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Comment by ihaveone | Hacker News Reader

Pebble Time 2 is still miles ahead being a watch, and only a bit behind being a computer. BUT, it has a sunlight readable ALWAYS on display, really good battery life and is open source. I still don't understand people charging their battery every 2 days or less. It's a problem guys. My Wear OS watches, even my fancy 2 screen one that got about 4 days or so, eventually ended up in a drawer. Never to be used again. Not so with my pebble, where I literally made an automation to remind me to charge it, because I charge it so rarely.

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For me, the appeal of the smartwatch is more advanced health tracking, custom applications, NFC, and GPS. As far as I know, Pebble lacks most if not all of these features. I really want to want a Pebble, but it's far closer to a customizable watchface than even a Fitbit. On the other hand, daily charging of smart watches is completely outrageous.

They have some heart-rate and some health tracking an as others have mentioned, so many of the more fringe features are way less useful than a watch that lasts anywhere from a week to a month on a charge versus a daybor two with the ultra

Well, right, that's why I said "advanced" health tracking. A pedometer is enough to measure steps.

And then, I dunno. We've clearly made this trade-off before with mobile phones. As much as I like the Nokia I had that went weeks without a charge, I also rarely notice the charging time of my phone.

Lately I've been thinking about a mode in which a "smartwatch" serves as a fitness tracker, heads-up display, and wallet, while a real, mechanical watch, which never runs out of battery, becomes the timepiece (and fashion piece?)

PebbleTime 2 has a pedometer, HR monitor, and sleep tracking. You can set it to do continuous HR measurements during activities. This covers all the basics.

GPS is covered by the phone that you're going to be carrying anyway.

Really the only missing part is NFC payments.

> GPS is covered by the phone that you're going to be carrying anyway

Unless you go for a run, for example.

> Really the only missing part is NFC payments.

And custom applications, not the least of which are navigation tools like Google Maps or Citymapper.

> Unless you go for a run, for example.

You can bring your phone with you! Then you can combine its GPS tracks and the information from Pebble.

> And custom applications, not the least of which are navigation tools like Google Maps or Citymapper.

They won't work without the phone connection because Pebble does not have a cellular modem.

But there are mapping apps for the Pebble that use the phone's GPS: https://apps.repebble.com/maptastic_52e7521679f937c182000004 or https://apps.repebble.com/maps-nav_99279aadf6df4c0fadfdb39a

>You can bring your phone with you!

You can, but it's pretty awful. put it in a pocket and it flops around. Wear a band that slides in your phone in and get it soaked (i'm a sweat monster).

I own a pebble, but I'll gladly just run without a phone.

Have you tried one of these upper arm holsters?

Actually, you gave me an idea!

There are button-sized Bluetooth GPS loggers. They can record a GPS track, and you can later download the data from them. Since it's freaking GPS, it automatically has timestamps, so it's easy to correlate with other activity.

As a bonus, I think it should be possible to connect them directly with the phone.

BRB, I think I have a ESP-based Tiny Arudino somewhere...

Heh, I used to use bluetooth GPS tracker with my nokia 770. It worked well since I could place the gps where it got the best signal. I could start a track, have it record it, and then check in with the n770 only when I needed to see a map. That way I made the most of my n770's battery life, but still got continuous tracking.

Beware that they take much longer to start since they don't know the GPS coords of the nearest cell tower, nor do they download the GPS almanac over the cell connection. They will however remember the almanac so you can leave it on for 30 minutes and not have to redownload it the next day.

I have a small Meshtastic device, not quite button-sized but still tiny. The chip on it supports aGPS, so I can upload the almanac and prime it with the approximate location. I'm very familiar with this process, I wrote a small utility for my cell phone back in ~2010 after I screwed up its factory image by installing Cyanogen.

Nice, I have a few mestastic widgets, but do want something small enough for a dog collar. That way my wife and I can carry a radio and keep one in the car so we have a good chance getting in range.

Sad that most of ham radio, which has similar APRS for tracking, doesn't do async or multi-hop.

I found this one when searching for something similar: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GF6QL9S9 - it should even be hackable.

I have not tested it, but it should be hackable. I have a couple of discrete RAK chips, and I've ordered a PCB with a trace antenna for them.

Looks nice for some uses, but pretty big for a dog collar, almost 3" on a side. I've some long/thin dev boards that I could pair with an 18650 that should be closer to 1".

I'm planning to use a small LiPo battery with a JST connector. The whole footprint should be slightly larger than 3x4x1 cm. Still a bit too large for a pocket device, but perfect for a collar.

Sounds great, best I found so far is the RAK19007 (30x60mm), then add a GPS (RAK12500). It will be kind of long (60mm + case) but not too wide (30mm + 3d printed case).

Or the Mesh Node T114 Development Board V2 (23mm wide).

OP specifically called out GPS in relation to a watch as a desired feature. You can’t just summarily dismiss that with a hand wave of “you have a phone don’t you?”

It can mean different things: support for fully autonomous GPS or for the phone-assisted GPS.

> GPS is covered by the phone that you're going to be carrying anyway.

I leave my phone at home when I go for a run. Connect my headphones to ma watch (which as my podcasts and audiobooks on there), remove the house key from my keychain and carry nothing with me besides key, watch and headphone. Feels so much better than having a phone with me

That isn’t advanced health tracking. Advanced health tracking is when my Apple Watch watched my activity versus heart rate over time and warned me it saw signs of hypertension, which caused me to buy a wrist BP and do a health log for BPmin Apple Health, then produce a report and go to a doctor who prescribed medication for me. Does the PebbleTime do that?

Pebble Time has the HR sensor, and it has activity monitoring. You can upload the data into Google Health or Apple's health tracker. So it should work? It's the same data, after all.

I canceled my pebble preorder when I found out it can only record audio for a couple minutes at a time. A big use case for me is to record voice notes without going into the distraction center that is my phone, but often they can be 20+ minutes

Pebble's custom applications is far better than Google or Apple. It's much more hackable.

The other features are indeed worse or missing.

>> I still don't understand people charging their battery every 2 days or less. It's a problem guys. My Wear OS watches, even my fancy 2 screen one that got about 4 days or so, eventually ended up in a drawer.

It's funny because I can't understand this from the other perspective. You get up, take your watch off to shower (i.e. put it on charge) and by the time you've got ready it's done. I actually had issues when I got the Apple Watch Ultra and the battery lasted longer. I got out of the charging routine and ran out of battery at inconvenient times.

Can you sell Pebble Time 2 to me as Amazfit Bip user? All I need are notifications from smartphone, sleep tracking and pedometer.

I am on my third Bip, the last two I bought used for like 20USD, why would I spend in 2026 225USD on Pebble Time 2 with worse specs (thicker and it doesn't even have GPS) rather than just buy another used Amazfit Bip for 15-20USD (it can still last 4 weeks even with old battery)? Their pricing is completely insane. I don't care about their special OS and custom apps.

i own PT2 due to buttons but charging thing is not such a problem considering i take it off before the shower

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