This thread is full of people complaining how these aren't like their preferred watches, in terms of design, face shape, no GPS, etc.
I think this is a much more valid criticism in that their expensive flagship watch is not like their cheaper watch.
Which is funny to me because that's explicitly the point.
> These watches are not made for everyone. We want to be upfront with you about what to expect.
It's probably the most frustrating part of smartwatches. Everyone has a different list of mandatory features, and few seem to accept that their list isn't universal. Unlike phones where just about all of them have just about all the features, the smartwatch market is a wild west. It makes finding the right one for you a lot of work, and it's understandably disappointing when a watch checks all but one or two of your "must have"s.
When a product has two price points, like this, it's usually expected that the more expensive one is strictly "better" than the cheaper one in some ways. That isn't the case here, and it makes everything more difficult. Most of us are conditioned to look at the more expensive version, and say "are these extra features worth $X extra" and decide that way. With these watches, I have to try to think about whether I would use a compass or heart rate monitor more.
I knew my preferences were niche, but I didn't think they were that niche. There hasn't been a phone with even half my ideal feature list (that works in the US) in probably close to a decade, and even if I abandon my more niche "nice to haves", there are essentially no new phones, and that's even before I add in that I'd really like it to be relatively repairable. And yes, there _used_ to be phones that had my entire feature list, so it's not a completely crazy list. It's just that phone makers have converged a pretty standard feature list with not too many companies coloring outside the lines. If you want that particular feature list, then sure, everyone has "all the features", but there is a whole universe of additional features that phones could (and some did) have, that they no longer do.
Small size. I'm a 6'2" male, so my hands are probably pretty well above the population average. Maybe it's because I'm a lefty, but I hate how big phones have gotten. It makes one hand use almost impossible, and if it's that hard for me, I have to assume that most people have just given up on even trying. I'd really prefer a sub 5.5" phone screen (part of me wants to say even smaller, but it's been so long since I've used a phone that small, that I don't even know anymore what my ideal size/lower limit is).
Headphone jack. Relatively self explanatory, imo.
No camera cutout. I hate them. I'd literally rather give up the screen real estate and have a bigger top bezel (although, see my point 1, I obviously value screen size less than most consumers). Luckily in Android you can just turn off the screen around the cutout in developer options, but I'd prefer to just not have the screen there. At least on my current phone, it still wastes battery (this might be a non-issue on OLED screens) and will register touches, preventing proper touch recognition elsewhere (this is related to the difficulty of single handed use, would probably be mitigated on a smaller phone)
SD card slot. Maybe the easiest of this list to actually still find? It seems like a decent number of phones these days have a spot for it in in the SIM card tray. I've heard that the reason companies don't include it is that a lot of SD cards are trash and wear out pretty quickly. This could lead to consumers losing data and being mad at the phone manufacturer. In my opinion, this is understandable, but still a bad reason.
IR Blaster/FM Tuner. I consider these two together. They are both pretty niche, and are "nice to haves". Mostly because I want my phone to be as much of a general purpose communications device as possible. The times when these are helpful are infrequent, but in those rare times, extremely nice to have.
Replaceable battery actually isn't on my list, mostly because I consider it part and parcel of "repairability", which (maybe nonsensically) seems like a different category. And, for me personally, battery degradation actually hasn't been a problem for phones. The two biggest things I would want to be able to repair are charging ports (this would be mitigated with wireless charging) and screen repair. These are, for me at least, the two most likely parts to break/wear out, and in my opinion they should both be cheap and easy to repair. Of course, if it was easy to do those two, you'd get battery replacement almost by default, and I certainly wouldn't be mad about easier to swap batteries.
The "pebble 2" from the Kickstarter -> "core 2 time" The "pebble 2 time" is nowhere to be found.
(The pebble 2 time was supposed to be the same underlying hardware, but a much classier case, slightly different form factor). They look much more like a normal watch, versus the pebble style feels like a geek toy.
I still get compliments on my pebble time round to this day!
I've been wearing my
The compass could be easily related to an accelerometer used for detecting watch position (a function commonly used in smartwatches to power on the screen on certain positions that suggest you're looking at it) or detecting "steps".
Not so sure about where could you also get the barometric pressure sensor...
Most smartphones don't come with a barometer, and the compass actually needs to be fixed to the display to make sense.