Google Pixel Watch 2
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My Garmin Forerunner 945 (a running focused smart watch), more than two years old at this point, gets nearly two weeks of battery life on a single charge, and it's got an always-on screen as well.
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Quick edit:
Even the latest Forerunner 965, which has an AMOLED touch screen, gets 7 days of battery life in display-always-on mode, and 3 weeks in default mode (display turns off)^1
[1]: https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=FEjONGCI270wlBlREC7Uw8...
The Garmin works just fine without an active backlight (due to transflective) and has much fewer colors and worse resolution and worse refresh rate. It also does not have a touchscreen which also consumes lots of energy.
The modern smart watch advertises always on screens because it manages to get a day of battery life with a "good" display
[1]: https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=FEjONGCI270wlBlREC7Uw8...
I think the biggest battery waste is the full OS. Like the Garmins my watch doesn't have installable apps.
Ps Garmin also sells OLED touch models with long battery life. Like the venu
Some newer Garmin devices do have true "always on" displays. Their battery life is slightly worse, but still pretty good.
I agree that 24 hours is lousy, and I won't buy and Apple/Google watch for this reason.
I have a Fenix 6s and with Always On mode it lasts about a week. However, if I record activities, I'll need to charge it that night.
At one point, battery life got really bad but a factory reset fixed it.
And the thing still gets updates years after its release!
I once broke my Garmin bike computer screen and they sent me a new bike computer free of charge. Honestly, I'm a big Garmin fan at this point.
I don’t understand how the Amazfit watches get 2+ weeks, with such nice-looking screens. I would have gotten one but don’t feel comfortable due to data/privacy issues, and the menus were clearly not written English-first. But the battery life was amazing!
Christ I wish more smartwatches were hybrid & e-paper displays. I just seems the most obvious form for a smartwatch to exist in, yet there's almost none around.
One nice thing about their privacy-invading app is that it works perfectly fine if networking permissions are disabled for it, at least on Android.
It also works with Gadgetbridge, except for sleep tracking. I really want to find the time to add a sleep tracking algorithm to Gadgetbridge one day.
Of course, I've found that after a couple of years the battery life starts to fade fast. Eventually I'm charging it every other day, at which point I usually start shopping for a new one.
My apple watch has 4g and can stream spotify for example, I can take phone calls from anyone anywhere.
Regardless, I find a fast charger while showering makes the watch last plenty long.
And for many the Garmin is not a suitable alternative.
The strategy I found for charging is to habitually plug in when in the shower, the few mins of charge per day provides "forever" battery life for me.
Turns out it doesn’t really matter. When going to bed at night I used to plug my phone in. Now I plug my phone and my watch in. Pick up both in the morning and I’m ready to go.
Ironically I find myself in fewer low battery scenarios than I did with my Pebble: because I need to charge every day it becomes part of my routine. With the Pebble I’d lose track of when I last charged it and leave the house with it running on fumes. Still miss it, though.
One exception: exercise hammers the battery. It'll work but it's not as good as my Garmin bike computer for multi-hour rides. 2 or 3 hours might mean it won't last until bedtime, 4+ and it might not last the ride.
I used to have a pebble watch that had 10 days battery but it would always go flat on me mid day because I didn’t have a regular charging schedule. Apple Watch has never gone flat mid day for me.
I've had thing thing a week and haven't charged it yet. It's even a 3S (shorter battery life than the base model). I've had it always-on, HR tracking, done three indoor workouts, a hike, and a run...
I could never have a device that needed to be charged every day.
I am very hesitant to support a smartwatch that locks features behind a subscription, even though I don't particularly care about the sleep analysis.
I don't really see who this is for anyways. If you want a fitness tracker, you are better off with something from Garmin or FitBit. If you want the best smartwatch experience, nothing comes close to the Apple Watch. The Galaxy Watches are cheaper and have more size/style options.
