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Comment by NBJack | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, Garmin watches are amazing. Going from a watch I had to charge daily (Samsung Gear line) to one I charge about 3 times a month feels incredibly liberating, particularly for travel. _And_ it feels almost as slim and light as my old Pebble Time Round.

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I agree completely! Our Garmin Descent Mk3i dive computer smart watches are the best watches I've ever seen. They just work. You can charge it for an hour or so and it's good for 25 days. I hated having to charge previous watches every day. It has a double-tap light on/off feature with a very bright LED, four light levels, and a red light mode. It automatically starts tracking my dives and is rated to 200 meters. It can also do diver-to-diver messaging, air tank tracking, and group tracking using subwave sonar. And it has all the normal pulse ox, heart rate tracking, step tracking, sleep tracking, and smartwatch stuff. Just don't enable the one touch kill-switch ;-). Apparently it's a feature for military divers to erase their data (but sounds like a marketing gimmick).

Pebble Time 2 is available again! I bought one.

It doesn't have all the Garmin features, but it's free and I don't have to worry about it's software getting redesigned.

True, but in defense or Garmins, one cool feature is that they are really similar to their GPSr units in that you can just connect them to a computer and transfer data and maps (including many custom maps) through MTP (or as a USB drive on older models). Plus they work with Gadgetbridge. So you can pretty much use the watch forever without Garmin involved.

Yep, agreed. Garmins are great! I tried Fenix and I liked its feature set, but it's just too large for me physically.

If only the map rendering wasn't so terribly slow. I often use mapping when cycling and panning or zooming the map is just unbearably slow.

I'm now usually taking the Coros Nomad because it has super-fast maps and still a battery life of three weeks.

They are really great otherwise and I love my Coros Nomad and Garmin Fenix so much more than the Apple Watch Ultra.

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