Given that they were a GPS company that people wrote off as being irrelevant in the age of smartphones and Google Maps they have done a great job carving out multiple niches in sports devices (and that ignores their "Smart Glass" airplane business).

I have 2 Edge cycling computers and a Garmin running watch and love them all.

The Edge 520 is the type of device that I'd see the specs of and expect to be a half-implemented heap of junk (connects to my phone to receive notifications while I ride? Automatically uploads rides when I finish them? This will never work). And yet it really is rather good.

They've lost physical buttons (it's much, much safer to get back to map view via tactile sensation) and added horrible drag-based panning to the overhead map view. The device can't reliably distinguish between a tap to initiate a drag and a tap to select a point. Selecting a point recenters the map. The two fight one another, usually going in the wrong direction.

It no longer supports an ad-hoc routing workflow. Before, you could select start and end points to your journey, then randomly select waypoints to visit from the map view, and they'd be added in the most sensible order. Now, if you manage to force the map view to point at where you want to go, then it forces you to select the insertion point of the new waypoint in a list, where you can't tell whether you'll be doubling back on yourself. I have to do all my routing in Google Maps now and then add villages to the route using the city finder. Ad-hoc routing by the roadside looking for curvy roads used to be a 60 second activity. Now I need to take off my gloves, pull out my phone, try and find relevant waypoints by name, type them in - it takes 10x as long.

The hardware is woefully underpowered. It feels just as slow as the Zumo 550 first released ten years ago. It can't route distances longer than about 400 miles if it doesn't involve motorways. Recalculation takes up to several minutes. Redrawing the screen in the middle of London after a zoom change can take nearly a minute.

Can't agree more! I just wish they had a decent SDK so we could have apps on Garmin devices just like Pebble OS.

She bought a Garmin Vivoactive after xmas and both of us havent looked back. We get 2-3 weeks pf battery with moderate gps use. Alerts work way better then the Pebble watch. I highly recommend the garmin. I forget I have to charge it, but it takes 2 hrs to go from 20%-100%.

Also, I only know one person who wears a pebble, and it was a hand me down. Eveyone I know who owned a Pebble switched to Appl, Android Wear, Microsoft Band or Garmin.

I agree the garmin was very sharp but mine for whatever reason lost bluetooth connection constantly.

The pebble on the other hand has been great for notifications.

I really wished the garmin had been better about that. YMMV.

What would be ideal would be a smartwatch that can manage to set Google reminders without having to have Google Now turned on; that, plus the occasional text message and even more occasional use of navigation, are all I use it for other than looking at notifications.

Just one example, it's a common and known issue that putting the 620 on the charger will sometimes drain it completely. There's magnets that hold it in place so there is no chance the proper connection wasn't made to produce a charge. Even if there wasn't any charge, it shouldn't drain it, but numerous times when I've gone to grab my watch off the charger, I've found it dead. For perspective this is a $500 top of the line watch that they offer.

When I wore a watch, I would take it off as soon as I could because it got in the way. I'm really happy with the Vivofit 2 - I haven't taken it off in (literally) months because it doesn't need to be charged and does just fine in the shower or swimming.

I've been disappointed with the automatic syncing not working. Other than that, it's a great product.

PS: my parents-in-law were given Fitbit devices with HR monitors which they had me set up for them. I'd like the HR monitoring but not at the cost of having a thicker device and having to deal with a proprietary charge connection (one end is standard USB).

For watches with these features, it needs a rechargeable battery and a very thin water-proof connection to that battery.

https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/into-sports/health-fitness/v...

Your wrist must smell great.

That says more about iOS than about Pebble. Get an Android. The experience is much better.

Don't get me wrong, Android is the clear answer here but it's still difficult to justify switching. It would be great if Apple just opened up their smartwatch functionality, but alas...

Believe it or not, I actually went that route. My Pebble experience was better, but there's a reason I'm back on iOS. In retrospect, it was incredibly stupid to change my mobile OS just to support a watch. Shoulda just bought a different watch.

The new Time 2 fixes this, from what I can see, in addition to making the display bigger (two sides of the same coin, but still worth the distinction).

Adding the HRM feature, and the fact that I love everything else about my Time Steel (the readability being the exception), I buddied up for a 2x order.

It's worth mentioning that the Pebble team have been doing some fantastic work on the OS on the past few months; the continuous updates are great.

Also I still get 9+ days from each charge with my always on display; nothing else in the smart watch market comes close.

I'm not OP, but I've had the opposite experience: I'm not using mine anymore.

I have both the original Pebble and the Pebble Time, but I've abandoned them in favor of a Suunto Ambit 3.

It functions well enough as a basic smartwatch (it can receive notifications, and that's about it) and fitness tracker, but is far better as a running watch: it records and displays more metrics, with far greater accuracy. Since it is also my fitness tracker, I'm wearing it every day instead of the Pebble, because I don't want two sets of incomplete data.

It's far more important to me to have a watch that functions as a running watch than one that has smartwatch features.

Wearing it as I type right now. But that's because all of my Garmin watches (610 and 910, IIRC) are old enough to not have the smart watch stuff. If I had a 920, I'd ditch the Pebble. I just can't yet justify the $400 simply to aggregate my wrist-worn devices.

Big handfuls, you'll get about 8 days out of it, less a day for every 30 minutes of running.

Garmin have released a few firmware updates for the watch which may account for the difference between my findings and those of early adopters.

It uses more battery life, but in a lot of cases it's the difference between accurate positioning and not.

So, yeah, I'd try doing same day runs on clear days, with GLONASS on and off, and compare drain rate.