10 ms·
Smartwatches have fallen so far from their peak. In 2015, Pebble had a watch that had: - an app store, third party apps, third party watch faces, and a develo
by jerlam 6y ago
Smartwatches have fallen so far from their peak.
In 2015, Pebble had a watch that had:
- an app store, third party apps, third party watch faces, and a developer ecosystem
- always on screen that didn't require a button press or specific arm gesture, and worked in bright, normally lit conditions
- physical buttons instead of tiny buttons on a tiny screen barely larger than the finger pressing it
- week long battery life
Pebble was crushed by Fitbit, which didn't have any third party support, and by Apple, which had miserable battery life and relied on the connected phone to do most of its work.
Now Pebble is long gone, Fitbit bought the remnants of Pebble is being acquired by Google, Google itself doesn't seem to have any interest in WearOS, and Apple Watch almost has two-day battery life and app store has never lived up to expectations. We now have "smart watches" which basically combine basic phone notification API implementations, a package of often unreliable sensors, mostly-off touchscreens, and bundled "apps" which can only be used with the hugest social media sites.
- colordrops 6y agoGoogle acquiring fitbit? Nooooo, I've been in the process of de-googlification and fitbit has massive amounts of my health data from the last half year. Need to figure out how to nuke all of that.
- lovemenot 6y agoIf your Fitbit data is linked to a residual Google account, you can use that account to delete it. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/465 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/465
- modeless 6y agoDon't forget: 7.5mm thick (for the round version). There is nothing on the market even close. I wore mine until last month when the battery gave out. If I could buy one with a new battery (not a replaced one as it compromises the waterproofing) I'd choose it over any other option available today.
- ce4 6y agoLook for devices supported by the gadgetbridge 3rd party app (found in android's f-droid store). I have an Amazfit Bip S lite. 45days battery, always on lcd. Custom notification filters by gadgetbridge. Great https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge
- modeless 6y agoI assure you, I have evaluated everything on the market. Amazfit devices are >1cm thick (even the ones that claim 9.2mm, it's a lie). They are also larger diameter than the Pebble Time Round, so overall more than twice as big and much less comfortable. The phone software is nowhere near as good, the watch UI is poorly designed, and the watch face/app selection is poor in comparison to Pebble. I haven't tried gadgetbridge yet but on newer Amazfit devices it requires some hacking to get it to work (extracting login tokens or encryption keys or something) and I expect that it will be fragile.
- will0 6y agoI know you said you don't want a replaced battery, but if you were interested in doing the (fairly easy) battery replacement yourself, there's a link to where you can purchase a battery on Aliexpress here: https://willow.systems/pebble/#hardware https://willow.systems/pebble/#hardware
- vanous 6y agoIt is fragile. But, the key can be fetched from their server. No root, no funky hacked app, judt one time effort. Bip is not perfect, but the translucent display and GPS, plus many weeks of life are great. You can even push it for BipOs and write your own apps. Disclosure: I help with Gadgetbridge :)
- ce4 6y agoI can confirm that vanous is helping users :) Hi vanous!
- delfinom 6y agoIt's sad Google is so incompetent with WearOS, I would kill to have a cheap smartwatch just to use Google Pay. Instead the only ones are overpriced and shit battery life.
- will0 6y agoPebble may be long gone, but there are plenty of people still using them with 90% of the functionality still intact!
- drewzero1 6y agoI do love seeing all the other pebble people show up whenever smartwatches come up as a topic. After a few years of looking into smartwatches (and working on my own ATTiny/ATMega/ESP32 smartwatch project) I finally bought a Pebble Time Steel this spring. I had expected the Pebble hype to wear off after a bit, but so far it's lived up to pretty much all of my expectations. I don't even have a Rebble account yet, but it's surprised me how much still works and how much use I can get out of it in my daily life.
- m463 6y agoIt also had an open ecosystem. You could create and compile your watch apps to your heart's delight without asking someone for permission.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoYou can get most of the Pebble features you listed on the Amazfit Bip and Gadgetbridge. It's not perfect, but it's the closest thing to what the Pebble used to be. See this thread from below here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25269500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25269500
- Twirrim 6y agoI like my Amazfit Bip, but the integration is no where near as smooth as Pebble was. I only stopped using my Pebble because I had the first gen screen corruption issues. By the time they were getting to be an issue, the writing was on the wall for them.
- m-p-3 6y agoIt's silly, but I miss having my TOTP codes on my wrist.
