Garmin has been crushing it with their smartwatches.

* App store with 3rd party apps and faces.

* Always on screen

* Physical buttons (Vivoactive is mostly touchscreen oriented, but all their "athlete" watches use buttons)

* Week long battery life - Even running GPS tracking for 12 hours straight leaves enough battery for the next day.

The biggest downside to the Garmin is trying to figure out which watch to buy. They stupidly gate certain activities to specific watches. For example Garmin has a Hike activity on their Fenix line, but not their Vivoactive so I need to track my hikes as a Walk.

I've also switched to a Garmin when Pebble went kaput, and one of my todo list items is to port some of the more fun Pebble faces over to Connect IQ.

However, as you've noticed, each device feature set is determined by overzealous marketing. My Forerunner 245, despite having tons more memory than my ancient Fenix 3 and considerably faster, has less data screens for running. It doesn't have an altimeter, but the cheaper Vivoactive series has an altimeter because fitness users want to count floors climbed. It has Bluetooth but is not allowed to connect to bike power meters, because then it would overlap with Garmin's much more expensive triathlete watches.

This leads to app store problems, because each app and watch face has to be explicitly compiled for each watch - even when the watches have the same display size and feature set. Buying a new device often means that you'll have fewer options than someone with an older one.

I had 3 Pebbles, and a Kickstarter pledge in for a fourth that they cancelled and refunded me when they sold out.

I spend the refund money on a small but fun collection of old soviet mechanical watches. The kinda ubiquitous Vostok Amfibia, a "Big Zero", and a pretty poor fake of the Sturmanski Yuri Gagarin wore.

I get much "more joy" from these - even the fake Yuri watch - than I ever got from a "smart watch".

My usual story about smart watches was that I jumped on the very first Pebble Kickstarter, because I thought it'd be useful while riding a motorcycle to be able to see who's calling/texting my phone when it was vibrating in my pocket, so I could decide whether I wanted to stop and answer it. Turns out, the answer was _always_ "No!". Even if it _was_ someone I'd normally pick up for, I was either gonna arrive at my destination in 10 or 20 mins and would deal with it then, or I was on a trip and wasn't gonna be stopping until the tank was empty - possibly at a place with no reception - and I'd deal with it late that evening or in a few days when I got back to town.

2nding mechanical watches, though my preferred value brand is Orient, but nothing wrong with Vostok. Seiko seems overpriced these days, Orient seems like the new Seiko (though Orient and Seiko are both owned by the same holding company, which happens to be Epson (yeah, as in Epson printers)).

While mechanical and real watches are fun, smartwatches' biggest selling point for me is body telemetry. Steps taken, floors climbed, pulse, activity tracking, etc.

I've disabled everything notifications and phone-control wise on my MiBand. I exclusively use it for a body telemetry device and I love it.

While I miss my proper watches, I just can't leave the MiBand at home.

I've loved every mi band I've had - they are great simple devices.

I loved the first one (or the 2nd revision of the 1st) that just had vibration and 3 coloured led.

It meant I turned vibration off in my phone, and I set the band to vibrate and flash 3 times white for sms, green for WhatsApp and red for calls. But if any of those were from my wife (who was pregnant at the time) it would vibrate longer and flash for 20 seconds.

It was so simple to feel and glance and get the info I needed - no need to squint and try read. It annoys me in meetings when people think they are being subtle reading a full notification from the apple watch or similar. If it is important just get your phone out it will be quicker to read and reply.

Actually, the NavMe app for Pebble was really useful as a navigator when riding a motorcycle. It would vibrate to yr attention when you were approaching the next turn and the turn info was easy to see on the watch while riding. It was a brilliant solution that would take you to your final destination without y having to stop once in a while and take out your phone to see what's next. I always used it when going places I never been or were unfamiliar with.

