6 ms·

Glad to finaly see someone in the low-power chip industry going in the open source direction. Thanks for the insight! When I saw rePebble be announced, I signe

by alin23 1y ago

Glad to finaly see someone in the low-power chip industry going in the open source direction. Thanks for the insight! When I saw rePebble be announced, I signed up for it right away. Only later I realized I actually don't want a smartwatch, I want a dumb watch with vibration notifications. I know I'm in the minority, but it's a niche that has a few very interested people in it [0] [1] [2] After wearing the Casio F105 for the past 2 years, I can't go back to something larger, heavier or thicker than this. I could accept weekly battery charging for the benefit of having some bluetooth functionality. So nowadays I'm looking for a super small bluetooth chip that can power a small vibration motor, which can receive all notifications from my iPhone. I would like to glue that chip, motor and a small lithium battery between the two straps of my F105, because in my tests it seems I don't notice if I add a small weight there. I still remember when I first used my first Mi Band 1, a forgotten fitness band that had no display, just 3 RGB LEDs that could even get specific colors based on the app that sent the notification. I could know right away when I got a blue Messenger chat that I needed to answer now, or a yellow Google Keep reminder that I could ignore until I got back to my computer. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/comments/9xw2j2/im_looking_for_a_dumb_smartwatch_that_just/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/comments/9xw2j2/im_looking_f... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/smartwatch/comments/174hq9x/need_a_minimalistic_yet_reliable_watch_for_email/ https://www.reddit.com/r/smartwatch/comments/174hq9x/need_a_... [2] https://tildes.net/~tech/18nf/smartwatch_primarily_for_notifications_and_battery_life https://tildes.net/~tech/18nf/smartwatch_primarily_for_notif...

