Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch
rebble.io
rebble.io
I've tried a couple of Garmin watches (Vivoactive 3 and Forerunner 55) and the Amazfit Bip, and this is where they all fall completely flat. The UX is just horrible by comparison. It's like these companies have no regard for designing the OS UX and are just trying to cram features in.
And the fact that companies want to make touchscreen watches is just with few/no buttons is baffling to me. Tapping tiny buttons on a tiny screen is a horrible experience. And there's tons of moving targets because of the tiny amount of real-estate.
Pebble _just got it_ with the 2.0 OS and beyond. They were a joy to use.
I begrudgingly have gone back to using an Apple Watch, because despite being subpar, the UX is somewhat together these days, just enough to be tolerable. When I move away from iOS again, I'll probably either pull out an old Pebble that still has some battery life, or a Casio GBD200, which isn't really a smartwatch but ticks some major boxes for me (always-on-display, silent vibration alarm, and timers, chief among them). The GBD200 runs on a coin cell too, so I never have to worry about charging or a replacement being difficult to find!
Steve Jobs obsession that the mouse should have only one button was probably right for the computer, but the input device had over 80 buttons minimum. (Keyboard)
Clearly whoever makes the call about Apple Watch buttons doesn't swim, sprint or cycle.
All the marketing about "sports" is to make you feel sporty not because it's actually useful.
Of course, for the use Apple make money from (Apple pay) there is a tactile button dedicated for the purpose.
LOL. Mine has 12, of which I regularly use 10.
Not that expensive, slick UI, full of features, great Android integration and a wonderful dial/crown which is well used in a couple of apps to make it all easier - you can use it to answer/cancel calls or finish/repeat alarms/timers.
AND THEN Samsung launches Watch 5 and DROPS THE FREAKING CROWN! Back to 1.5 buttons - because the second one, as the Apple Watch, is stuck to Samsung Pay (can't even set it to Google Pay) and recent apps, no app uses.
WHY? WHYYYY? The crown is amazing for scrolling through screens when I'm biking (shaky) or swimming (touch disabled). It's WAY better for scrolling in that tiny screen. It's awesome as interaction aid. WHY REMOVE IT??
I do miss the long battery and buttons, but I must mention that a touch screen gives you many more UI possibilities.
I'm also not a very hardcore watch user, though.
I was sold on the GW because the OS (Tizen) was supposed to be the best one. Everyone hated the google OS, which then in GW4 I think they switched to.
I now wear a Garmin Instinct. The UI isn’t as joyful and it’s not quite as pretty. It’s every bit as practical as the pebble and then some. Also you couldn’t kill it with a stick.
A key criteria for the replacement was "I never want to have to think about whether something will break it" and the Instinct has lived up to that. Have spent the last few years wearing it surfing, snowboarding, through many bush fires and one structure fire where I forgot to take it off before donning. Hasn't skipped a beat.
I still miss the Pebble, though.
I particularly miss being able to write custom apps.
I was gifted a Garmin Vivoactive 3 a few years ago. Like you, I've come to the exact same conclusion regarding the Garmin watches. It is slow and annoyingly needs to connect to their servers to do anything (couldn't even access my own data when they were hacked). I still use it mostly when i run/cycle but battery life is slowly going away.
Also, i want to stress the point that while smartwatches are nice for certain applications, they mostly are toys. Yes, the data is interesting, but how many of us really do something from that data? I know I don't. And if you really need this data (professional athlete or whatever), most of the time, someone will pay the gadget for you.
For a lot of reasons (price, planned obsolescence, privacy), i'll probably get a g-shock that'll last years on a coin cell that's easily replaceable everywhere.
Which is why I was sad when Pebble doubled down on the fitness/sports marketing in the months before they shut down.
I don't care about fitness tracking and sportsball data. What I do care about is an e-paper-like screen (not just the "always on display" phone screen tech, but a proper "looks the same whether I look at it or not" always-on screen), hackability, predictable UI and buttons. The ability to operate the watch (and remotely control the phone, via Pebble/Tasker integration) without looking at it is supremely useful to me. That, and no fucking cloud. Ever. Hardware tied to SaaS is the enemy of all that's holy.
Definitely take a look at the Casio G-Shock GBD100/200 watches. They're for sure bulky and sporty, though the 200 a bit less so. I'm impressed in what they can do on a coin cell! I haven't tried the BT connection yet, but they seem to do step tracking, timers, and silent alarms quite well! The UI/UX definitely isn't Pebble-esque and is very utilitarian, but seems solid.
I once interviewed a candidate who came from Pebble. He had the most impressive interview performance of any candidate I've ever interviewed.
Can you tell more about this?
To me, I hated that everything was so huge on the display, leading to very low information density. I always enjoyed how the pebble could show a decently long text message on the display at once, when the font was set to small.
I also feel like, outside of the fitness functions, the menus are too deep/branching. Pebble got it right, in that the menus tended to be shallow, if a little long at times.
In the meantime, I'm wearing a Withings ScanWatch [0]. Not as extendable as a Pebble, but it has some features I care about and doesn't distract me.