My main problem with Garmin, and the one that gets me really hard when camping, is the fact that Connect requires internet in order to be able to see even basic statistics. I absolutely love my Garmin Vivomove Style, but because of the small screen I can't really see any activity other than very basic things, which requires that I fall back to my phone app... which doesn't work when camping or hiking because I don't have cellphone reception.

If they could fix this one problem, I'd buy more of their sports-oriented watches, but this is the one thing that I find really hard to deal with.

Otoh, the watch is phenomenal and beautiful, and I love having a watch that lasts 5+ days on a single charge and looks like a normal watch, but tells me my calendar and such, and can be used to track running and hiking.

I was bitten by this just the other weekend. Out in the middle of nowhere for an organised event, and the organisers said we had to use the backup route. I had it downloaded to my phone, but Garmin Connect won't work at all without an internet connection.

Ended up just using my phone for navigation, and even though I was recording GPS and heart rate the whole time, I'd only used 50% battery after 14 hours riding. Nice.

There was another guy at the campsite who was looking for someone who had downloaded the route. I AirDropped it to him, and he transferred it to his Wahoo bike computer with no trouble.

For shorter rides/runs, I use the WorkOutdoors app on the Apple Watch. It's only battery life that's an issue when the activity is longer than 6 hours. Just this morning I had the opportunity to go for a run a bit out of my normal zones, so within a minute I had sketched out a route on the phone and transferred it over to the watch. (That some of the paths I'd used didn't actually exist anymore was a separate issue, but I've already updated OpenStreetMap to fix that.)

Similar experience on my side. I was sitting on the fence between an Apple Watch and the Garmin 945. I'm quite pleased with the Garmin 945 all day tracking, the ability to track activities for over 12 hours (GPS, routing, and bunch of metrics), and good battery life. While the software ecosystem in Garmin feels a bit rough, it's usable. It's the software that makes it stand apart from these lower priced offerings. Even the Garmin VivoActive has interesting metrics when paired with software Garmin Connect.

After going with Android Wear and seeing how they made everything worse with WearOS, I switched to a Garmin Fenix 2 years ago.

It's the best thing if you're sporting an Android phone. 3rd party apps are mostly weather apps and apps mimicking features of more expensive Garmin watches to be used on cheaper models. And don't expect apps to talk to the apps on your phone - you mostly have to enter all details into the Garmin apps again (using the Connect software on your phone).

However, I recently switched to an iPhone and bought an Apple Watch and it's so much better if you are more into smart watches instead of a fitness tracker with smart features. Yes, the battery has to be recharged as often as I do. And yes, it's a touchscreen that's utterly useless in a downpour or when swimming. But apart from that, and I don't say this easily, I get more from the Apple Watch than from my Garmin then-top-of-the-line model.

What I have heard and experience makes me not so sure. For example, a kid’s Vivofit regularly crashes on the countdown timer and skips or repeats numbers on the stopwatch. Then there’s the thing where they paid $10 million to unlock a ransomware attack.

Yes, I had friends affected that were unable to access years of running data during that attack, which made them think maybe having a local copy of their data was a better idea.

That’s not specific to Garmin, though. It could happen to almost anyone.

I’ve enjoyed the Garmin instinct. It “just works”.

Yeah I love my Instinct...great as a basic everyday watch (always on, easy to read, never have to think about charging it), full-featured as a GPS running watch, nice addition in the backcountry as it integrates with my inReach satellite device. Sending and receiving text messages from my wrist while on the side of a mountain 50 miles from the last trace of cell service is kind of fun.

I resisted the idea of a smartwatch for years and bought this mostly for outdoor stuff, but I've found myself wearing it all the time.

This. It is absolutely my favorite piece of gear when hunting, hiking or fishing because it just works. I have the Solar Version and while it can’t fully recharge from solar with GPS in full power tracking, it’s amazing how long it’ll run in expedition mode.

More importantly it looks like a G Shock and is similarly tough.

I had a Pebble Time Steel. Loved the thing to death.