- antidaily 6y agoI backed the first Pebble. I think you're overselling how great things were as compared to now, where I can make calls from my wrist or use it as golf GPS. And it's not like smart watches are the only app ecosystem to become closed and shittier.
- slezyr 6y agoPineTime is the only watch that is cheap and can be programmable. However, it's software isn't mature enough for daily use. https://pine64.com/product/pinetime-dev-kit/?v=0446c16e2e66 https://pine64.com/product/pinetime-dev-kit/?v=0446c16e2e66
- tartoran 6y agoDo you have one? What are the problems with it so far?
- posguy 6y agoI have a few, its a functional smartwatch that is super snappy and responsive to touch. It does not have the largest feature set, but I can see the time, my heartrate, control the music player on my phone, etc. The feature set is expanding as people develop for it, and you have a choice in OSes (much like the Pinephone or a Thinkpad can run dozens of diverse OSes)
- bllguo 6y agoseriously - it's been _years_, it should only be easier to get to pebble's level (if not surpass it) anecdotally, in my life I've seen maybe enough apple watches to count on one hand? and a few fitbits. That's it. A far cry from what I expected the future to be like, back when pebble was getting hype and when apple announced their offering. What is the problem with the market? is there really just no demand for smartwatches of any kind?
- orthros 6y agoI own an Apple Watch 6, but I'll tell you the problem: charging $400 for a watch. If they got down to $100 or so, you'd see wide adoption. Which is why the Wyze Watch at $20 is so fascinating to me. At this price, you can just buy one instead of a Casio.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoI miss my Pebble big time. Still nothing compares.
- slenk 6y agoI would encourage you to look at Garmin watches. They definitely compare
- bibabaloo 6y agoI don't agree with all their business practices, but if you're looking for an alternative, Garmin watches do all of that well these days. I'm quite happy with my Forerunner 735XT.
- steve_adams_86 6y agoMind if I ask what issue you have with their practices? I try to be a conscious consumer so I’m curious if anything you know would concern me as well.
- bibabaloo 6y agoMainly that they sell health data (anonymized and aggregated, but still), to undisclosed third parties and they're not super upfront about it.
- steve_adams_86 6y agoI can’t find this information and there are way too many policies to sift through. It doesn’t seem unlikely or abnormal, though. Do you think many wearable manufacturers aren’t sharing or selling data like this?
- newfromblammo 6y agoThis right here. When I see a twenty buck wearable I immediately think surveillance.
- amanzi 6y agoFor what it's worth, I wear a Garmin Vivoactive 4 and it has the following: - an app store, third party apps, third party watch faces, and a developer ecosystem - always on screen that doesn't require a button press or specific arm gesture, and works in bright, normally lit conditions - physical buttons instead of tiny buttons on a tiny screen barely larger than the finger pressing it - week long battery life Also has GPS, Music storage/playback, actionable notifications, and a ton of health and fitness stuff.
- eximius 6y agoI'm kind of hopeful an interesting community will develop around the PineTime Watch. https://lupyuen.github.io/pinetime-rust-mynewt/articles/watchface https://lupyuen.github.io/pinetime-rust-mynewt/articles/watc...
- Triv888 6y agoIt's almost the same as comparing PC and smartphones... Smartphones are restricted in a lot of ways for no good reason which is why I am still wanting a true Linux phone.
- MikeKusold 6y agoGarmin has been crushing it with their smartwatches. * App store with 3rd party apps and faces. * Always on screen * Physical buttons (Vivoactive is mostly touchscreen oriented, but all their "athlete" watches use buttons) * Week long battery life - Even running GPS tracking for 12 hours straight leaves enough battery for the next day. The biggest downside to the Garmin is trying to figure out which watch to buy. They stupidly gate certain activities to specific watches. For example Garmin has a Hike activity on their Fenix line, but not their Vivoactive so I need to track my hikes as a Walk.
- LolWolf 6y agoMy main problem with Garmin, and the one that gets me really hard when camping, is the fact that Connect requires internet in order to be able to see even basic statistics. I absolutely love my Garmin Vivomove Style, but because of the small screen I can't really see any activity other than very basic things, which requires that I fall back to my phone app... which doesn't work when camping or hiking because I don't have cellphone reception. If they could fix this one problem, I'd buy more of their sports-oriented watches, but this is the one thing that I find really hard to deal with. Otoh, the watch is phenomenal and beautiful, and I love having a watch that lasts 5+ days on a single charge and looks like a normal watch, but tells me my calendar and such, and can be used to track running and hiking.
- Chris2048 6y agoMaybe rephrase "and the one that gets me really hard when camping"..