However it looks like Google is killing that in newer iterations...
I've enjoyed it, although I am really missing the ability to write my own apps. Everything else is great.
I understand that the Versa 4 is generally worse than the 3. Insane, why would you remove music controls?
It's totally usable, but it doesn't have a vibrant app store like Pebble did for example.
I wish that hadn't been the case, but after replacing the battery 3x in one month because I swapped out watches occasionally, it went into retirement.
It's elegant, and the smartwatch features are unobtrusive, but I wouldn't trust it for any precise tracking, or even time tracking.
I've found an Amazfit Bip to be a totally satisfactory replacement for my Pebble Time, but it doesn't cover every single usecase. It does have a battery life measured in weeks though (usually 3-4 for me, less if I use the GPS to track a bunch of exercise), which is a pretty nice selling point.
I like mine, except for the fact that the front fell off and I had to glue it back on. The battery lasts for 3 or 4 weeks, you can receive notifications (but not respond to them) and it looks fairly stylish.
I want my watch to have time/date, alarms, timers/stopwatches, the ability to read phone notifications, always-on screen, and battery life measured on the scale of weeks. Step and heartrate tracking are also nice perks that the Amazfit Bip also includes.
https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/wiki/Amazfit-...
I miss the simplicity, yet the huge amount possibilities (via their store and SDK) and watch faces the Pebble had. They still managed to keep the device distraction free along with a good battery life. I'm all ears for any good Pebble-like smartwatch if anyone knows one.
I’ve used a few Fossil watches and found the battery to be very good, but the software to be lacking. One example is that if you receive a notification, you have to click the center button to select it, and then the down button to scroll down. The buttons on some models are quite mushy, which makes navigation even more frustrating. The light is also unimpressive and hard to trigger.
I don’t love the styling of the current Fossil models. The Skagen version looks nicer to me, but sadly the software forced you to display a Skagen logo instead of one of the four complications that’s available on the Fossil-branded version.
I don’t know what I’m going to do when my Fossil dies. The battery is down to 4 days if I remember to put it in airplane mode every night. I’m considering the Apple Watch Ultra, which should get around 5 days of battery in low power mode but I don’t love the styling, don’t need the sporty features, and don’t love the price.
As others mention hybrid watches are probably the closest alternative.
I wanted a watch that I could control my media player on my phone with, gave me notifications, and didn't cost me an appendage. The Pinetime was $35USD shipped (IIRC), and while I can't dismiss phone notifications from my watch, it does at least show me the notifications from my wrist. I'm very happy with mine.
With the Pebble I had app shortcuts on the long press of most of the buttons and could pretty much navigate it blind to start a stopwatch ASAP and lap as needed without looking. I had tons of saved timer presets. The alarms could actually wake me up (before the vibration motor broke). PineTime won't let me save timer presets, set timers over an hour or so long, and it's not obvious enough when the timer ends. I think it vibrates once instead of doing it until dismissed. These are basic things, and to me they matter even more than seeing notifications from my phone appear. I even used my Pebble without a phone for months at a time before.
The bangle.js: - ships significantly faster - has an always-on display with similar 4 week maximum battery life - can be updated without flashing - has a thriving app ecosystem
My Pebble Time Steel was vastly superior.
The notification functionality is not as customizable, but otherwise I haven't really been missing the Pebble much.
These are marketed as fitness devices first, which they are, but the smart watch features are comparable to the Pebbles. The lack of a touchscreen, the long battery life, and the epaper-like display are all there.
For years, I used my steel HR (got a weird one branded Nokia because they had purchased Withings only to resell Withings to the founder a year later), loved the sleep tracking, health report etc... But the activity tracking wasn't the best, especially running.
However the battery's life is out of this world. I loved the mix between tech and good old watch.
The Fitbit Alta HR and the Apple Watch are worth mentioning for tracking sleep time and wake ups fairly accurately.
I wasn't a huge fan of Pebble, the company - they didn't sell replacement parts, for instance (the watch for geeks? yeah, sure).
For some crazy reason, though, to this day, this watch is still almost the only one that gets such a basic thing right: Telling the damn time.
The formula is as simple as it is unreplicated:
- Always telling the time
- Good battery life
- Buttons
Why nobody else makes such a watch is a mystery to me. The Amazfit Bip comes close, but it requires touch interaction and doesn't look as nice as the Pebble Time Steel. It's also supported by GadgetBridge though and also does heart rate tracking while having much better battery life (while being smaller!). When my Bip broke after a few months I bought another (5 years old at this point!) Pebble and am pretty happy with it. I could use some heart rate tracking, though.
I don't exactly know which model it is, but it's a Garmin watch with the traditional hour/minute arms and a tiny little screen. But it really kicks ass at telling me the time :)
There are more Pebble users out there using Gadgetbridge for example.
There could also be many more users using neither. For example, my wife is still using the OG Pebble (the monochromatic one) with the official app and stock firmware, today. I was using my Pebble Time with the OG app/firmware as well, until couple months ago when I broke my phone and couldn't transfer the app to the new one, at which point I decided to go the Rebble route.
