Separate note: I don't crowdfund anything anymore. Learned my lesson.
There's been an exodus from Pebble for months now. Our team already picked up a few competent people. :( Sad because I really like Pebble's products.
Do not compare to the Apple watch; have you looked at Garmin's Fenix 3? It has an always-on screen, a compass that works EVERYWHERE including indoors, on airplanes, in underground car parks, etc., a super-accurate GPS, and all the other functions you would need. Its battery lasts over a week when not using GPS, or 24hrs with GPS.
It doesn't need a phone to operate, it's very sturdy and what's more, it's round (square watches are ugly, how do makers of other "smart" watches not see that???)
It's a bit thick but not too heavy. I've had it for a year and couldn't live without it.
http://www.wareable.com/media/images/2015/04/uber-1428589196...
I disagree about the style. A sleek square smartwatch is a lot less ugly than that bulky, messy Garmin. There's no reason to make it round, it's not analogue, it's digital, it displays text and images. Round displays just cut off text and anything that scrolls. Square is far more functional.
Regarding square vs round, if you look at the high-end watch market it's a ratio of maybe 1-10 in favor of the round watch. Why the makers of smart watches thought they could ignore this, I don't know.
What I do know is I used to wear a Tissot T-Touch which has a compass, and it doesn't work everywhere. Not in underground car parks, and certainly not on airplanes.
Maybe it's specific to the Tissot, I'm not sure.
Or any ferrous material that distorts magnetic fields locally, such as steel beams, rebar in concrete, electric cables, etc. You can map an office building by measuring the local magnetic field distortion.
Compass everywhere sounds easy until you try it.
For me, the point of a smartwatch is that it serves as a secondary interface to my phone. I like that my phone stays in my pocket more, because then I'm less likely to be rude because of my phone, or to have to drag it out just to see what that notification was.
I've owned and used an earlier Garmin watch for running and I loved it, but eventually stopped using it because I just didn't need to maintain another separate device. But clearly you're up to something else than me.
I really like having a compass, I'm not sure why but when I get lost in a town (at night) I usually can find my way back if I know where North is. Some people always know where North is -- not me, but I usually can figure out where everything else is, relative to the North.
I sometimes take walks in the woods with my kids and like to track where we've been. You can do this with a phone but then you have to have the proper app, launch it, etc. I don't like to use my phone for anything else but calls (I'm old). With the Fenix it's just the push of a button.
You can use GPS also to record where your car is, and it will direct you back to it; this is useful everywhere.
Also, as a photographer, if you record your tracks when shooting you can later import GPS data to photographs (some cameras have GPS but not all, it doesn't work too well and it drains the battery).
It remembers my sleeping patterns, which is completely useless but nice to look at, in a narcissistic kind of way.
I think the most impressive engineering feat is what they're able to accomplish in their software, given their hardware limitations.
The Pebble platform is a much richer 'operating system' for pebble apps.
That doesn't match my experience at all. A few months ago I was completely ready to jump on the smartwatch bandwagon so got a pebble. First of all, and somewhat unrelated, but the watch band itched and was uncomfortable and seemed to be low quality. More importantly, the Pebble randomly disconnected from my Android phone multiple times a day causing notifications not to show up. The watch would also crash occasionally, resetting to its homescreen and forgetting what I was doing.
I am now a happy Moto 360 user (gen 2).
Switching to Pebble Time Round after that was a revelation.
It was built on a platform that the company making it left the business partially through it's development. It was made with a different screen type (and processor arch IIRC) than other watches, it was significantly slower than other watches, and has had some QC issues where batteries at this point are beginning to swell up and make the watch unusable (it seems to be hitting everyone, the only factor is how long it'll take).
I loved my v1 like how I loved my first shitty car, and that might just be a mix of stockholm syndrome and nostalgia (not sure if that's the right word there...), but I currently have a fossil founder that my wife got me as a gift and it clearly improves on the M360v1 in just about every way.
Obviously you do you, but if you ever end up wanting to take another look at the landscape, just know that your experience with android wear was probably the worse you could have had, and that things are all around much better now.
The heart rate sensor also seems consistent at least, though I have nothing to compare it with.
Anyway, funny to see how these things go and how our experiences are basically opposites.