0xEF 1y ago
I still rock my OG Pebble and while I am excited they're coming back, I have no plans to upgrade. Like you, my needs are simple; vibrating alarm, notifications, but with one key factor; I need a display that I can read in broad daylight that plays nice with my far-sighted eyes. The eInk display on the OG Pebbles hits the mark. Being able to read a text without pulling out my phone is also nice. Plus they can be got on eBay for about $30 USD and a fresh battery is about $15, so they don't break the bank. The Rebble.io community's work is still functioning well enough for my use, as well.
- Knork-and-Fife 1y ago
  Small correction, pebbles use a TFT "e-paper" display, not e-ink. This is how they have reasonable refresh rates for animations and no after image problems. It's the best compromise imo
  - 0xEF 1y ago
    Ahh, right. Thank you, I do mix them up in my head often.
MrAlex94 1y ago
Would Withings[1] watches not fit the bill? I have a ScanWatch and the battery life lasts almost a month. 1: https://www.withings.com/ https://www.withings.com/
- alin23 1y ago
  The Scanwatch Light seems to be very close to what I need. While they're priced reasonably for what they offer, they're crazy expensive for what I would need. I'm really not interested in fitness or sleep tracking these days anymore. I'm also a bit scared of the many "charging issues" some people seem to have with them after a few months, but I guess every batch has a few bad devices so I could hopefully return it. Thanks for the recommendation! I might try one soon.
  - MrAlex94 1y ago
    For what it’s worth, after I bought one, around five other people I know got them, varying models from the Steel HR to Nova, and haven’t been made aware of any issues. Of course, personal experience doesn’t apply to the mass of products, and these are all UK SKUs, so who knows if issues vary between countries as well? Overall everyone has been happy though and I haven’t seen Withings come up on HN which is surprising tbh!
- rstuart4133 1y ago
  I had a Seiko watch for decades that needed a new battery every 5 years, and I still miss it. It never left my wrist except for battery replacements. The Casio mentioned above goes one better by using solar, so it would never have to leave my wrist - and it has a BLE connection to the phone. But it doesn't have enough sensors, like an accelerometer. Withings smartwatches come do closest, and that's what I have now. Their standout feature is their 30 day recharge, but they still have a ways to go. They are expensive, but worse they are fragile and no one will repair them in most countries, and the rechargeable battery means they will only live a few years. On top of that I'd like to see them add NFC, payment card and passkey integration, with better security so if they leave you wrist you have to re-authenticate or reset them. None of these things require much (if any) power. Also while the analogue time is great, interacting with the digital interface is clunky. A single button is not enough. The digital interface could be bigger, and could display more - like displaying the last few message. So my take is while smartwatches are improving, they still have a ways to go. And that way is not the direction Apple appears to be taking, which seems to be to put a power hungry iPhone with a miniature screen on your wrist. I'm hoping the old watch manufacturers will come back with their robust very low power designs, with a few added sensors.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mrweasel 1y ago
Apparent my wish for a fitness tracker that's not a watch is also pretty niche. I know that there are rings, but I also don't like rings. Basically I want a bracelet, if it must be on my arm, but ideally it would be an ankle bracelet. I'm not sure that would provide a convenient spot to get heart rate, or data beyond steps.
- ramses0 1y ago
  Whoop.com, your wish has been granted! Just pony up $19.95/mo (or whatever) as well...
  - mrweasel 1y ago
    So close... but why the subscription? It just needs to stuff the data into Apple Health when it is within range of my phone. It is actually tempting, but I can't support a subscription based hardware product. Just charge me whatever the device cost + profits.
    - hombre_fatal 1y ago
      I've had one since October and really like it. I justify the ~$20/mo the same way I justify a gym membership: it's a bargain if it's compelling you to make positive choices about health/sleep/exercise. If it's not, then yeah, it's just an expensive mood ring. Of course, there are also smart rings (Oura) and much cheaper devices (FitBit https://store.google.com/category/trackers https://store.google.com/category/trackers).
    - sulam 1y ago
      Full disclosure, I worked many years at Fitbit, in a very senior role. The reason you want Whoop to have a subscription (and why I wear a Whoop now) is because it incentivizes the company to ship great hardware _and_ software. If you don’t have a subscription, your company becomes stuck on the treadmill of needing to have a new device to sell to the public every year (or even twice a year) so that you can continue to fund your business. Pebble found this out, too, and it led to their sale eventually. Worse, the launch dates are not movable. People are largely not going to wait and buy your new watch in January if they wanted to get a Christmas gift for their spouse. The same goes for Mother’s Day. The scope is also not movable, because it has to have certain things for people to be interested vs last year’s model. We all know what happens when you fix scope and date in the iron triangle — quality suffers. The subscription model has a great property — you can ship the device to your customers when it’s ready and meets your quality bar, and you can theoretically do it for free, because they are already paying a subscription. I realize Whoop did not take this path with their latest device release, they are clearly trying to goose their revenue for a quarter or two. That said, at the end of the day, their full product offering will either earn your subscription or not, which means that you can be confident that they are aligned with your interests. You generally cannot say that about a pure hardware company, unless they are remarkably disciplined with respect to hiring. I have not seen an example of this in the wearable/health space. I think you can derive a general principle from this, which is that if a company is incented to sell you crap, they will eventually do so. If instead they are required to repeatedly earn your business, they will either maintain high standards for their products or they will go out of business. I mostly choose to spend my money on products made by companies with the latter model.
ramses0 1y ago
Same boat, Apple watch has terrible UX (1cm fingertip in a 2cm screen??!?), tries to do too much and not to my liking. Pebble allows me to walk away from my phone because I will get the notifications (text or phone call) and can see enough to decide to respond. Pebble is pretty lightweight and if you load up this watchface you'll feel right at home: https://store-beta.rebble.io/app/52f0939b1ac7948708001fc9 https://store-beta.rebble.io/app/52f0939b1ac7948708001fc9
lmm 1y ago
As per your last link, the current Mi Bands fill that niche pretty well. Screen, but decent battery life and small enough to not get in the way.
dsalzman 1y ago
I agree. I’ve been looking for a “smart” watch strap or strap clasp I can use with my vintage seiko watch. I just want vibration alerts when very specific things happen on my phone. My wife is calling etc. Dont need all the features or display of a typical smart watch. Too distracting.
K0balt 1y ago
This might be out of scope, but citizen makes the W770, I recently bought one for <200US lightly used. It manages to be a pretty good chronograph , BLE with an alarm and vibration motor (with a somewhat neglected strange little ecosystem of scriptable notifications). As a watch, it does require that you read the manual completely to understand its various interface paradigms, but it’s reasonable given that there is no display per se, only hands, to show all of the information. Also, you may need to synchronize the hands at first setup, that baffled me at first lol. It’s efficiently solar powered using a super capacitor, with months of battery life if left in the dark, no battery concerns at all if you wear it (unless maybe you are an actual vampire that also cannot tolerate artificial light) The supercapacitor can be replaced if it wears out, seems to be reliable for about 15-20 years based on their other watches. I like mine quite a lot, it’s a well built actual timepiece, put it on and forget about it if you want. It doesn’t ask you to do anything for it to just do its job, year after year. Citizen may have other options as well with BLE, idk. Id love to see someone reverse engineer the notification / BLE communication protocol and create an open source companion app - the possibilities for hacker-y types would be pretty cool.
crote 1y ago
> I want a dumb watch with vibration notifications. Same. Notifications are rarely time-critical. A few years ago I noticed that I kept getting distracted by my phone alerting to some nonsense which really didn't matter, so I completely disabled all notifications. I'll just look at it once every few hours to respond to incoming messages. A regular smart watch would be pretty pointless for me. Getting stuff like message notifications on my wrist would be a huge anti-feature. However, it would be pretty nice to have a convenient way to set an alarm, which will vibrate on my wrist when it goes off. I want a "leave now to catch the bus" reminder, or a "it's time to take a break" reminder! That's all, nothing more, no need to add any fancy sensors.
- Chris2048 1y ago
  > I kept getting distracted by my phone ... so I completely disabled all notifications Couldn't you just disable notifications for the unimportant apps?
  - bornfreddy 1y ago
    For me at least, it turns out there are no important ones.

