Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

I love my Pebble Time watch, and for the first several years I used all the bells and whistles: the sleep tracking, the Bluetooth alerts, even the mini games (like Tetris) from the Pebble Store.

But after about 6 years of ownership, I noticed that my battery could only hold a charge for 3-4 days, compared with 10-12 when I first got it.

Then I realized that I wasn't regularly paying attention to the sleep tracking data. And the Bluetooth alerts were a little noisy, especially since I'm in front of a laptop for most of my workday. And once Pebble went out of business and the Rebble app store became more of a gamble, I realized it had been a while since I used any apps.

So about a month ago, I bought a simple $40 Timex watch. And it dawned on me that it has the three things I really want: a clock, an always-on display, and a super long battery life.

I'm not entirely abandoning my Pebble. It's still nice to wear when I'm out and about and don't want to constantly check my phone for notifications. But it's nice to know that when it finally wears out for good, I've got an acceptable backup.

Had the same experience w/ the Apple Watch Ultra. I realized the main way I'm using the watch is as a stopwatch when I'm at the gym. For fun -- let's do a quick comparison:

Cheap Casio Watch:

- Never have to charge it

- Continuously shows me the minutes and seconds on the stopwatch

$700 Apple Watch Ultra:

- Needs to be re-charged daily

- Refuses to offer a minutes and seconds mode for more than 10-15 seconds at a time (it will keep counting, but will just show the minutes unless you continuously keep raising your wrist)

- Refuses to offer a settings option to adjust the above behavior (presumably because Apple's UI in general is basically "would you like 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or 60 minutes?" with very little thought given to the idea you might be able to actually comprehend how many minutes you want and that it might not be one of the Cupertino options)

Also since I'm already rambling -- just to ramble a bit more:

- Receiving "now's a good time to be mindful" or "time to take a break and stand up" alerts while I'm driving and (maybe because of the specific distance from my house) particularly when I'm about to merge onto the nearest freeway .... when the watch has a GPS and knows how fast I've been moving and where I am ... kinda leaves me speechless.

To balance:

It is still useful overall for seeing Maps directions displayed directly on the watch face -- and this would be the major use case for me. But it's enough of a PITA to keep it charged that I generally just use my phone instead anyway.

Big fan of my new solar powered G Shock. Auto syncs time via radio signal and supposedly a 10-15 yr battery life

I got one of the Fossil Hybrid Watches. Looks like a normal watch (that was important for me) but has an eInk display in the background. I've disabled lots of notifications but it still keeps track of various data without a hassle and relays important messages to the watch face.

Battery lifetime on a charge is... I don't know, maybe I charge it once a week or every 10 days or something like that?! It's not so often that I find myself doing it conciously, I just sometimes take it of at night and leave it to charge.

Was around 150 € which I found okay.

I'm in a similar boat - I pretty much use the watch for HR tracking (as a proxy for stress), but otherwise keep things like the notifications disabled. This gets me about 20 days between charges

However the biggest problem is that the eInk screens seem to be a major failure point - even when working normally it seems to suffer massive burn-in making it unreadable after a few months.

My first watch had the screen die due to what I believe was trapped moisture (the weep-hole on the back is easily clogged) and just a few days ago my current watch also had the screen go bad.

It's really sad because the feature-set is almost precisely what I want, at exactly the price I'd like to pay

The e-ink screen on my Hybrid HR has faded/burnt-in as well, so the contrast is not as good as when it was new.

I have had it almost three years though and I can still read it unless the ambient light is too dim.

I find it useful to quickly answer phone calls and to control music/podcast replaying and of course the heart rate and sleep tracking.

It is a good device even with this problem - I will probably buy another to replace this one, possibly when they release their next update.

Similarly, I'd also suggest the Withings watches. I love mine. My battery lasts about a month but that also depends on how active its smart aspects are (like vibrating, the display, sport activities, etc).

Regarding notifications, I've had a bunch of small smart clocks (Xiaomi Band style), and I found notifications really intrusive in general, specially given my attention problems.

So finally I removed them all excepot for two that weren't as intrusive and also were very useful for me: phone calls and meeting/event notifications from calendars. That way I could keep my phone "silent", and also don't miss meetings (I have very bad time management abilities)

I also just swapped my Xiaomi Smart Band for a Timex. I realized that none of the data had any use to me.

I now wear a cheap (~£20) vintage mechanical watch. It tells the time. It does need charging every day or two, but charging only takes a few seconds and doesn't require an adapter or power socket.

Citizen Eco-Drive (<$20 eBay). Trickle charges off the bar light filtering through my Glenfarclas 105.

Citizen and Seiko have great cheap (but good quality) pieces <3

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