I understand it's about 4x the price, but there's also lower-end Garmin's that are about 2x the price with the same screen, slightly less features and similar battery life
As to "why": I'm not interested at all in Garmin's sports and health features and their cloud stuff. Pebbles work well, get out of the way and have a nice, friendly and slightly quirky interface. There are many apps and watchfaces out there. As of the new ones, the OS is open source. Reasons enough for me. ;)
I likely will continue to use my Garmin watch because I rely heavily on the fitness stuff that they do so well, but outside of that the Garmin is "just OK."
If you want a fitness tracker that is also a smartwatch the Garmin is a great choice. If you want a smartwatch and don't care about fitness tracking then you're wasting a lot of money on stuff you don't care about with Garmin, for just an OK and extremely locked down device.
Otherwise I agree. I would love an opensource fitness watch though, but I understand why this is not (yet?) possible.
Automatic illumination has never worked well for me on any watch. It seems I just don't roll my wrist to view the screen the way other people do, so this heuristic fails badly for me. I often read my watches via ambient light and the light hasn't triggered or comes later after I've already seen what I want. And on the other hand, I get annoyed by false-positives where it just lights up randomly in my peripheral vision. So I often disable the automatic light feature.
So, I enjoy the always-on but passive aspect of a transflective LCD display. It is practical like a conventional watch with physical hands. It works well in bright sunlight, well enough in other decently lit environments, and at least copes with dark via the backlight. I wish it was even more reflective for low light, but the recent LCDs are not bad.
I vastly prefer my Garmin FR255 which seems like the last of its breed. Garmin may have lost me as a repeat buyer with the changing products. I think I'd like their Enduro line, but not at those prices. I don't like many of the compromises of the Instinct line either, but it seems the only option left.
I was thinking about that, I like my iWatch logging my hikes.
But then I realized that I always have my phone with me anyway. And I already use a self-hosted track recorder ( https://github.com/Freika/dawarich/ ). So Pebble has one more order from me.
iWatch and the recent Android phones have some nifty features like fall detection and heart rate alarms, but their privacy and the ease of use are deteriorating.
This is the main value of the watch to me. I like it as a standalone tool in the wilderness. I am not in the market for a phone peripheral. To me, the phone app is a peripheral to setup/maintain the watch and manage its data. But during hikes they are not connected at all.
I also really like the "course following" navigation on the watch and the customizable data pages. So I can have at my wrist a concise dashboard of timing, distance, elevation, ascent/descent, and upcoming turn guidance as I approach trail junctions. It's there at a glance.
I do also have mapping software on the phone for redundancy and other purposes, but the watch will get me to my destination on its own.
Though if you want to use your watch as a primary navigation device, you likely need to use LCD/OLED. eInk is not great for interactive map use, not a great use-case for Pebble.
For backup, I like carrying a Garmin satellite communicator. It has its own offline maps and a way to call for rescue in a pinch.
There's still a strong market for dumb watches too, so a long-lasting "smart" device that does some things but not as much as an Apple Watch, Garmin, Coros, etc while still serving as a general information displaying wearable sounded enticing. Unfortunately Apple's lockdown of the iPhone for the previous Pebbles (which I think might still be a thing) and my need for fitness tracking are what prevented me from buying a Pebble.
I have an Instinct 2 that cost me under $200 new, goes 2+ weeks between charges, and handles all activities I throw at it quite well.
I agree: their launching of a subscription service is disappointing, because (1) it was wonderful having a no-recurring-cost ecosystem before, and (2) presumably that's where they'll be investing their product dollars. But, it's not required, and to date, it's not particularly high value.
The new Pebble is very similar to the Coros Pace but without the GPS but with hackability and that makes me very interested.
Yeah... I bought an Instinct 2S hoping it would scratch the same itch as Pebble, but the UX is really awful.
The Pebble OS UX is really something special because it's so... obviously correct. Vertical menus just a few layers deep. You can set shortcuts on long-press but they aren't required to do the basic functions. It boggles my mind that Garmin cannot make an interface that doesn't require a lot of memorization in remembering all the right buttons to press/hold.
The idea of having a screen on my wrist doesn't particularly appeal to me.
My partner has one and when they turn over in bed, I am sometimes blinded by the screen which still glows brightly even at the lowest setting in complete darkness.