The battery was a bit degraded and I got tired of not being able to acknowledge Pagerduty notifications (even though I could receive them), as well as not having any fitness features whatsoever (other than the steps counter). So I bit the bullet and bough an Apple watch.

Within two days, I stop using the Pebble. Yes it's nice, but against what's essentially a supercomputer in my wrist, with a bunch of useful apps... I switched. Sure, having to charge daily is not _ideal_, but I can put it to charge while I'm having dinner or in the shower, and it will be full pretty quickly - specially if you are just topping off daily. It is not as convenient, but I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would.

The screen is always on too. I disabled the feature, didn't see much of a difference.

Just this weekend, I had a pretty spectacular fall from my bike. Fall detection kicked in - I did not need emergency services, but it was a reminder that some features can be life-saving.

My company's SSO supports IOS, which means it is now integrated with my watch. Pretty secure too, the watch will lock if it is removed from my wrist. It can unlock my machine (and my car). I can control other devices. I can take just the watch outside and still receive phone calls, or buy groceries. Many of those things, I couldn't do with the Pebble, or they would be more cumbersome. Yes, physical buttons are nice, but also limiting.

Pebble had the right idea. But they executed too slowly and too late. The fitness focus was missed by them for quite a while, I bet that they could have stayed relevant if they had implemented features like heart rate monitoring.

> Pebble had the right idea. But they executed too slowly and too late.

They were also _way_ too small to compete with the industrial design, manufacturing capability, and marketing clout of Apple. Or even Samsung. They were inevitably gonna get crushed.

And I say this as a four time Pebble Kickstarter backer who could see it even back then. A couple of kids with an amazing YC pitch deck and ambitions-untempered-by-experience-or-reality? They were never gonna "win" if Jony Ives and Foxconn ended up in their market segment. I don't regret a cent I spent with Pebble. I hope the founders made out like bandits when they sold out, and I hope it launched them onto spectacular career trajectories. But they never really stood a chance of being the top player in any sophisticated consumer electronics space...

Eh, that depends on how you define "win".

If you mean sell as many units as Apple and never get bought? Sure.

But as someone who also owned an OG Pebble, if the "Pebble-way" was actually better, it would have won.

Winning might have meant getting acquired, or even just competitors making devices similar in spirit to theirs, but it'd still be a victory.

The "Apple Watch way" was the anti-thesis to the Pebble philosophy with it's needing daily charges and it's color screen, and trying to be a second phone on your wrist with beefy specs. While the Pebble was trying to be _literally_ a smarter watch.

And Apple's way won out. People just preferred that.

The mistake we made was thinking we had to compete with Apple. Unfortunately, we realized that a little too late -- had we kept to our own pace we'd still be around, and by now would have figured out how to reach a more mainstream market.

> I hope the founders made out like bandits when they sold out, and I hope it launched them onto spectacular career trajectories.

Well uh... The company went under, so I doubt they made out like bandits. The IP was sold off, but I suspect that much of that money was used to pay off outstanding liabilities. My impression was that the founders tried to do right by their employees as well. I find it unlikely that they came out of the process with a ton of money- more than likely they lost money.

Just as a counter, I'm a (current) Pebble user, and I bought an Apple Watch and returned it. I don't need fitness tracking, the Apple Watch's screen was a little too hard to see outside, and the UI was too cluttered for the type of super-quick tasks I want to do on a watch. (I also really really disliked the lack of an always-on screen, which didn't exist until a few months later.)

I like my Pebble because it's a watch first and foremost—I've worn a watch since I was around ten years old—but it just so happens to also show me notifications, and glance at things like the weather and my calendar. And I can do all of that super quickly.

I bought the Amazfit Bip because the format came close to what Pebble was, but I still miss third-party apps and the timeline UI, which made so much sense on a device that focus mainly on telling the time and upcoming events.

Hopefully the folks working on Rebble will make a nice open-source OS that can be ported to other watches out there.

