Ask HN: What is your favorite Android-compatible smart watch? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your favorite Android-compatible smart watch?

What is your favorite Android-compatible smart watch?

I love the Garmin Fenix series. Always on screen with 14days of battery life, notifications, and excellent exercise and health tracking, music storage, spotify support, etc. The battery life is achieved by not being glitzy like Apple watches, and using a "memory in pixel" display.

Seems like an excellent series, I wish they made rectangular faces for these models.

Yeah, they're not the most stylish.

I've had several different Android Wear smart watches, and an MS Band before those. In every case, the battery life went from bad to worse after a year or two (like 1-2 days, to less than a day). Because of this, battery life is my number one criteria. And why I won't get an Apple watch.

I had a 645M for years. Its lower end than the Fenix, and has a smaller battery. I had mine for over 4 years, and never noticed any substantial battery degradation. I upgraded to the Fenix 6 after I broke the watch case (broke the tip off the thing that holds the band pin in place) when it caught on my very heavy backpack.

It looks like there is now a newer Fenix 7 with longer (28 day) battery life. And they have solar editions that get up to 37 days (or 1+ years in battery saver mode).

Honestly I don't care too much about the style, I'd just like to have a larger display. Round displays are sort of awkward, they don't have enough surface area. Rectangular displays seem to be less popular, but I think they're easier to use.

Now that you mention it though, I am very disappointed with the battery life of my current watch (Galaxy Watch4) which seems to last for a few days tops...

I'm now using a PineTime since a few months and quite like it. While it does not have that many features and is not the most stable one, it is very cheap and fully open source. The community is constantly working on the main OS and there are even a few alternative OS's to choose from. You can get an okeyisch Android integration with GadgedBridge.

I'll need to read more about PineTime. Thanks for the feedback.

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