I had two Pebbles and was very sad when it shut down - my Pebble devices are no longer functioning but I've been using an Apple Watch for maybe 6 years now and am very happy with it. Sometimes I miss the battery life, but I never feel like it's a restriction and the UI on the Apple Watch is really very good.
This is the killer feature for me and why I still use mine daily. I don't know why nobody else is doing this. With media controls on a shortcut slot I can pause whatever media I'm playing, switch songs, etc without even looking at the screen. No other smartwatch I've used comes close to that convenience.
Real watch hands, buttons and an e-ink display. 7-10 days battery life.
It's a really nice watch.
> - Always telling the time
> - Good battery life
> - Buttons
I'm not so sure this is "unreplicated". Since bailing on Pebble I've had 2 Garmin watches which always tell the time, and have good battery life and buttons.
Haven't used a smart watch in 6ish years, so maybe they're better. From what I understand though, they still don't have always on displays for time, right? I hope I'm wrong and that they do.
Apple is on the fourth version that has an always-on-display, and Google's new Pixel watch has it. Can't say about any others with any confidence, but I'd be surprised if Apple/Google are the only ones.
"Why nobody else makes such a watch is a mystery to me."
There ya go.
There are always people who mourn the Pebble and I understand why. But the market has clearly shown you don’t need a week of battery life to be successful.
But in all seriousness it's the general public's lack of foresight to care about the direction these products go, they don't know what they're sacrificing all they see is shiny oled, whizzbang animations.
Same as the general apathy towards right to repair, the general public doesn't give two shits because they can't connect the dots: right to repair---->I can take it to the repair shop around the corner. Normies that hear about it will just think "well I'm not repairing stuff myself anyway".
The Pebble Time 2 was so far ahead of its time, I promise you I would still be rocking it (or whatever came after it from Pebble) if they had shipped it to me.
The continuous trickle of articles about how great these second generation Pebbles turned out, and my ongoing wait for an alternative that comes even close certainly haven't helped me forget!
Just noticed the Kickstarter page is still up https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-2-time...
:(
- > 7 days battery life
- HR monitor (useful as a sports watch)
- < 10 mm thickness
- toned down to fit different clothing styles
- hackable
- high-contrast, always-on screen
- buttons
I am currently wearing a Garmin Fenix 7 Sapphire sportswatch, which comes close.
It had a MONTH charge and it filled all my requirements which were mainly about getting notifications.
The moisture was stuck there for a day or two, came and went depending on temperature and outside climate. After about a week it became even worse and eventually it gave up and showed 0 charge.
I live in northern europe so too much sunlight would not affect it. I was so hyped for this watch that I actually had an american friend ship it to me before it was released here.
(and confirmed for iPhone)
Watches are a strange sort of luxury good, where some people will pay thousands of dollars, and Garmin aggressively price-segments their products. Use this comparison tool to see the different features:
The latter disables the NFC payments radio on the same radio IC, disables recording power meter and etap/DI2 gear-shift data from bikes even though it has ANT+ radio, disables open-water swim mode, disables multi-sport (triathlon) tracking, disables maps (even though it has the same memory capacity), and doesn't implement the running dynamics/running power software.
It's like a premium printer that's identical to the cheap printer, with the speed inhibitor turned off:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
- affordable
Features from the Fenix 7 which I value over Pebble (apart from the obvious):
- Materials: titanium and sapphire. Means it is indestructible. Great for hiking expeditions.
- Garmin Connect (SaaS fitness community).
- HRV (Heart Rate Variability).
- Regular, well tested updates.
Stuff that I miss:
- Hackability (I want to transfer my data directly to InfluxDB)
- Thickness (14.5 mm, which is 5 mm more than the Pebble)
- Community
(correction, I lost one because the band snapped and the watch dropped into the sea).
I bought that after the Kickstarter fell through. I loved it until the plastic membrane over the buttons degraded, rendering it open to the elements. It didn't last long after that.
The Venu Sq 2 was just recently released. I have the Venu 2, myself.
Missing from your list: * <10mm thickness - it appears to be a smidge over * hackable - You have a Fenix 7 so you're familiar with the ecosystem * always-on screen - it's OLED and not always on, but works well enough - there is an always on mode but it's not recommended for OLED
As for the rest: * >7 days battery life - Venu 2 is rated up to 12 days, I charge about once a week * HR monitor - it's there, works reasonably well * toned down - as a lifestyle type, it's a bit more toned down * high-contrast - it's as high contrast as any OLED, and clearly visible in sunlight * buttons - 2 of them
I'd throw in cost as a valid metric. The Pebble watches were really inexpensive and I think that's what brought more broad appeal to them early on. My Venu 2 was $400. That's a tough pill for some to swallow.
Never tried the Garmin Instinct though - its monochrome screen looks better, but the rest of the watch has a distinctly downmarket feel.
- 40 day battery life
- HR monitor
- 11.4mm thickness
- Always on transreflective screen
It's not hackable, is a bit thicker and only has one button but unlike the Fenix 7 it is very affordable.
