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Comment by diego_moita | Hacker News Reader

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diego_moita

I use 5 of them!

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.

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Most Garmins (Fenix, Forerunner series) can do all of your "only Pebble" parts. In fact I replaced my touchscreen smartwatch with Fenix 6 precisely for not having one and relying on buttons instead.

> I replaced my touchscreen smartwatch with Fenix 6

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.

> a screen that barcode scanners can easily read for authentication into the gym and library

Only Pebble can do this? Apple Watch does that too, like literally I use mine for the same cases you described

I think the above posted was saying more that the Pebble is the only smartwatch with all of those features.

I don't get it, many smartphones and smartwatches can be read by Barcode scanners never had any problems with it. (I used a few different samsung phones and watches)

Apple Watch is arguably not a general purpose "smartwatch" since it's actually only usable by those who happen to use iPhones.

Don't know about the Apple Watch, I'm out of Apple's walled garden.

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.

Apple Watch's OLED seems great with even the densest QR code profiles. (I have an older Series 5, I think, and have never had a problem scanning a QR code from the watch.) I think Apple tests it heavily, too, because a lot of the codes on "Apple Wallet cards" for things like a store's rewards program get scanned as QR codes, and at least several of those are extremely dense. (I haven't done the debugging myself, but I believe I read on HN elsewhere that at least one was just stuffing a full bloated JWT into a QR to explain its extreme density.)

> And I have one more with a wasted battery that I intend to replace.

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).

Totally agree. I’ve been looking into replacement and it’s not something I’m comfortable doing on my own.

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.

We'd love to offer something like that, but there's all kind of considerations around liability with repairs. Plus we're entirely run by volunteers, and watch repairs take a lot of time.

That being said, a store for refurbed Pebbles might be doable, but it would be a big time and cost overhead.

That's fair - I hadn't realized Rebble were volunteers. I'd hoped the subscriber money might stretch to also compensating people involved. I certainly wouldn't expect volunteers to be working on repairs out of the goodness of their hearts.

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!

Pebble user here as well! I moved from PTS to PTR (fall on the ground - dead) now back to PTR and it is amazing: long battery life, the apps on it are great. I use: Rain, Checklist, timer, LMS controller and alarm and torch. You?

- MultiTimer - for short naps, setting alarms when cooking, etc

- 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

Thanks. Need to look into skunk and pebble controller.

Yeah the multitimer is nice - it’s a watch after all.

Have a pebble and a fenix, I got all of those set up on my pebble, and all but one of those things set up on fenix. Unfortunaltely the opensource barcode app for connectIQ only supports 1D barcodes and not QR codes.

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