This is just another copycat product line that exists solely because competitors have them and probably won't exist in 3-5 years.
So, this product is for the part of the world that doesn't use iPhones, I suppose.
I'm kinda keen. Awaiting a MKBHD video, as per.
.edit: Guessing that feature's locked because it's part of FitBit, which was purchased by Google but probably still functions a bit separately.
On the other hand, the Apple Watch requires buying a macbook ($1000 one time) + a $100/year annual subscription for ad-hoc distribution to run your own app on your watch and play with data.
I assume the majority of hacker news users who buy a smart watch are going to end up writing a few simple apps/widgets/whatever for themselves, so it seems to me like, even if you do buy the optional fitbit premium subscription, you'll end up paying less per year than for an apple watch.
I'm quite hesitant of smart-watches that lock writing and running my own simple widgets behind a subscription.
I’m not so sure about that! I’m very content to be an Apple Watch user, not a developer. It already does the things I need it to (and the Shortcuts app is a great way to automate things).
I limit my watch notifications to the most important ones, allow more on the phone but the mute switch is always on, so I’ll check it when I feel like it.
And because I don’t need to drag my phone out of my pocket when important notifications arrive, I can respond or ignore them with much less literal and figurative friction.
I'm probably showing my age here, but there was a time that's hard to remember now when there were no notifications, no devices constantly vying for our attention. You would know what you deemed important when you wanted to know it. No notification angst to reduce, no distractions to fight, no productivity to claw back, no sleep disruption to schedule DND around, no cognitive overload of all the systems on your machine, let alone a computer we carry around all the time, trying to tell you their state. That was for engineers operating complex systems, for 8 hours a day - very rarely more.
Perhaps we are accepting things like "you can snooze notifications now" because we've adjusted to the new, quite crappy, normal. Imagine an advert for a car that says "you can turn off sudden unintended accelerations on your preferred hours" in a market where cars would never SUA. That's the normal we had for notifications - none of the stress or anxiety.
I’m happier with the choice to monitor in real-time what’s happening in my life, or not monitor, vs what we used to have: no choice at all.
In the early and mid 00s we had means to do all these things without notification spam. Even in the 90s, were these things problems? In which emergencies were you not able to reach loved ones or were unable to tell a tornado was coming? A lot of the public warning systems we have are from that time.
What you say makes sense if you go further back, but I feel like you're ignoring at least a decade where we had all these conveniences but no spam.
Emergencies are probably the only thing I will agree with you on, but, and this could be just my luck, I just didn't have many of those. One in particular I can think of was when I went off the road into a ditch in the middle of nowhere while trying to avoid a deer and my car was suspended over the ditch so I couldn't get it out. I walked down the road to a local factory and hitched a ride with a trucker who took me to the security office so I could call a tow truck. Yea it was a hassle but it wasn't impossible to get through emergencies without a device in your pocket.
By far the greatest feature of my Apple watch is being contactable while out on a hike without access to any Meta products. It's absolute bliss. I guess someone at Meta is trying to workout how to make us all completely addicted to our watch screens too but until then, it's paradise. A smart phone on my risk with zero distractions.
Also looking at my watch for a notification got many people thinking I was late for some appointment or that I was trying to find an excuse to stop talking to them. When I disabled the notifications I was left with not-so-smart watch with terrible battery life (still many times better than current models!).
Nowadays I stick either with a Casio Waveceptor or a mechanical watch depending if I need the time precision of the Waveceptor or not.
For me, watch notifications reduce stress by allowing me to get absorbed in the moment while still being able to quickly check up on any important things without having to "context switch" by pulling out a phone.
It means that I can actually take advantage of my flexible work schedule and go out on a walk or be visiting my niece and playing with her, yet still available to others who might be working at the time.
In the early 2000s, sure there weren't devices vying for your attention, but such flexible work requirements were also not that common.