No needs hacking because it would take all day to use all features it brings. It is nearly the perfect smartwatch.
https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/reference-guides/mon...
And I have one more with a wasted battery that I intend to replace.
And I'll still buy some more, because I want to have them available for the rest of my life.
There are things that only the Pebble does:
- button only interface that you can handle in the dark without glasses
- a screen that barcode scanners can easily read for authentication into the gym and library
- a TOTP app (authentication tokens) that you can access with only a button press, etc.
Only Pebble can do this? Apple Watch does that too, like literally I use mine for the same cases you described
My experience with bright screens is that low density bar codes work ok mostly. But some high density codes don't work well. One of them is Plessey, still used in Europe.
I wish Rebble would offer a paid mail-in service to replace the batteries, to have someone trusted & reliable do the work. I'm down to about 2-days battery life on my Time Steel. I do have a replacement Time Steel that I bought on eBay, but I'd love to get this one fixed.
I love Rebble, but I wish they did more to round out the service. I'm really surprised they don't have their own web store for new-old stock & certified-Rebble refurbished Pebbles. A Discord channel really doesn't cut it, at least not for me (even eBay is a better experience).
One tip: put your Pebble in airplane mode each night. For me, it extends my battery life substantially. I mapped long-hold left button to toggle this setting, for ease of use.
That being said, a store for refurbed Pebbles might be doable, but it would be a big time and cost overhead.
I guess my dream is for Rebble to be like a cross between Framework & iFixIt - somewhere you can buy all your spare parts (and accessories?), maybe find repair guides... and then to continue the Pebble mission by making new models that can run Pebble software on modern designs. I guess it's just a dream. But if there's only about 2k of us Rebble subscribers, I'm proud to be one of those 2k!
Interesting. And it also has an sdk in C.
Although it costs almost 4 times what I'd pay for a Pebble on eBay.
But it is the best Pebble alternative I've seen so far.
- Authenticator - TOTP authorization tokens
- Skunk - barcodes
- Time Tracker - I work remotely as a contractor
- Pebble Controler - a remote control for my laptop
I also use a lot the standard apps on the Pebble:
- alarm, to wake me up by vibration, without waking up my wife
- canned messages - to answer phone calls when driving
- notifications, notifications
- hang up phone calls I don't want
- steps counter, when running
Yeah the multitimer is nice - it’s a watch after all.
I would love to use my 5-inch 16:9 Samsung phone from 2016. It still works fine, but the battery barely lasts an hour. Instead I have to use one of their gigantic replacement phones with a ridiculous 21:9 ratio.
However, that does not leave me with workable alternatives. I respect what Fairphone is trying to do, but €500 for a replaceable battery phone with internals several years old isn't the right choice for me.
But.....why? It's hardly any effort. Saying "I won't fiddle around with a screwdriver" is a stance as respectable as someone saying they are proud of not being able to do maths or know basic geography facts.
My 3 last phones have been samsung, and after using /e/ I have no intent of getting an original samsung software again
I have less fond memories of waiting all day for a newer phone to run out of battery when the same thing happened.
Non-removable batteries are still stupid though.
However, I do know of some slightly older HTC devices that would have the EEPROM straight-up completely die, leaving the device permanently trapped in a "hard-brick" state unless someone felt like doing some BGA soldering.
Modern phones do have a lot of stuff running under the hood that makes it a lot harder to mess things up, but once you go off the beaten path things become much less certain.
You can definitely mess it up really bad, but I don't know if you can get to a point where there's no reset path. Correct me if I'm wrong though.
Every time, I waited until the phone started to shut off or rapidly drain below 20% battery. Replacing the battery fixed that and brought my battery life back to original (impressive!) longevity each time. As in, I can reliably use my phone for 2 days without charging, as opposed to barely making it to midnight of the first day.
You do have to "recalibrate" the battery by fully charging it, sitting on the charger for a few hours, then fully discharging it, letting it sit dead for a few hours, and finally recharging to 100% uninterrupted afterward. Maybe if you leave that out it takes a lot longer to see the impact?
I think our culture is really wasteful with batteries. I can't believe that my iphone doesn't have a built-in setting to cap charging at 80%. Studies show that you can decrease battery wear to negligible levels by doing this. Yet my Android e-ink tablet, my iphone, my smartwatch, and my laptop all do not support a hard battery cap.
At least I can install al dente on my laptop, and root my tablet. Everything else I just have to manually take off the charger before 80%!
source (one of many): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/2.0411609jes/pdf
I keep my EV charged to just 50% most days for this reason, get below that step change.
Still, perhaps I should buy ex-landfill sites on the cheap, so my descendants can mine them.
I feel like the batteries nowadays are just made to last 2-3 years to get to 85-80% capacity no matter how you treat them
They have a "smart charging" setting which is poorly defined. It says it limits charging to 80% sometimes using AI. I think the idea is it charges to 100% overnight, and 80% the rest of the time.