- photojosh 6y agoI was bitten by this just the other weekend. Out in the middle of nowhere for an organised event, and the organisers said we had to use the backup route. I had it downloaded to my phone, but Garmin Connect won't work at all without an internet connection. Ended up just using my phone for navigation, and even though I was recording GPS and heart rate the whole time, I'd only used 50% battery after 14 hours riding. Nice. There was another guy at the campsite who was looking for someone who had downloaded the route. I AirDropped it to him, and he transferred it to his Wahoo bike computer with no trouble. For shorter rides/runs, I use the WorkOutdoors app on the Apple Watch. It's only battery life that's an issue when the activity is longer than 6 hours. Just this morning I had the opportunity to go for a run a bit out of my normal zones, so within a minute I had sketched out a route on the phone and transferred it over to the watch. (That some of the paths I'd used didn't actually exist anymore was a separate issue, but I've already updated OpenStreetMap to fix that.)
- bamboozled 6y agoI have a Garmin Forerunner, it’s basically the watch you’re describing from Pebble but better. Longer battery etc.
- outworlder 6y agoI had a Pebble Time Steel. Loved the thing to death. The battery was a bit degraded and I got tired of not being able to acknowledge Pagerduty notifications (even though I could receive them), as well as not having any fitness features whatsoever (other than the steps counter). So I bit the bullet and bough an Apple watch. Within two days, I stop using the Pebble. Yes it's nice, but against what's essentially a supercomputer in my wrist, with a bunch of useful apps... I switched. Sure, having to charge daily is not _ideal_, but I can put it to charge while I'm having dinner or in the shower, and it will be full pretty quickly - specially if you are just topping off daily. It is not as convenient, but I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would. The screen is always on too. I disabled the feature, didn't see much of a difference. Just this weekend, I had a pretty spectacular fall from my bike. Fall detection kicked in - I did not need emergency services, but it was a reminder that some features can be life-saving. My company's SSO supports IOS, which means it is now integrated with my watch. Pretty secure too, the watch will lock if it is removed from my wrist. It can unlock my machine (and my car). I can control other devices. I can take just the watch outside and still receive phone calls, or buy groceries. Many of those things, I couldn't do with the Pebble, or they would be more cumbersome. Yes, physical buttons are nice, but also limiting. Pebble had the right idea. But they executed too slowly and too late. The fitness focus was missed by them for quite a while, I bet that they could have stayed relevant if they had implemented features like heart rate monitoring.
- bigiain 6y ago> Pebble had the right idea. But they executed too slowly and too late. They were also _way_ too small to compete with the industrial design, manufacturing capability, and marketing clout of Apple. Or even Samsung. They were inevitably gonna get crushed. And I say this as a four time Pebble Kickstarter backer who could see it even back then. A couple of kids with an amazing YC pitch deck and ambitions-untempered-by-experience-or-reality? They were never gonna "win" if Jony Ives and Foxconn ended up in their market segment. I don't regret a cent I spent with Pebble. I hope the founders made out like bandits when they sold out, and I hope it launched them onto spectacular career trajectories. But they never really stood a chance of being the top player in any sophisticated consumer electronics space...
- Wildgoose 6y agoI have a Fossil Hybrid HR. It has an always-on e-ink display with physical watch hands, back light, Heart Rate monitor, and a 10 day battery life. It's great, and probably the closest thing to a successor to a Pebble watch.
- bpye 6y agoI've been tempted but I do use some of the smart features on my Apple Watch. It's a tough tradeoff.
- justsid 6y agoSecond this and at the same time don’t. The watch is great, it’s the closest to Pebble I’ve gotten. It also has features that I wanted out of my Pebble, like sleep tracking. The battery life is also fantastic and closer to 14 days for me. But, the big downside is the software. It’s veeeery limited. The latest update made things a lot better and Fossil seems to be headed in the right direction, but it’s just not there yet. Customization is big for me, and the Fossil HR has limited amounts of it. No SDK for example, so no third party apps. You get what Fossil says you need. That being said, I love my Fossil HR to bits. But man, I really wish I was wearing a Time Steel 2.
- mjcohen 6y agoPebble watches still run on Android thanks to Rebel. My Pebble Time rules!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- balls187 6y agoWhat is it you're looking for in a smartwatch?
- intricatedetail 6y agoThey are not interested in providing watch experience, but rather to harvest as much data about user as possible. This should be illegal.
- tinus_hn 6y agoOnly the Apple Watch 1 ran its applications on the phone, and the current version is 6. And it has an always on display.