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Comment by poetril | Hacker News Reader

I've tried a handful of smartwatches, and own a Pebble 2 Duo. While I'm interested in picking up a newer Pebble device (hopefully with a bit nicer build quality), I've found my sweetspot to be a Garmin. I bought a Forerunner 165, have never needed to pair it to my phone so I can be happy in the data privacy department. Additionally the battery life is fantastic and it gives me all the data I need for my health and fitness goals.

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I wanted to love my Garmin watches so much. I've tried a couple of Forerunners and an Instinct 2S. The hardware is great, but the software UX is so poor... I had to memorize an archaic maze of presses/long-presses to get to various features.

Just putting the watch into DnD mode required flipping through a ring of shortcuts hidden behind a long press menu. My Pebble can do this with a shortcut I assigned to a back-button long-press. Pebble's shallow-menu + shortcuts system is brilliant.

I ponder what Garmin is like in an alternate dimension where _they_ bought Pebble and used their UX chops for their own devices...

An annoyance with Garmin is that they use something as trivial as customizable shortcuts as a price discriminator. They have it in their UI already, but remove it from the affordable budget models.

On the other side, I think they are a little trapped in their legacy UX. A lot of people have Garmin watches long term, and will probably scream bloody murder if everything changes.

I don't mind so much. I have one of those budget models without a touch screen, and I find the UI vastly easier to use than my prior Casio hiking watches at least...

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