by alin23 1y ago

0xEF 1y ago

I still rock my OG Pebble and while I am excited they're coming back, I have no plans to upgrade. Like you, my needs are simple; vibrating alarm, notifications, but with one key factor; I need a display that I can read in broad daylight that plays nice with my far-sighted eyes. The eInk display on the OG Pebbles hits the mark. Being able to read a text without pulling out my phone is also nice. Plus they can be got on eBay for about $30 USD and a fresh battery is about $15, so they don't break the bank. The Rebble.io community's work is still functioning well enough for my use, as well.

Knork-and-Fife 1y ago
Small correction, pebbles use a TFT "e-paper" display, not e-ink. This is how they have reasonable refresh rates for animations and no after image problems. It's the best compromise imo
- 0xEF 1y ago
  Ahh, right. Thank you, I do mix them up in my head often.

MrAlex94 1y ago

Would Withings[1] watches not fit the bill? I have a ScanWatch and the battery life lasts almost a month. 1: https://www.withings.com/ https://www.withings.com/

alin23 1y ago
The Scanwatch Light seems to be very close to what I need. While they're priced reasonably for what they offer, they're crazy expensive for what I would need. I'm really not interested in fitness or sleep tracking these days anymore. I'm also a bit scared of the many "charging issues" some people seem to have with them after a few months, but I guess every batch has a few bad devices so I could hopefully return it. Thanks for the recommendation! I might try one soon.
- MrAlex94 1y ago
  For what it’s worth, after I bought one, around five other people I know got them, varying models from the Steel HR to Nova, and haven’t been made aware of any issues. Of course, personal experience doesn’t apply to the mass of products, and these are all UK SKUs, so who knows if issues vary between countries as well? Overall everyone has been happy though and I haven’t seen Withings come up on HN which is surprising tbh!
rstuart4133 1y ago
I had a Seiko watch for decades that needed a new battery every 5 years, and I still miss it. It never left my wrist except for battery replacements. The Casio mentioned above goes one better by using solar, so it would never have to leave my wrist - and it has a BLE connection to the phone. But it doesn't have enough sensors, like an accelerometer. Withings smartwatches come do closest, and that's what I have now. Their standout feature is their 30 day recharge, but they still have a ways to go. They are expensive, but worse they are fragile and no one will repair them in most countries, and the rechargeable battery means they will only live a few years. On top of that I'd like to see them add NFC, payment card and passkey integration, with better security so if they leave you wrist you have to re-authenticate or reset them. None of these things require much (if any) power. Also while the analogue time is great, interacting with the digital interface is clunky. A single button is not enough. The digital interface could be bigger, and could display more - like displaying the last few message. So my take is while smartwatches are improving, they still have a ways to go. And that way is not the direction Apple appears to be taking, which seems to be to put a power hungry iPhone with a miniature screen on your wrist. I'm hoping the old watch manufacturers will come back with their robust very low power designs, with a few added sensors.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

mrweasel 1y ago

Apparent my wish for a fitness tracker that's not a watch is also pretty niche. I know that there are rings, but I also don't like rings. Basically I want a bracelet, if it must be on my arm, but ideally it would be an ankle bracelet. I'm not sure that would provide a convenient spot to get heart rate, or data beyond steps.

