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We're bringing Pebble back

repebble.com

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Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#421

Post by Fnoord »

michaelt wrote: post #320
llimllib wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't swim, but I have done thousands of runs with my series of garmin watches and I can say that the UX for them is spectacular, everything is in a sensible place for me to do without thinking. Not sure what problems you've had with it specifically

Garmin is certainly better than some previous smartwatches I've had. You get a sunlight-readable, always-on display and a week-long battery life. But with my Forerunner, they've packed a lot of options into the five buttons. Leads to a lot of "these buttons are for up and down, except at the start run screen where the up button opens the menu, which you can then navigate with up and down to choose between the six typ…

My Fossil HR Collider lasted 4 weeks. It could do much (but not all) of the stuff my Pebble Classic/Pebble 2 could do. Both could control music during workout, pick up calls, put radios off. What I liked most about it is it could disguise as a non-smartwatch. On top of that, Pebble 2 HRM was bad.

A Pebble successor has to be better than a Pebble 2. The only reason my Pebble 2 isn't used anymore (and why I swapped to Fossil which is discontinued, too) is hardware buttons died. I tried to donor from a Pebble Classic, but sadly failed.

On top of all this, I get skin rashes from watches, so I cannot wear them 24/7.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#422

Post by pjmlp »

lopis wrote: post #147
insane_dreamer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Withings ScanWatch was the right fit for me. Unfortunately the HR sensor stopped working recently and the water resistant seal broke, and it's out of warranty, so it's in a drawer. But IMO that was the right idea: analog time, discrete notifications, ppg/ekg sensors, 2-week battery life.

I don't like analog watches. I wish there was a watch like the basic casio I use but smart, but not huge and rugged like a G-Shock. If pebble releases a modern version of their watch, I might finally buy a smartwatch.

Amazfit watches.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#423

Post by akho »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #407
tomaskafka wrote: post #194

Awesome! The first Pebble absolutely fascinated me by having a hackable, C-running watch on my wrist. I vividly remember spending days fine tuning the heuristics of a simple step detection algorithm in the first watchface where I thought “seeing your daily step count next to time sure is awesome”. And later, tens of thousands of people thought so as well - this was one of the signs what the health-tracking wrist devi…

Indeed, I forgive Google about 40 of their killed projects for giving us pebble in return.

not the reader though

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#424

Post by notpushkin »

jrockway wrote: post #272
askvictor wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example: I would like to program a (dumb/ID-only) RFID card into it to unlock a door. I can't as the NFC off limits to apps.

Apparently there is some transit system in China that uses this format for payments. So you can get one of those cards, add it to your watch, and program the RFID system to accept the ID of the card you got. There was an HN article about it this weekend.

I think that was NFC. The problem was, iPhone generated a random UID for all other cards, while this one was fixed.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#426

Post by Tade0 »

seanhunter wrote: post #405
ctkhn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta be honest I feel like Garmin is the perfect balance of pebble vs apple watch

Garmin is the perfect solution if you want a smart watch with a gps that takes 5mins to possibly sync 50% of the time and a touchscreen-only interface that doesn’t work if it gets wet or say sweaty. Ie during most of the activities it’s supposedly designed for. When I got a garmin smartwatch I was astounded by how poor the basic ux is in almost every single way. If I’m swimming, how do I stop my work out? The touchsc…

I've received a basic Garmin watch for my 5 years anniversary with the company I work for and I don't use as:

-The app has dark patterns like: you need to put a weight and height before you proceed with the setup, even though you can remove those later.

-Step counter quite simply doesn't work, as it grossly overestimates the count.

-5 day battery life. Not terrible, but also not practical.

-Notifications. All. The. Time. And about some "fitness goals" I don't remember setting. I have enough distractions from my phone thank you very much.

Who is the target audience for this?

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#427

Post by saidinesh5 »

erohead wrote: post #391
rzazueta wrote: post #341

I LOVE My Pebble and even got Rebble working on it not long ago to revive it. However... If you want to make it TRULY HACKABLE as you claim, you will not encumber it with cloud dependencies like you did last time. Let ME self host my own Pebble server if I choose. Go ahead and default to your servers and sell services and whatever, but let me host my own and switch the base URL to my own domain, preferably with open…

I'm 100% with you! No VCs this time...no mandatory cloud subscription. But I'm not really sure that this fear is grounded - before we sold to Fitbit we 'unlocked' the Pebble mobile app so you could use it with any cloud you wanted, including self hosted. So...it already meets your definition

This is really good news!

Wishlist for the next device:

More sensors: heart rate, spo2 and ecg...

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#428

Post by Moldoteck »

That's absolutely good news. The only thing I hope is to keep it thin design, which basically means no pulse measurements. But I also understand that maybe there are ppl that want this.

I tried Garmin Forerunner 245. It was the closest but OS and button placement were less intuitive. And it was thicker. Pebble time has a much sleaker design that doesn't give sport vibes but an everyday watch style. PTR looked great too but battery life wasn't great

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#429

Post by lloeki »

seanhunter wrote: post #405
ctkhn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta be honest I feel like Garmin is the perfect balance of pebble vs apple watch

Garmin is the perfect solution if you want a smart watch with a gps that takes 5mins to possibly sync 50% of the time and a touchscreen-only interface that doesn’t work if it gets wet or say sweaty. Ie during most of the activities it’s supposedly designed for. When I got a garmin smartwatch I was astounded by how poor the basic ux is in almost every single way. If I’m swimming, how do I stop my work out? The touchsc…

This may be model/generation dependent.

I've had such issues with my Forerunner 735xt (from the very start), but ever since I upgraded - or seen friends using - newer hardware, these issues have entirely disappeared.

e.g I've traced sync issues to some problem in the BT stack: forcing a disconnect/reconnect made it sync without fail. GPS was slow to lock because of low storage thus no AGPS data.

The situation with "new" hardware is completely different.

GPS lock is ~instant, by the time I get out of my RF bunker of a home I have a lock by the time I have moved the arm to press the start activity button.

Sync is subsecond usually, and takes mere seconds when it "catches up" due to phone being away from watch for a while.

Touchscreen is handy sometimes but a mere occasional bonus convenience in specific occasions: the main input mechanism is squarely buttons. I mean touch for watches is kinda braindead as an input mechanism since a finger covers so much of an area, obscuring a quarter of the screen.

UI and menu organisation felt very odd at the beginning, but after a while I started understanding how and why it's laid out this way.

It is a very alien interface at first but it absolutely makes sense, and the amount of things one can do straight from the watch is insane. I mean you can never ever sync the watch to Garmin Connect and still have a massive amount of features. It's essentially completely autonomous, something I used to great effect when their system was brought down because of IIRC a malware attack.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#430

Post by Moldoteck »

abraxas wrote: post #74
ctkhn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta be honest I feel like Garmin is the perfect balance of pebble vs apple watch

I just gave away a very expensive Garmin to my son. Its feature set is to dream of. Its user interface is hot garbage. When I'm out on a hike or in the pool trying to just measure my fsking laps I need a single click option or something. Their paradigm of "button 1, button 3, button 5, long press button 4, button 1 again to confirm. Now you can push off the wall in 3... 2... 1" is beyond fucking stupid. Does anyone a…

Don't some Garmin watches support long press app launch?
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