Disabling LE on my Pebble worked (sort of) at the obvious expense of higher battery consumption.
This doesn't seem to be the case on the iPhones I've had, though my Pebble is much less useful on iOS than it is on Android.
Every smartwatch at the moment has compromises.
Well there's your problem. That's the cheap knockoff brand.
weird. I stopped using AndroidWear, but only because I have no interest in wearables, the OS itself has worked like a charm for me.
> if that team is still intact
from what I understand, employees have been leaving from quite some time since pebble has been in the red for a while.
I can understand 2 days since you might stay at your girlfriend's house or something, but mine already can do 2 days anyway.
However, having a week long charge is also about more than just being able to avoid charging it at night. It also means that the remaining battery capacity (wear, age) will matter less. Is your battery dying, with only 50% of the design capacity left? Who cares, the watch still lasts for days. Not only that - the slow discharge also means that the battery will take ages to even experience reduced capacity.
The Apple Watch, on the other hand, sprints through the battery charges, and will both be completely intolerant to reduced battery capacity and reach reduced battery capacity faster.
... So yeah. It matters.
- you are often in different places from night to nigh (have a lot of friends, a scattered familly, a job on the move, etc).
- you have no brain and forget often to charge your stuff
- you are fed up (or too lazy, or both) to have a 6th stuff to put on your night stand every freaking day
- you want it to be still usable after the battery wears off, and not just half a day like most smart phones after 2 years
- you have a busy party night life
- you work night shifts, or several days in a row without going back home
- you want to put you watch in a drawer, forget about it, and get it back 2 days later, still usable.
You can manage all that with a little preparation, but the point is, you should not have to.
I have a Fitbit and one of the biggest reasons for me is its sleep tracking, which totally doesn't work if, um, I take it off to sleep. As a result I usually end up charging mine while I'm showering.
Unfortunately, if I forget to do that when I hop into the shower in the morning (which easily happens when I haven't had enough sleep and pre-coffee), I very much appreciate that my Fitbit's battery lasts more than a single day.
Can't do that if you're using the watch for sleep tracking.
I've got into the habit of putting mine (an Apple Watch Series 2) on charge when I get up and leaving it there till I'm about to leave.
Other than the odd top-up (if I've been using the Workout app and thus the heart rate sensor), no problems. More battery life would be good though - if it used to be worse with the original AW, it's not hard to see how that would be a problem.
I charge my Pebble once a week. Before that, wearing a bog-standard digital watch, I took it off ~never.
This is where you differ from many (probably most?) watch wearers.
Which is a tiny tiny niche
shrug
My old non-smart watch had battery that lasted 2 years, and generally I never took it of for sleeping.
Was kind of gross tbh.
I have a Pebble. My SO also has a Pebble. We can sleep together just fine, without taking them off.
I spend more often than not 3-4 days away from power in a given week.
I personally like watch that is low maintenance, I don't want to worry about having it charged. As others mentioned you can use watch to wake you up. I also use my pebble to track my sleep.
Another thing that is often ignored is that if battery doesn't need to be frequently charged it will also last longer (battery life is measured in charging cycles).
Sadly this might be the reason why Pebble has issues, their watch is quite good, so when they released second version of Pebble Time, I decided not to buy it because I was still happy with mine that I got 1.5 years ago.
I find that the only time I don't wear my Pebble Time is when I am having a shower and in those 10-15 minutes I can fully top up the charge on the PT, which I find is a killer feature. Basically, its more/less constantly charged, I wish other Watches (Android, Apple) would implement 'fast charging' to replicate this feature, as I hate having to think about charging any device.
They are by far and away my favorite smartwatch. The others have just no appeal to me at all.
Fitbit, however, makes awful devices, IMO. I really hope they don't kill the Pebble magic.
After paying debt and preferred shareholders, I won't be surprised if the founders and employees see absolutely nothing (as in, absolutely $0), although employees will probably receive retention payouts.
In particular it's incredible what the Pebble firmware team was able to accomplish. They built a bespoke OS that's extremely reliable (certainly more reliable than Android Wear), with an app SDK and store, plus a well thought out user interface with a striking visual design and even fun little animated flourishes, despite running in a fraction of the power budget of Apple or Android smartwatches. How many companies could have done that? Fitbit is getting a bargain, if that team is still intact.