Mi Band 4 lasts me 4 weeks with a full-color AMOLED display (without NFC). That's the base to compare to.

Me too. It says "All-week 180 mAh battery" which I'm not sure what it means but I doubt a 180 mAh lasts an entire week.

It's a milliamp-hour.

The processor draws about 220uA [1]

so you have about 818 hours (=34 days) of CPU time, but you need to take display current out of that budget too, and an easy source for that probably exists, but I can't find easily.

[1] https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/f/nordic-q-a/7893/nrf52832-cu...

it's running a low power nrf52. they can last a year on a coin cell battery, with adequate power optimisations. without an always on display, a week is possibly an underestimation. for example, see the amazfit bip, it has lasted me ~45 days which even has a (low power) always on display.

There are plenty of smartwatches with heart rate monitoring that have a week of battery life and 180mAh is enough for 10 days on some of them. It's obviously not enough if you're playing music or video or something like that. But if you're primarily using the device to give you notifications, heart rate, and the time, it seems likely it does last all week.

Using the recent infinitime OS v0.9, I get 2 to 3 days of normal usage per charge.

I dunno. I get two days out of my Apple SE. Doesn’t seem too much of a bore charging it.

i still forget to charge my pebble time steel sometimes cos it lasts long enough for that to happen. I don't need to pack a charger for it on short trips, weekends, etc.

I prefer it that way. would not want to charge yet another device every day or every other day.

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