I have a Bip and it is really great, except for the GPS which takes 10 minutes to get a lock and no 3rd party apps.

Everything else is perfect. Although I try to track my runs with it, so it is sadly a big hit against it.

Make sure your aGPS is updated and also that your time is correct (timezone ). I had the same issues ( not 10 minutes but not instant ) , now am getting fix in seconds.

Don't forget: 7.5mm thick (for the round version). There is nothing on the market even close.

I wore mine until last month when the battery gave out. If I could buy one with a new battery (not a replaced one as it compromises the waterproofing) I'd choose it over any other option available today.

Look for devices supported by the gadgetbridge 3rd party app (found in android's f-droid store). I have an Amazfit Bip S lite. 45days battery, always on lcd. Custom notification filters by gadgetbridge. Great

https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge

I assure you, I have evaluated everything on the market. Amazfit devices are >1cm thick (even the ones that claim 9.2mm, it's a lie). They are also larger diameter than the Pebble Time Round, so overall more than twice as big and much less comfortable.

The phone software is nowhere near as good, the watch UI is poorly designed, and the watch face/app selection is poor in comparison to Pebble. I haven't tried gadgetbridge yet but on newer Amazfit devices it requires some hacking to get it to work (extracting login tokens or encryption keys or something) and I expect that it will be fragile.

It is fragile. But, the key can be fetched from their server. No root, no funky hacked app, judt one time effort. Bip is not perfect, but the translucent display and GPS, plus many weeks of life are great. You can even push it for BipOs and write your own apps.

Disclosure: I help with Gadgetbridge :)

I can confirm that vanous is helping users :)

Hi vanous!

I know you said you don't want a replaced battery, but if you were interested in doing the (fairly easy) battery replacement yourself, there's a link to where you can purchase a battery on Aliexpress here:

https://willow.systems/pebble/#hardware

In case it helps with the token

https://codeberg.org/vanous/huafetcher

I'm not sure how you evaluated it. I took my Amazfit Bip off my wrist in order to measure it right now. From top glass to bump at bottom surrounding the optical sensor it's 8mm.The diagonal from case edge to case edge,is 47mm. I agree that the phone software could be better. However, I think the watch UI is reasonable given the constraints. As for watch-face selection - there are a couple of dozen - how many do you want for <$100?

Reviewers report 9.5mm, not 8mm [1]. But the original Amazfit Bip is no longer for sale on their store or on Amazon except for overpriced marketplace sellers. They only make later models now which are thicker (they have a dizzying array of different models with similar names which is quite confusing).

I did purchase an Amazfit watch, the GTR 42mm which is supposed to be 9.2mm thick but is >11 in reality. "A couple of dozen" faces is laughable compared to what Pebble offered. The community produced an incredibly diverse set of faces and apps for Pebble. I find the quality of the GTR faces to be mostly poor with them all pretty much looking the same with the same features. For example, you can't do this on an Amazfit watch face: https://store-beta.rebble.io/app/57cc2c33be5ad0d9500002cd let alone the apps which have no equivalent AFAIK: https://store-beta.rebble.io/apps/most-loved/1

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazfit-bip-review-100-smartwa...

Far more than that it you consider the community created ones. Heck I built my own too.

https://amazfitwatchfaces.com/

Isue with those: they're often battery leeches. Especiially when displaying highly dynamic content - the lcd draws almost nothing when the displayed image stays static

Yep, the newer amazfit's server based key-pairing is nuts, but there's a solution and you only need to do it once until you hard reset your watch (hopefully never). The watch dials are rather ugly but functional. The built in dials are also much better battery-wise than custom faces

I just measured the Bip S lite: 9.7mm height x 34.8 x 41.6mm rectangle (without lugs + crown).

Did you include the sensor bump? The official specs claim 11.4 mm [1] so it would be strange if it was thinner. The Amazfit GTS 42mm is claimed to be 9.2 mm thick but actually measures >10 even without including the sensor bump. In any case, still much larger overall than the Pebble Time Round.