ramses0 1y ago
Whoop.com, your wish has been granted! Just pony up $19.95/mo (or whatever) as well...
- mrweasel 1y ago
  So close... but why the subscription? It just needs to stuff the data into Apple Health when it is within range of my phone. It is actually tempting, but I can't support a subscription based hardware product. Just charge me whatever the device cost + profits.
  - hombre_fatal 1y ago
    I've had one since October and really like it. I justify the ~$20/mo the same way I justify a gym membership: it's a bargain if it's compelling you to make positive choices about health/sleep/exercise. If it's not, then yeah, it's just an expensive mood ring. Of course, there are also smart rings (Oura) and much cheaper devices (FitBit https://store.google.com/category/trackers https://store.google.com/category/trackers).
  - sulam 1y ago
    Full disclosure, I worked many years at Fitbit, in a very senior role. The reason you want Whoop to have a subscription (and why I wear a Whoop now) is because it incentivizes the company to ship great hardware _and_ software. If you don’t have a subscription, your company becomes stuck on the treadmill of needing to have a new device to sell to the public every year (or even twice a year) so that you can continue to fund your business. Pebble found this out, too, and it led to their sale eventually. Worse, the launch dates are not movable. People are largely not going to wait and buy your new watch in January if they wanted to get a Christmas gift for their spouse. The same goes for Mother’s Day. The scope is also not movable, because it has to have certain things for people to be interested vs last year’s model. We all know what happens when you fix scope and date in the iron triangle — quality suffers. The subscription model has a great property — you can ship the device to your customers when it’s ready and meets your quality bar, and you can theoretically do it for free, because they are already paying a subscription. I realize Whoop did not take this path with their latest device release, they are clearly trying to goose their revenue for a quarter or two. That said, at the end of the day, their full product offering will either earn your subscription or not, which means that you can be confident that they are aligned with your interests. You generally cannot say that about a pure hardware company, unless they are remarkably disciplined with respect to hiring. I have not seen an example of this in the wearable/health space. I think you can derive a general principle from this, which is that if a company is incented to sell you crap, they will eventually do so. If instead they are required to repeatedly earn your business, they will either maintain high standards for their products or they will go out of business. I mostly choose to spend my money on products made by companies with the latter model.

ramses0 1y ago

Same boat, Apple watch has terrible UX (1cm fingertip in a 2cm screen??!?), tries to do too much and not to my liking. Pebble allows me to walk away from my phone because I will get the notifications (text or phone call) and can see enough to decide to respond. Pebble is pretty lightweight and if you load up this watchface you'll feel right at home: https://store-beta.rebble.io/app/52f0939b1ac7948708001fc9 https://store-beta.rebble.io/app/52f0939b1ac7948708001fc9

lmm 1y ago

As per your last link, the current Mi Bands fill that niche pretty well. Screen, but decent battery life and small enough to not get in the way.

dsalzman 1y ago

I agree. I’ve been looking for a “smart” watch strap or strap clasp I can use with my vintage seiko watch. I just want vibration alerts when very specific things happen on my phone. My wife is calling etc. Dont need all the features or display of a typical smart watch. Too distracting.

K0balt 1y ago

This might be out of scope, but citizen makes the W770, I recently bought one for <200US lightly used. It manages to be a pretty good chronograph , BLE with an alarm and vibration motor (with a somewhat neglected strange little ecosystem of scriptable notifications). As a watch, it does require that you read the manual completely to understand its various interface paradigms, but it’s reasonable given that there is no display per se, only hands, to show all of the information. Also, you may need to synchronize the hands at first setup, that baffled me at first lol. It’s efficiently solar powered using a super capacitor, with months of battery life if left in the dark, no battery concerns at all if you wear it (unless maybe you are an actual vampire that also cannot tolerate artificial light) The supercapacitor can be replaced if it wears out, seems to be reliable for about 15-20 years based on their other watches. I like mine quite a lot, it’s a well built actual timepiece, put it on and forget about it if you want. It doesn’t ask you to do anything for it to just do its job, year after year. Citizen may have other options as well with BLE, idk. Id love to see someone reverse engineer the notification / BLE communication protocol and create an open source companion app - the possibilities for hacker-y types would be pretty cool.

crote 1y ago

> I want a dumb watch with vibration notifications. Same. Notifications are rarely time-critical. A few years ago I noticed that I kept getting distracted by my phone alerting to some nonsense which really didn't matter, so I completely disabled all notifications. I'll just look at it once every few hours to respond to incoming messages. A regular smart watch would be pretty pointless for me. Getting stuff like message notifications on my wrist would be a huge anti-feature. However, it would be pretty nice to have a convenient way to set an alarm, which will vibrate on my wrist when it goes off. I want a "leave now to catch the bus" reminder, or a "it's time to take a break" reminder! That's all, nothing more, no need to add any fancy sensors.

Chris2048 1y ago
> I kept getting distracted by my phone ... so I completely disabled all notifications Couldn't you just disable notifications for the unimportant apps?
- bornfreddy 1y ago
  For me at least, it turns out there are no important ones.