Thar Garmin watches are so much more expensive and do an excessive amount of stuff. In Canada, for $150 I could have a pebble time with a color screen, great battery life, sleep tracking, step tracking and that can do notifications. That's all I use it for, I might like a heart rate monitor on occasion, but paying way more for extra stuff I'll never or rarely use doesn't appeal to me at all. The only Garmin smartwatch I can find in stores is over $800. This isn't a real alternative.

Well, they're three times the price. That's a bit hard to swallow, honestly.

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.

The fenix 3 does look nice, and 2 weeks battery in 'smartwatch' mode is a reasonable amount.

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.

The Garmin Vivoactive HR (which supports their app platform, has GPS and optical HR) was on sale for $170 on Black Friday. It periodically will go on sale for this price.

Thanks for that. Looking at the specs it seems to have equivalent battery life (ignoring GPS, which is fair), is just as water proof and generally looks like an alternative.

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?

> Well, they're three times the price. That's a bit hard to swallow, honestly.

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".

You've tried several different brands of smart watches and you like Garmin the most? Can I ask what you actually use your smart watch for?

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.

Tracking when I workout, notifications (I carry two phones and during the day my personal phone is in my bag most of the time). And just using it as a watch. I hated that most of the "smart watches" out there would either run out of battery in 8 hours, or have the screen off by default (with a wrist action or a button to enable it).

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.