[1] https://www.amazfit.com/en/bips-lite.html

No, i excluded the sensor bump deliberately. Its area is too small to have a notable effect - the 8.5x9.2x1mm sensor bump sinks into the wrists skin and raises the watch by a lot less than the nominal 1mm. It probably is measurable, maybe calculate the space of the bump (~80mm³) and virtually redistribute the displacement across the whole 42x35 base plate and assume a calculated effective thickness of less than a tenth of a millimeter (80/42/35=0,054mm)

> Its area is too small to have a notable effect

We'll have to agree to disagree on that one. Bumps protruding into my skin definitely reduce my comfort wearing a watch all day. Your measurement still doesn't match the official specs and even assuming it's correct and they're all that thin it's still not close to the Pebble Time Round. 30% thicker and 60% more volume.

The measured data is for my Bip S lite (which is a bit smaller than the Bip S). A bump of 1mm high with an area of less than 1 square centimeter is not noticable imho. My other watches also have bumps (nato strap seams, the gshock's rear plate is uneven by 1mm easy, and seiko's glass rear window...)

The spec page I linked to showing 11.4 mm is specifically for the Bip S Lite.

Maybe the lugs are included in the official specs' height/thickness. If you put it flat on the table the backside doesnt touch the surface because the lugs protrude a bit - maybe to protect the sensor from scratching. I ignored the lugs though as they're wrapping around my wrist and don't add to the thickness.

Or maybe i measure again to be sure.

Man never heard of this Gadgetbridge thing. Thanks for bringing it up. The awful apps are the worst part about these kind of Chinesium devices.

The first setup to get started can be a bit rough, especially with server based key fetch + pairing. Gadgetbridge's issue tracker will help if you get stuck.

There's also a bunch of us on the Matrix channel https://app.element.io/#/room/#gadgetbridge:matrix.org

I finally bit the bullet and replaced the battery in mine. It wasn't my favorite process, but it seems to have turned out fine. Used a hand rolled bead of Sugru [1] to re-seal it. Not sure I'll ever be able to try again, but at least now it works again.

[1] https://sugru.com/

I still have mine somewhere, I wonder if the battery has survived... Probably not.

I don't agree with all their business practices, but if you're looking for an alternative, Garmin watches do all of that well these days. I'm quite happy with my Forerunner 735XT.

Mind if I ask what issue you have with their practices? I try to be a conscious consumer so I’m curious if anything you know would concern me as well.

Mainly that they sell health data (anonymized and aggregated, but still), to undisclosed third parties and they're not super upfront about it.

I can’t find this information and there are way too many policies to sift through. It doesn’t seem unlikely or abnormal, though. Do you think many wearable manufacturers aren’t sharing or selling data like this?

This right here. When I see a twenty buck wearable I immediately think surveillance.

For what it's worth, I wear a Garmin Vivoactive 4 and it has the following:

- an app store, third party apps, third party watch faces, and a developer ecosystem

- always on screen that doesn't require a button press or specific arm gesture, and works in bright, normally lit conditions

- physical buttons instead of tiny buttons on a tiny screen barely larger than the finger pressing it

- week long battery life

Also has GPS, Music storage/playback, actionable notifications, and a ton of health and fitness stuff.

PineTime is the only watch that is cheap and can be programmable. However, it's software isn't mature enough for daily use.

https://pine64.com/product/pinetime-dev-kit/?v=0446c16e2e66

Do you have one? What are the problems with it so far?

I have a few, its a functional smartwatch that is super snappy and responsive to touch. It does not have the largest feature set, but I can see the time, my heartrate, control the music player on my phone, etc.

The feature set is expanding as people develop for it, and you have a choice in OSes (much like the Pinephone or a Thinkpad can run dozens of diverse OSes)

I'm kind of hopeful an interesting community will develop around the PineTime Watch.

https://lupyuen.github.io/pinetime-rust-mynewt/articles/watc...