But i agree, it would be nice if it had a selector switch. Some laptops have a "aim for 60%, 80% or 100% battery charge" option.
They do the same thing for Macs, but it’s way, way too conservative IMO. My M1 MBP sits on my desk on a dock with a charger pretty much all week, and it eventually figures out that it should just keep it at 80%. Until a brief period where I use it on battery, draining maybe down to 70%. When I put it back on the dock, it charges back to 100% and stays there for the next 2 days.
I would be happy with a “Don’t bother trying to learn, just cap it at 80%, I’ll tell you when I change my mind” setting.
I too agree that I would prefer to have a manual/scheduled charge setting system.
1. Caps charging to 80%
2. Pauses charging if it gets too hot, until it's below 40°C
If you sporadically need full capacity (travelling, etc), just hit the "charge once to 100%" button and you're good to go.
OS updates make or break devices long term.
Considering that I've got the phone in June 2019, I paid less than 100 Euro per year. If I had to buy a new phone to have Android 12 (and I don't understand why I should - I'd be fine with Android 8 or even 4 if I'd get security patches), 100 Euro per year is acceptable. The big problem with buying a new phone is that I'm not buying from Apple and I'm not going to find an Android one as small as the A40, which is already too big IMHO. I wish it was 3/4 or one inch shorter (2 or 2.5 cm.)
This is one of the worst design trends (perhaps the worst) of modern-day devices.
I used to crawl fark.com so I could read the stories and comments later.
wearchronos.com seemed to hit my use case, but the reviews aren't great.
I think the general category you're looking for is devices that support ANT+.
I had the first generation of Mi Band, the one with only 3 RGB LEDs, no display. And I loved it, I could easily see I have a new Gmail notification when it gently vibrated and the LEDs flashed red (well more of a breathe animation than a flash), or a Facebook Messenger one when it was blue. The Bluetooth communications it used made it easy to program your own vibrations and LEDs.
It sounds non intuitive but 90% of the time the flashing LEDs made me NOT check the phone. I was like, "oh blue, most likely my brother replied, I'll check it later"
I also fantasized about modding my current analog watch but fitting a tiny battery and a tiny BLE chip and a tiny vibration motor and surfacing tiny LEDs is way outside my possibilities. Chronos sounds good in theory but the end result is not what I want. I don't want to increase the thickness of my watch, or have to recharge it or worry about a magnet not staying in place.
You could actually log your food intake via their app. And sync data to your phone by removing the “cap” from the band and plugging it into your phone’s headphone port!
He still wears it most days today. Not sure if this is the software he's using today or not. I'll have to find out if he's one of the 16,000.
[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-wa...
To be fair- I've also got PineTime bookmarked for if my Bangle.js 2 ever breaks, or I just want to mess around with some lower-level aspects of watch firmware.
https://www.espruino.com/ide/?emulator https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js+First+App
[0] https://banglejs.com/apps/?c=game [1] https://github.com/espruino/BangleApps/tree/master/apps/blac...
[0]: https://fashion-entertainments.com
[1]: https://fashion-entertainments.com/fes-watch-u/fw/oss.html
I need a smartwatch that tells the time, gives me notifications, doesn't blind me in the dark but is readable in daylight and lasts days without charging. Calendar access and weather are a bonus. The pebble does all of that.
I was somewhat excited when the Apple Watch was announced only to find out that it, of course, was going to be usable with iOS devices only and therefore not an option for Android users like me. I still haven't found a good alternative to the Pebble and all the lo-fi watches are primarily fitness trackers, which I have no use for.
If there are 100 million people who wear an Apple Watch, it’s not surprising that less than .02% of that number would like something as niche as the pebble.
It’s like the iPod Classic people. Billions of people want music with them wherever they go. 12 of them like it in MP3 form on a little brick that’s not their phone.
Also, the vibrate function for alarm or calls in the middle of the night does not disturb anyone else, but still gets me up.
The notifications are nice if I'm on the subway and don't want to pull my phone out of my pocket to see what's up.
It doesn't take long to charge the watch, whenever I take a shower I put it to charge and it's full battery by the time I'm back at my desk.
I also like turning off alarms by using the watch rather than pulling out my phone.
* Consuming notifications without potentially being distracted once you unlock your phone
* Haptics for notifications - I'd like to be notified of some things, but 'vibrate' is a little too much
* Fitness/sleep tracking
https://developers.strava.com/
The Coros I have was around $400USD refurbished on Amazon. I considered the Apple Watch Ultra which was nearly 2x the price but wanted something made by a company focused on runners rather than a consumer products company making a running watch.
Overall I’ve been extremely happy with it as a semi-serious runner.
Especially when traveling and doing activities like hiking, I do find watch modestly useful. Hiking distance etc. Apple Pay as you say. Calendar events and other notifications.
It is for me modest benefit and I often wear a cheap Timex at home. And yes the charging is the big downside although there are quite a few things I do daily that are a routine.
Notifications I could take or leave; they're not super reliable but have occasionally been useful.
Battery life is IMO fine; I charge it once or twice a week while sitting at my desk or having a shower.
