A Pebble is a nice gadget. The Garmin (looking at garmin.com, clicking the first thing that looks like a watch) is close to a month of rent.
I believe you when you state that you're satisfied. On the other hand, I really don't feel that this is in the Pebble replacement league.
Been badly burned by Garmin in the past, but maybe I'll take a look. They seem to be competing with Suunto, but without that ridiculous iOS only thing.
I'm not sure I like the looks of the thing (but then again, pictures are bad and I should get my hands on one first) and I've no idea about their app platform yet.
Do you happen to know if this works completely offline, ignoring cloud offerings? Can I track whatever I want to track and keep it on the device and/or my phone only?
Exactly, people keep bringing up Garmin as a replacement but I don't think it is. I was into Pebble for the open C API and price, which did everything I wanted. The Pebble 2 was at the limit of what I would ever pay for a smartwatch, Garmin I just won't consider as I only want a few features.
I'm sad that it is almost certain that the Pebble/fitbit blend that we will see in the future will be completely closed/proprietary which definitely doesn't help me "make awesome happen".
I've always had nice wristwatches (and prefer to look at my wrist for the time instead of my phone) but I've been thinking about buying one recently. Most of them seem centered around health / fitness tracking, though, and that's not something I need or want. Mostly, I just want a "regular watch" (date/time) and perhaps notifications of incoming calls/messages (not necessarily even the content of messages -- just, for example, "SMS from Alice" or "Call from Bob", enough to let me decide whether to go pick up my phone). Garmin's API/SDK looks pretty cool, though.
I looked at some devices a week or two when purchasing a new FitBit for the girlfriend but, like I said, they had loads of features I didn't want. I'm tempted to just continue to wait on purchasing a "smart watch" and get a new wristwatch instead. I'm not really thrilled at the idea of having to charge my watch all the time anyways.
I don't use the sleep tracking at all, hate having a watch on at night, but the step tracker is fairly accurate and useful.
It's one of those things where I initially bought it for the notifications and the (supposed) battery life. And every now and again I'll find some random new cool use.
People are already working on open-source firmware for some of these watches[2], so I think there's a reasonably good chance that either some of these companies will create a decent alternative to pebble, or at least good enough hardware which can be used with community-developed firmware (and even more importantly: apps on the phone side).
[1]: http://www.goclever.com/uk/products,c1/smart-wear,c114/
Similar to how OrangePI leverage Raspberry Pi situations.
It becomes race to the bottom ($5-10 pi zero) and no one can make $ in the market in both short and long term.
There seem to be a lot of sub $20 watch base on following links - not sure how good/bad are they.
https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product...
However I think that brands focused on quality will emerge. Xiaomi for example don't make the cheapest gadgets but instead focus on quality. If they decide that there is a market for pebble-like smartwatch, I'm certain they would execute well.
How does it hold up "out there" in the real world? Is it too focused on the suit/office crowd?
My only complaint is they try and be clever and detect when you move your wrist up to look at it, so it auto-shows you notifications. This sucks because it's not totally reliable (so half the time I press the button to bring up notifications and it ends up dismissing them because they are already in view, and other times it triggers due to an incorrect motion). I wish you could turn that off but I haven't found a way yet.
I've had this watch for about 3 months now. The first charge only lasted about 2 weeks but after that I actually got more than 30 days on the 2nd charge and going strong on my 3rd charge now, so the battery life claims definitely are true (though I did uninstall the weather app cause it was useless).
The build quality is good. People say it's a little thick but I guess my arms are big enough that I don't notice. I got the leather band and it's never felt uncomfortable to me.
I would recommend a screen protector (Amazon has some good fitting ones for cheap) but that's probably because it's been a decade since I wore a walk and got a tiny scratch because the first day I wore it I accidentally flailed my arm towards a brick column at work. It scratched the face a tiny bit (not really noticable) but I feel much safer with a screen protector.
Any other specific things you'd like to know I'm happy to answer.
The Pebble watchface Time Orbit by Spectre Collie has the very same problem. I love the watchface looks, but if you tilt it, it decides to show other info such as date. It is a usability problem.
There's a rather large difference between the Vector and Pebble though. I checked various Vector watches and saw most at 500 USD, with one at 400 USD. So the cheapest Vector appears to be about 4 times more expensive than a Pebble 2 Classic. I don't know, that just doesn't seem like a fair comparison.
The watches seem to start around 350 euros
I'll take a look on amazon :)
If you do actually purchase one, the screen protectors I got were: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01L03TF7Y/ref=oh_aui_sear...
Interesting to know about the display of the notifications. I was wondering how cleverly they did that, and if it was a check box. Sounds like it needs to be a checkbox or something.
Even as careful as I try to be with it I know I still hit it against things and it hasn't scratched up at all. Wheither that's due to the screen protector (not tempered glass, just a standard plastic protector you'd lay on a phone) or not I don't know, but it's held up pretty well. That includes biking and running outside.
I literally only take it off if I go for a swim or at night when I sleep (I don't like having something on my wrist while sleeping)
That being said, as long as time and notification works I'm good.
And by crowdfunding I meant crowdfunding of manufacturing; the hardware would be open source, ensuring you could (with enough skills or good enough friends) make your own instead of buying one, and the software ecosystem would be compatible with it.
A good example of this is the raspberry pi's with all the NES/SNES/etc games. Withing needing to make sure cartridges and old NES's still work, we use a new piece of hardware to give a very similar experience.
Smart watches and other small worn devices will be changing a lot. I'd rather have hw builds posted to something like massdrop as they are iterated, once the software is mostly saved.
One of the bigger obstacles for me personally has been bluetooth notifications. I have found surprisingly few examples online of people getting it to actually work, and if you read through their work more closely, it only very barely works. I've tried to reproduce what other people have done and had it actually work even less than that.
I was thinking of selling a pre-programmed bluetooth module with apple and android notifications etc. if I ever got it working, figuring there must be other people in the same situation with this pain point. So far the idea that I could do a better job than others that have tried has turned out to be hubristic, though.
Obviously we all need something different, but that's what I'm waiting for.
[1]: http://www.trivoly.com/en [2]: https://wearchronos.com/
I'd be pretty interested in making something like this happen and figuring it out and leading the charge so-to-speak. It'd be an awesome experience, at the very least. However, I have no experience on the hardware side of things. I'm down to learn, but the software side is what I do have some experience with.
In a year or two, when my current Pebble Time fails, I'd love an equivalent smartwatch to be available. Since the market doesn't seem to want it, how can we make it happen anyway?
Features I'm looking for are, in order of priority:
Now I can go the DIY route (I have a friend with experience in making smartwatches from ground-up, though I'd look at some SOCs instead of going the uC + separate sensors route - to save on watch size). Many of us here could do it. But honestly, I have shit ton of other stuff to do, and I'd rather pay for such a watch and enjoy the ecosystem, just like I did with Pebbles. And if everyone goes the DIY route, and there won't be some standardization along the way, there will be no community. Any idea how to coordinate and make this happen? Maybe a community, open-hardware design + crowdfunding for production?