That's why I'm considering a e-ink watch. The reason I didn't commit yet is that I fear that notifications and such before bedtime could be just as harmful to my nightline peacefulness.
If you have an Android, you can set Do Not Disturb mode on a schedule.
Why/how can my Apple Watch barely make it through 24 hours?
What’s the fundamental difference between these two smartwatches that accounts for a 30× decrease in battery life?
Also, Apple sees no benefit having their watches last longer, so they're adding features instead of optimizing them, as long as it hits 18 hours or so.
For most people, the batter is enough for the day of an average use and they charge it at night with their phones.
I don't know about the Apple Watch Ultra 2 however and how it compares.
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[1] Actually second, their priorities are money->UX->others - hence being uncooperative with any efforts to improve standard web apps despite the potential user benefits as they could compete with their appstore
I'm a Garmin Venu fan, but... apparently it was a $350 watch[0], and now there's a $450 version[1] and an $800 version[2]. There's still an older one[3] available for $250 (or ~$185 on Amazon). Though I got my original Venu "refurbished" for under $100 (and it still had all the plastic wrap, etc. so was truly "like new.")
10-11 day battery when new (mine gets 6-7 days after several years of use, but I have never used always-on-display.)
If I can get a Venu 2/2S/2S Plus/3/3S as a refurbished watch for ~$200-250, then I would go that route over an inexpensive Pebble 2 Time. Love that OLED screen. But I totally get the hacker ethos favoring the Pebble OS over Garmin. (Garmin does have a pretty good watch OS, and most things work without a subscription, which was a major factor in my purchase.) For $450 (or more...) it is not comparable to Pebble's offering.
[0] https://www.techradar.com/reviews/garmin-venu
[1] https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/873008/
It's squarely aimed at people who want the watch functionality to be first and foremost - no dorky wrist flicks or the distraction of the screen coming on and off all the time.
My watch display (Garming Fenix 7) is always on and the battery life is great. Any dorky wrist flick or button presses are for the backlight when it is needed.
[Though as others point out, the balance of needs targetted by the two devices differ noticably]
These devices are able to always show the display, don't need to turn off features, can still show notifications, etc.
The use-case for a transflective watch are the same as they were in 2013. I don't really care if my watch has a beautiful vibrant display, I want it to show the time, every single time I look at it. The Garmin's wrist turn gesture detection is decent, but far from perfect. I need to either poke the screen, push a button, or very deliberately raise my wrist to trigger the gesture detection. Also, it emits light every time the screen wakes, whether I'm looking or not, and whether the light from the watch will be disruptive or not.
None of that sounds convincing? Then this product probably just isn't aimed at you. And I don't mean that to be snarky, preferences around smartwatches are just really particular to the individual.
And that's not even talking about the software bugs that destroy a full battery in moments.
In fact, I am tempted by the Pebble Core 2 (which is the lower-end version) because it ticks all the boxes: affordable ($150), supports notifications, vibration, good battery life (30 days), and of course it tells the time. It is also one of the most open smart watch platforms.
I am not a competitive athlete, I don't need a detailed report of my physical activity, and my idea of health is not chasing numbers unless it comes from a prescription. Not saying it is wrong, it is just not my thing. As for GPS tracking, it is a nice feature, but AFAIK, Pebble watches can use the GPS in your phone to do some limited navigation.
Pebble watches still have some basic health tracking features, like step counting, sleep tracking, heart rate. All probably inaccurate like for most watches, but considering how cheap these things are, why not put them in.
I heavily debated getting one of these and I bit the bullet a few days ago. The use case is I want a watch that I can tinker with and not giving Garmin my data.
Garmin introduced a subscription and you can guarantee that'll pave the way for the base experience to get shittier over time as they funnel people to it. If it works other fitness watches will follow.
As soon as someone makes a good enough fitness app for that it becomes a way better option, it could actually get better over time without breaking.
Lately my Garmin comparison strategy has been:
- look at the last Garmin watch you were interested in
- see if there's been an upgrade to that model (and hope that the model numbering hasn't totally changed)
- look at prices of recent Garmin watches in the same ballpark
Also, you have to consider that I charge my watch ~10 times less than my phone (roughly every 10 days). So the total amount of charging cycles was maybe ~100 times.
I don't need any of this
Pebble is very different product. It's a watch for tinkerers with some fitness features added to it.