I know I could cobble together these capabilities from a suite of other apps— Strava, Apple Health, whatever. And I get annoyed that certain things on the watch aren't more customizable. But the overall package is more than good enough for my basic needs, and has motivated me to make (and stick to) real lifestyle changes, which is ultimately the point, at least on the fitness side.
And it doesn't have its own GPS; it piggy-backs off the phone for that. Which is fine for cycling and running, but obviously doesn't work for open water swims where you could use GPS for position but wouldn't normally bring your phone.
This is why the Pebble was good. Charge it once a week.
I do own a smart watch, but I don't use it in the typical manner.
I don't ever want to see notifications on my wrist. People seem to think it's ok to read notifications in situations where looking at a phone would be rude, such as at dinner or whilst having a conversation.
I wear mine when doing sport. I like that I can play music and track my activity without my phone.
And I wear mine when navigating cities. I like that I can pay for public transport and check map directions without making myself a target by getting my phone out.
Other than that, I don't wear mine. I don't see the point of wearing it day to day.
My mom, in her 70s, uses hers for calls a lot -- though in her case it's tethered to her phone so the phone has to be within range (I don't see how that's very useful, might as well use the phone).
For me telling the time is the least valuable aspect. It's convenient for email notifications, particularly since I don't tend to keep my phone in my pocket (or often even in sight), it's a convenient way to control music playback when out and about and things like weather reports are also neat info to have on a wrist.
But even more valuable are the health related features, I tend to get too easily absorbed in work so the reminders to stretch when I've been sitting too long and the water consumption tracking is very useful. I also often have trouble sleeping, where the sleep coaching functionality is pretty useful for identifying what I need to do to fix things. Additionally having things like step count on my wrist has gotten me to try to walk more as it's a constant reminder of how little I walk. It's also a very convenient morning alarm since it stays on your wrist and can just use vibration to wake you instead of playing a loud sound and making you dig around for the phone while half asleep.
I remember this, too.
But good companies plan for the future, not the past. And all of those young people get older. That's one of the few certainties of life.
So what Apple did (intentionally or unintentionally) is create a market, and then let its customers mature into it.
Financial institutions do this all the time.
All these years, I haven't found a replacement.
So I'm trying to move to a simpler watch with just basic smart features and longer battery life, but one where I can customize the watchface with code.
I ended up going with Watchy: https://watchy.sqfmi.com/
And it's cool, but it's extremely basic, a bit bulky and ugly, and has all the drawbacks of E-Paper.
Pebble would have been perfect. If they still sold them I would buy one today. It's tragic the company went under so quickly.
Maybe I should get a Pebble. But I don't really want to buy a second hand smartwatch, and I don't see the point in investing into something that will never be updated and has no official support. All this update does it make the phone companion app work on a Pixel 7.
RIP Pebble. I hope someone makes something similar.
I haven't looked into the process of watchface creation but there is a huge collection[2] that can be installed via Gadgetbridge. It also has the benefit that its privacy friendly without any cloud connections and fully opensource.
[1]https://www.gadgetbridge.org/ [2]https://amazfitwatchfaces.com/
Can you elaborate a bit about the e-paper part? I always believed that watches were the perfect place for e-paper. Low power, durable, always-on, wide viewing angle, no need to constant refresh.
I thought the smaller the display, the better suited it was for e-paper.
Wait...what?? I've used all the Samsung watches, with 3G/LTE, and the 4 is leaps and bounds better than anything that preceded it (and is for me quite usable and hassle-free).
I think the Apple Watch, with all it's flashy animations and bright, beautiful screen contributed to the issue; people only see the shiny, they don't realise they don't need all of those features/oled screen and that they're sacrificing a week long (or more!) battery life for them.
I regularly got like 4-5 days out of the Round and it was super thin! I imagine had they done a model as thick as the GW4 it would've lasted 2 weeks or so! I really wish smart watches had gone in the Pebble direction, always on displays should be the primary feature for people. MIP LCD, not oled.
Then again, I really can't wait until we _finally_ get some properly commercialised AR glasses as I'd rather use those over a phone or watch or anything else at this point.
This is timely for me as I’m now in the doghouse for missing a reminder to take my kid to the dentist yesterday :(
For the cost of a brand new case ($30) and batteries, I plan to keep using them until the software fails spectacularly.
There's really nothing that compares for my usage.
Loved my Pebble, and I appreciate my bangle.js2 more and more.
Seems like a giant hole wishing to be filled. I know I want one - but I don't want to revive one - I want a new one with active support.
Once in a blue moon I buy a hot new smart watch, but nothing lasted more than a week before being resold.
I had Amazfit Bip for multiple years until it finally broke.
After trying Android Wear, battery life if very bad, I am looking for alternatives.
Is there any modern alternative to Pebble with all basic functions, such as eink display, battery life, notifications or call muting, but it also could reply to messages/notifications?
The face fell off of mine, and the band snapped. The face was put back in with super glue and has been holding just fine for two years, and the band was replaced with a metal one which will last forever.
