- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
You must log in or register to comment.
Can we stop picking on this startup? They’re just hardware hobbyists, give them a break.
deleted by creator
I miss Pebble. ePaper Display, week long battery life, and I can see all my phones notifications and reply to texts on the watch itself.
Made my old phone with bad battery life usable.
Garmin is the only “smart watch”/fitness tracker that does this and does it well. Wish it wasn’t as pricy for the week long battery devices.
My pinetime has a really similar feel to the pebble.
I have the forerunner 965 and it’s so much better than I thought it would be. Unless Garmin make some horrendous decisions I’ll stick with their watches in future.
i personally don’t find smart watches interesting or really that useful (to me). I tried out a samsung watch for a while and had fun making my own watch faces but that’s about it. Charging it every few days was a pain. I ended up going back to my trusty Casio F-91W. Super thin, 8-10 year battery life, alarm and stopwatch built in. Not much more I need from a device on my wrist.
deleted by creator
Didn’t mean to get you so riled up, was just expressing an opinion. If you like your Garmin that’s awesome I’m happy for you! Most of the cool features you talk about i can get from my smart phone so I don’t need that in a watch, but it sounds like we live very different lives and what I need in a wrist watch is not what you need
What car dealership do you work at?
deleted by creator
I’m on lemm.ee, but okay.
Which one do you have?
deleted by creator
I mean, why would you pay to replace the screen? The cost of a screen repair on a smart watch is about $300 for most comparable devices.
Guess how much the watch costs? About $300. It sucks, but it’s literally not worth the parts and labor hours required to repair it. Buy a protection plan if you’re worried about it, but otherwise, you just need to eat that cost. That’s the risk you take with devices like this.
You realize replacing the screen costs that much because google says its supposed to cost that much… i wonder why they would do that…
No they don’t. Google doesn’t say it costs anything to repair, because they don’t offer repairs. That’s the whole point of this discussion in the first place, the fact that Google doesn’t repair Pixel Watches.
I’m making a comparison to services offered from Apple and iFixIt, however - both of which will charge about $300 for a smart watch repair.
Who do you think makes it so complicated and costly to repair them?
You’re not the kind of guy who really spends much time thinking about how things are made are you?
Has a smartwatch other than the Apple Watch ever done well?
Garmin does pretty well. Although you could argue they’re more fitness and sports oriented, they do have “normal” smartwatches too like the Venu and Lily series, and also hybrid watches like the Vivomove. All Garmins have excellent battery life and there have been very few complaints about them. If anything, the most common complaint is that they’ve got too many watches to choose from, which can be confusing for someone new to the Garmin lineup.
Garmin also has titanium watches with sapphire glass on their high end. I’m ridiculously clumsy with watches, so I got one thinking I’d stand a chance of not breaking it. Now the new problem is, the watch is way harder than anything else I accidentally smack it into, and can break stuff around it instead.
I have the same “issue” on my galaxy watch 5 pro. I can see the dents on walls I accidentally hit, but the watch hasn’t a single scratch.
And being pedantic, it’s not sapphire glass, it’s sapphire crystal. Glass is a wholly different thing. Sapphire glass would be when Apple claims their products have sapphire in them, but in reality they just mix the tiniest amount of sapphire in the glass so they can technically call it sapphire glass, but it doesn’t offer any extra resistance or hardness.
How’s the battery life? I have a Pixel watch and I like it but the battery life is kinda bothersome.
Going on a long hike with literally every power draining option turned on, I still finished the day with like 65%+ battery. A normal day, again with pretty much every battery draining feature turned on, drains about 10% battery, estimated battery life is about 11 days with that set up. If I turn off the extra GPS antennas and only use the US constellation, and dial down the rest of the tracking a little, it’s easily 18-20 days I think.
My watch is also the power hungry one with an AMOLED screen. You can get closer to 30 day battery life from their Enduro lines I think.
deleted by creator
Just got my Garmin watch and it’s been fantastic already. Battery life is the best I’ve had since my Pebble smartwatch.
I have the Venu and the only thing I’m waiting for Garmin is YouTube Music support. I know most fully featured smart watches have 1 or 2 days but I get like multiple days even when I go for runs so often.
My girlfriend and I both got Garmin watches and we absolutely love them. I got the Forerunner 265 and she got the venue 2sq. I like that they support both android and Apple, and don’t have subscriptions!
Even the basic ones are almost as expensive as my phone, how do they cost so much?
deleted by creator
Comparing a piece of tech to something your children will inherit isn’t really a fair comparison though, is it?
deleted by creator
I have a Venu 2 and I love it. Battery lasts forever and I can pretty much do all the things I’d want to. The best part is that the performance is always top-tier. The OS is very lightweight and that makes it nice and snappy.
This is great input! I’m in the market right now and haven’t had a Garmin in 8-ish years. I’ll take a closer look again!
Honestly my one complaint is when starting a workout, activating the GPS takes a bit so I usually have to wait up to about a minute for the GPS to be ready and then I can start.
Another Venu 2 owner here. It is great, does what I want from a smart watch(notifications, calender, heart rate, sleep and some other stuff), ties in nicely with the Garmin cycle computer I own, and allows for tracking between the two. And I get 3 - 4 days(or more depending on how much I am using it to record activities) in a single charge. I do kinda wish I had gone for a forerunner, but I dont wear it when cycling and it tracks walks and runs and everything else under the sun perfectly well.
Definitely recommend a Garmin if it fits your needs.
Pebble watches were awesome! 1 week battery eink screens with app support. Too bad fitbit bought them and went nowhere. It shut down 5 years ago, but the hardware is still supported by third party alternatives. In fact I’m using it right now.
I feel like my Garmin could probably survive being run over by a car
PineTime is cheap and FOSS
The galaxy watches are pretty good, and as usual, Samsung carried Wear OS on its back while Google was planning on killing it, up to a point that Google then decided to have their own smart watches.
Samsung wasn’t using wear OS until the watch 4 IIRC, they were using tizen
I’ve had a Samsung watch for a few years and I’m definitely not careful with it but it has easily put up to all of my abuse and the battery still lasts a couple days or more. Nothing I can really complain about.
Similar experience with my Galaxy Watch 4 classic, had it since launch, don’t treat it carefully and I haven’t managed to damage it, and it’s been pretty much faultess for me.
I had a gear s3 frontier that I got about a year after it released. I didn’t baby that thing at all, and I took it swimming pretty often. It lasted until about 3 months ago.
A little water got in and stuck it in a boot loop. I went out and ordered a replacement battery, and viola, it still works minus the back button, which is probably a reassembly fuck up and fixable. I had already bought a watch5 pro, so I don’t really care about fixing it further.
No complaints whatsoever with my Samsung Watch 4 Classic. Best watch I’ve ever owned, smart or otherwise.
My Pebble Time Steel is still kicking ass! The only repair I had to do was replacing the battery a couple years ago
I was a Kickstarter backer for the Time. It really set the bar for me in smartwatches. I sold my Pebble Steel to a fledgeling developer after owning it for a year or so and I think I gave my Time away to a family member. Big regret.
I really hope the pixel watch 2 will be repairable or even be able to do a glue less repair.
Especially since Google already partnered with ifixit for parts for the Google phones