I get to do things whenever I want as long as the overall work is progressing at a decent pace. If I had to avoid getting into something enough to remember to keep checking my phone, it'd defeat the point of such flexibility, and if others had to wait an hour or two for me to notice and reply to them, work would not progress at a decent pace and the flexibility would be taken away.
This is probably also a function of my position. I'm at the start of my research career, so most of the emails I have ultimately involve me asking someone else for something which benefits me much more than them. My being extremely prompt with my replies helps a lot with making a good impression and getting things done, and a watch helps a lot with pulling that off without having to actually stress about paying attention to my emails.
The hard truth is you are conditioning others to see and treat you like a good servant. One they want to keep as a servant.
If you want to serve yourself and advance your carreer, bring other values to the table when it matters. You want to be the person that shows promising skills for the next few carreer steps, not be the 'good ata boy, fetch'.
If you are truly needed for something urgent, because you are the only person that can do it rather than anyone that will do it. they will find a way to contact you even with your phone notifications turned off.
Making the "good impression" is a negative if you are impressing the wrong image.
You can ignore this advice from someone who has been through many stages of a carreer, and it can be scary advice givin your current perception, but trust me, this is an important worklife lesson.
These urgent emails can be about things like quick questions about my code. If they had to wait for me to reply (which would cause them to just switch to another in their large backlog of tasks in the meantime), it'd take even longer than the year it has already taken to make meaningful progress on integrating my work.
Alternatively they may be requests to have a quick call to discuss a paper draft I sent for their review (because that's the only reasonable time they might have to discussit that week). With these, of course I should care about expediency as there are only a handful of papers with me as primary author. They directly count towards the progress of my career. Plus, with these there are strict submission deadlines to deal with, which are more important to me as primary author.
I'm in a research group of 4 people, 2 of whom are more scientist than computer engineer, and the other is mainly a Python person and also mainly a Windows person. Thus, any of our new developments relating to GPU acceleration, parallelization, automations and relating to our Linux systems are, in most cases, my child. This isn't a large company where there may be many different people who can handle the same task and where it's reasonable to make it difficult for them to reach me to avoid giving the impression of being a slave.
Plus, it isn't like I'm just doing everything I'm told either. I understand when someone's just asking me to do something that they likely won't even remember asking for and know to deprioritize those things appropriately.
For better or worse, Apple's rectangular form factor is something people have gotten used to and frankly it's more space efficient than a circle.
To really make a dent in the market place, they should build a product that has a Wow factor that is good enough to lure even Apple Watch users away.
They are seriously going to need to come up with something out of the box that you mentioned to draw users. There is no wow factor at all with this thing.
Why?
Edit: I absolutely love the watch so maybe I've just learned not to care, I agree it's a little bulky but the value I get out of it makes any bulk worth it.
I do like having a heart-rate tracker, but having had a couple of fitbits the novelty eventually wears off and the reality that knowing the numbers isn't important sets in.
Also, if my hands are full/dirty I can still control media playback (granted that using the nose to tap on a watch probably looks pretty funny), and have weather right on my wrist (which is surprisingly handy).
Edit: Also it turns out to be the best kind of alarm for me. Audio alarms are annoying (also to anyone else who has to hear it) and don't really tend to wake me up nicely. Turns out the slight vibration of the watch wakes me up pretty nicely without bothering people in other rooms.
It’s never been an issue.
I understand that they're getting to the point where you can charge just while showering, but aren't quite there yet.
I can't sleep with a watch on at night, so I take it off and put it on its stand, which is the charger- my phone goes on it's charging stand at the same time.
For all other situations, I just have to stick the watch to the back of my phone to charge it, so don't even need to carry around a separate watch charger.
...but its 12mm thick?! xD
And it's free with purchase of their flagship? Who could resist?
PS> I don't work for Google/Pixel or any affiliated group.
Google Pixel Watch 2 = 306 mAh
A small improvement I suppose.
Just telling the customers "just buy a new one" if they have a cracked screen is just not acceptable in 2023.