You can get most of the Pebble features you listed on the Amazfit Bip and Gadgetbridge.

It's not perfect, but it's the closest thing to what the Pebble used to be.

See this thread from below here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25269500

I like my Amazfit Bip, but the integration is no where near as smooth as Pebble was. I only stopped using my Pebble because I had the first gen screen corruption issues. By the time they were getting to be an issue, the writing was on the wall for them.

It's silly, but I miss having my TOTP codes on my wrist.

It also had an open ecosystem.

You could create and compile your watch apps to your heart's delight without asking someone for permission.

Pebble may be long gone, but there are plenty of people still using them with 90% of the functionality still intact!

I do love seeing all the other pebble people show up whenever smartwatches come up as a topic. After a few years of looking into smartwatches (and working on my own ATTiny/ATMega/ESP32 smartwatch project) I finally bought a Pebble Time Steel this spring. I had expected the Pebble hype to wear off after a bit, but so far it's lived up to pretty much all of my expectations.

I don't even have a Rebble account yet, but it's surprised me how much still works and how much use I can get out of it in my daily life.

Pebble watches still run on Android thanks to Rebel. My Pebble Time rules!

Google acquiring fitbit? Nooooo, I've been in the process of de-googlification and fitbit has massive amounts of my health data from the last half year. Need to figure out how to nuke all of that.

If your Fitbit data is linked to a residual Google account, you can use that account to delete it.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/465

I have a Garmin Forerunner, it’s basically the watch you’re describing from Pebble but better. Longer battery etc.

I backed the first Pebble. I think you're overselling how great things were as compared to now, where I can make calls from my wrist or use it as golf GPS. And it's not like smart watches are the only app ecosystem to become closed and shittier.

I have a Fossil Hybrid HR. It has an always-on e-ink display with physical watch hands, back light, Heart Rate monitor, and a 10 day battery life.

It's great, and probably the closest thing to a successor to a Pebble watch.

Second this and at the same time don’t. The watch is great, it’s the closest to Pebble I’ve gotten. It also has features that I wanted out of my Pebble, like sleep tracking. The battery life is also fantastic and closer to 14 days for me.

But, the big downside is the software. It’s veeeery limited. The latest update made things a lot better and Fossil seems to be headed in the right direction, but it’s just not there yet. Customization is big for me, and the Fossil HR has limited amounts of it. No SDK for example, so no third party apps. You get what Fossil says you need.

That being said, I love my Fossil HR to bits. But man, I really wish I was wearing a Time Steel 2.

I've been tempted but I do use some of the smart features on my Apple Watch. It's a tough tradeoff.

It's sad Google is so incompetent with WearOS, I would kill to have a cheap smartwatch just to use Google Pay. Instead the only ones are overpriced and shit battery life.

I miss my Pebble big time. Still nothing compares.

I would encourage you to look at Garmin watches. They definitely compare

They are not interested in providing watch experience, but rather to harvest as much data about user as possible. This should be illegal.

Only the Apple Watch 1 ran its applications on the phone, and the current version is 6. And it has an always on display.

What is it you're looking for in a smartwatch?

It's almost the same as comparing PC and smartphones... Smartphones are restricted in a lot of ways for no good reason which is why I am still wanting a true Linux phone.

seriously - it's been _years_, it should only be easier to get to pebble's level (if not surpass it)

anecdotally, in my life I've seen maybe enough apple watches to count on one hand? and a few fitbits. That's it. A far cry from what I expected the future to be like, back when pebble was getting hype and when apple announced their offering. What is the problem with the market? is there really just no demand for smartwatches of any kind?

I own an Apple Watch 6, but I'll tell you the problem: charging $400 for a watch.

If they got down to $100 or so, you'd see wide adoption. Which is why the Wyze Watch at $20 is so fascinating to me. At this price, you can just buy one instead of a Casio.