How did yours break?
I would be perfectly content with something like Casio F91W if it could display notifications through bluetooth from my phone, I don't really need any sleep tracking or any other features just watch with notifications so I don't have to turn on phone screen
you might like the Withings
* incredible battery life
* tens of thousands of watch faces
* HR
* always-on transflective display
* notifications
Apparently I may be able to fix this if I try some soldering, but I'm an inexperienced solderer...
But more likely than not you will manage to wrangle it back together somehow :)
Good luck!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1104350651/tiktok-lunat...
I still use my iPod Shuffles a couple of days a week, so there's probably someone out there.
Every time I upgrade macOS, I'm amazed that even the ancient iPods are still supported. I bunged my launch day Shuffle (17 years old) into my new Mac over the weekend, and it works fine, still syncs, and Finder even still shows the icon for it.
Same with my also 17-year-old iPod Video. Man, 17 years went by quickly.
Getting a replacement is not an option as any iPod nano battery is about 10 years old now. A sign of what will happen to all the Apple Watches out there.
Today, when I run, I just carry my phone. It ends up doing everything the old clip did but in a much larger and more cumbersome package.
I'd probably carry my phone anyway these days after having a run, years ago, where my IT band told me I was done NOW but I was 8 miles from home. It was early Sunday morning and I ended up walking 2 miles on country roads and then through an empty office park before I found some place with a phone to call for a ride. That sucked.
Every major IOS release I think this is the time my Pebble app stops working but it is still going strong on IOS16. Safe for another year. :)
I plan to reluctantly get a Pixel Watch. It's the first Android Wear watch since the Moto 360 that looks decent. Still way too thick though and still with a garbage outdated SoC (which wouldn't matter if the software was efficient like Pebble, but...)
Then I moved to Microsoft Band, Microsoft Band 2, FitBit Charge, Fitbit Ionic, Fitbit Versa, Fitbit Sense, and now on FitBit Sense 2 (definitely a big leap forward).
I view Pebble as a huge success, even if it wasn't an immediate financial windfall for the team, as they pioneered something critical for humans.
Occasionally, I am one of those 16k.
But now I want some basic apps (ie TOTP) but this model doesn't support apps...
I don't use the official app, which has mostly alleviated my privacy concerns.
It's the only smartwatch I've owned and I loved it. I'm back to my $5 Casio now.
He tried to gift it to multiple people (including me) and they all returned it to him after a week or so.
And every time I hear about the Pebble and self-hosting, I get disappointed that it no longer exists.
The final smartwatch.
Sleep monitor is perfect and notifications really help so I never miss anything important without disturbing anyone else.
So, a fraction of users using alternate firmware to the watch that's up to 10 years old - an eternity for modern electronics - and whose vendor shut down 6 years ago. I'd say it's quite a big number.
We already do: https://pine64.org/pinetime.
(I like my pine book pro; honest question.)
Is there a term for complementing something that is objectively much worse than what came before only because it's better than what we have now.
Stockholm syndrome?
Watch batteries used to last month's/ years / didn't need batteries at all.
It's the same with phones, they used to last a week easily, now we get excited when they last 2 days.
I loved my Garmin, but I hated the notifications. And I couldn't disable the fitness related notifications. I'm at a point where I hate all notifications though, and have them only enabled for work and my wife. Everyone/everything else can wait.
Phones used to be powered directly from the wire and work even during a power outage and now they have batteries and die, but I'm still willing to trade that feature to have a GPS and text messaging.
Further Casio made a range of smartish watches back in the day. I don't know battery life's but they weren't measured in days.
And those Casio watches were terrible. Even without a comparison to anything else, they just didn't work reliably.
If it's just for telling the time I don't exactly need a watch, I'm almost always looking at or within reach of some device that can tell me the time anyway. A smart watch is useful for other purposes.
Also while weeklong battery lives would be nice, even needing to charge daily isn't too bad, I just stick it on the charger at night while relaxing and getting ready to sleep.
What kind of smartwatch came before it, that had a battery that held for more than a week? And no, a simple watch is not a smartwatch, so that doesn't count.
You probably mean the marvel of mechanical engineering that has zero dependency on the outside world, needs no software updates, and will still continue running as new for years after all the smart watches will turn into useless pucks?
Which features don't work? I'm still wearing a Pebble Time Steel every day with Rebble Services and not encountering problems.
Okay, I guess Apple integration doesn't work anymore, but that's an Apple problem. If Apple allowed sideloading & half of the things you can do on Android, Pebble would still work there. I used to be an iPhone owner (I was one of those queue-on-day-one types that got a standing ovation from the Apple employees as you walked out of the Apple Store), but I am so glad I switched to Android.
That's kind of a tenuous link at best. You could make the case that buying more increases the opportunities for those at the bottom.
I'm not even necessarily making a factual statement here, but personally I don't feel that there's anything to reconcile.
I don’t know enough about these things to know whether buying more or less of these devices directly helps enslaved people, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to observe that rampant consumerism does fuel the postcolonial economic machine that perpetrates that kind of exploitation. And I think that those of us who stand to benefit the most from this system would do well to be extremely cautious about how we are incentivized toward motivated reasoning.
A sufficiently technologically advanced human species might be the only thing capable of stopping the next extinction event. Something that will almost certainly occur naturally without any intervention.
So our choices appear to be wait for the bad thing to happen or continue to drive each other to improve and learn, which consumerism does in fact provide great motive and drive for humans to improve (although not the only mechanism, I'm sure, just a large one we understand today). Hopefully we strike the right balance and solve these problems.
Can you confirm this for Apple products? I couldn't find anything recent.
Factually you could argue either way. I suppose broadly you could say that industrialisation is bad for those at the bottom in the short term. But after the hump things get better. Is that pain reasonable? Is it avoidable? Are we morally obligated to avoid it? Are all somewhat open questions.
The GP used the word 'reconcile' which to me is a more emotional metric. Personally I don't make the link (rightly or wrongly) between me buying X and person Y suffering. So personally I don't have anything to reconcile. That is a correct answer. It isn't the answer, but as an answer to the GP, it is legitimate.
I can also see it being a reasonable answer to say that in buying Congolese cobalt you are helping the country industrialise, which in the long term is a good thing. Again you may disagree with the reasoning or morality but it seems to me a legitimate way of reconciliation.
Everyone can reconcile almost anything, practically humanity's superpower. It's rare the person that fails to - on any issue. I think we all do it all the time for most issues.
-Benjamin Franklin
Also being shamed for everything you do as bad for the environment or bad for human right does not work.
I'm not going to buy a new phone today and it sounds like you probably won't either, I'll check back in tomorrow and see how the environment is doing!
With that said, I generally go for 3 years and use the older phone to drive my stereo, sometimes act as a travel spare, etc.
I wouldn't do it personally (see me still using a >7 year old Macbook), but they're likely not dropping anywhere near the full MSRP every year, after they sell the old one.
Meanwhile, I've had three gaming Windows laptops during that same time, and two of them literally fell apart (one I kept using until enough of the plastic frame around the monitor cracked that I could no longer keep it in place with binder clips). The most recent one (ASUS ROG Strix G15) is still doing well, but I've only had it for about two years at this point.
- Security: hackers constantly find new vulnerabilities. And depending on the kind of device, it can be a big deal.
- Services shutting down, it can be direct (if the device connects to the internet), or indirect (if some "companion app" is no longer available).
- Or just plain obsolescence. The device may be incompatible with modern standards, irrelevant, unfashionable, etc...
Considering how much functionality and information is on that phone that could affect my life in absolutely fantastically negative ways if it was hacked (online accounts including owned licenses for software, banking), I have little choice but to buy a new phone now, even though the hardware is more than adequate for my needs and even though new phones don't really do much more much better.
Planned obsolescence, or whatever you prefer to call it, really drives this behaviour.
Once it's completely bricked, I'm throwing it out and not getting anything with an Apple logo. Unless something like the EU manages to make them open up.
I get the annoyance, but I just don’t know of viable alternatives.
10 years is a dang good run for a tablet; only thing that really can hope to compete would be actual computers.
I suspect, though, that that’s optimizing for perfection in rare cases rather than doing better overall. The number of iPads that survive to 10 years is presumably puny. The batteries wear out, they get dropped, etc. I would guess that the number of 2-3 year old devices that get replaced simply because the OS updates stop or the UX gets slow is much greater. And, while community OS and firmware projects do exist, they haven’t made it into the mainstream in any meaningful way, so I doubt they make a dent in overall consumer behavior. In which case, perhaps Apple’s way of doing things is a net win (or at least the lesser of some number of evils) compared to others’ in the aggregate.
Hard to say without any hard numbers, though.
(Disclaimer: A couple months back I opted to replace the battery on my 2013 MacBook, which is still going strong, instead of buying a new Framework laptop. That may indicate some bias.)
Important applications like the browser, webview, media players, etc are patched via Play Store regularly so untrusted data is usually processed through those pipelines regardless. Perhaps hardware decode on untrusted content could still provide a vector there, but judging by the practice it's not exactly a large one.
There haven't exactly been worm-grade exploits flying around in the mobile space, even big public things like StageFright pretty much turned out to be non-starters and the targeted attacks are so far ahead that I wouldn't even worry about public exploits - the private ones have you covered already even on the latest OS.
Maybe I'm the minority here, but I wouldn't exactly rush out and blow $1000 over anything short of an unpatched and readily exploitable RCE.
This happened with ES File Explorer.
In a software project this is really a responsibility I think people don't appreciate that they have, especially in regards to package managers.
But for end user devices it's encouraged to have automatic updates on. I think this is a personal responsibility as no-one really has your back on your device, except the highly automated app store verification. Which in fairness to them, likely stops a lot of exploits/malware making it to user devices.
Samsung (and IIRC Google) now promises at least 4 years of regular updates and 5 of security.
Funnily, when I meet people now with the latest and greatest iphone and they see my old phone they often express they wish they still had one of them.