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We're bringing Pebble back

repebble.com

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Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#461

Post by gvurrdon »

flakeoil wrote: post #437
saidinesh5 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really good news! Wishlist for the next device: More sensors: heart rate, spo2 and ecg...

Please, not too many sensors. Long battery life and small size and low weight is more important. All the other smartphones and fitness watches have these sensors so get one of those instead. Maybe a HW interface to attach other sensor modules could be an option, but could also easily become a distraction and pull down the overall experience. [Edit] A wireless i/f (bluetooth, LP RF) is of course better to use as inter…

A Pebble 2 HR with a colour screen would do the job for me, I think.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#462

Post by donjoe0 »

saidinesh5 wrote: post #427
erohead wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Never cared about Pebble's fitness/health tracking and never used it. I don't need my health reported to me in numbers every day, I'm not a performance athlete nor a hospital patient. Living my personal life trying to hit some numbers dictated to me by some app sounds like a horrifying idea, like a second work life at home.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#463

Post by worldsayshi »

vibhurishi wrote: post #458

Looking forward to it ! My first smart watch was a pebble and the interface was/is still the best. Current smartwatches try too much to be like phones ( just like the earlier smart phones tried to be too much like PCs)

I wonder if a new pebble could be a bit like a dumb phone.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#464

Post by mattmanser »

dingaling wrote: post #448
akho wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not the reader though

It's strange to see the naivety around Reader. If Facebook had created it, people would recognise the initiative to gate-keep, regulate and curate the Wild West of RSS. "They're trying to keep you inside their walled garden!"

It was from a time where Google's ethos was still "Don't be evil" and generally speaking the naked greed triggered by AdSense hadn't infected the rest of the company yet.

So I think a lot of nostalgia is not just for the reader but also for the company Google used to be.

I wonder if in 20 years time there will be the next generation of programmers sneering over vapour-ware Google products while middle managers still buy them products because "no-one ever got fired for buying Google".

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#465

Post by sureglymop »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #60
mrinterweb wrote: post #26

I noticed my mouth had been hanging agape for a while while reading this. This is huge news. I feel like Pebble is the smartwatch that got it right the first time. So many smartwatches try to replace the phone instead of being an extension of the phone. Pebble seemed to better understand what is important than most smartwatches by being the extension of the phone, a focus on battery life and always on displays.

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 love my Withings watch but I wish I didn't have to use their app and could instead get the data directly. I tried to reverse engineer their bluetooth based protocol in the past but didn't get far because I don't have much experience with bluetooth.

I then looked at what http requests their app makes which was more straightforward and actually interesting but still not what I wanted... I hope I will find the time to try again soon.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#466

Post by trabant00 »

I personally hope they stay well away from fitness stuff. I think all those big companies having a go at it for years has sufficiently proved that a wrist device can not be accurate enough at tracking steps, sleep or even heart rate. While GPS is better served by a phone which has a more accurate chip and also the battery to sustain it.

And orienting towards fitness means compromises for size, weight, comfort and battery life. The original Pebble was slim, light, didn't have a sensor bump, wrapped nicely around the wrist.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#467

Post by Peanuts99 »

Cadwhisker wrote: post #222
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 prefer technology that hides from view, so the Withings watches suit me as well. The biggest downside is that the battery does not seem to be user-replaceable, so the 1 month of run-time I used to get slowly fades down to about a week or two after a couple of years of use. I can't go away for more than a week now without bringing the charger.

Mines 8 years old at this point (so old it's a Nokia branded one) and it still lasts 3-4 weeks. I wonder why it's held up better?

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#468

Post by _thisdot »

nradov wrote: post #339
abraxas wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> scroll tap swim this watch has no touch interface. any scrolling and selecting has to be done via the five buttons which I ALWAYS somehow get wrong. Who on this beautiful earth thought it was sane to make the bottom right button be the "Back" button in a L2R (English) locale?

I really can't understand what you're complaining about. There's nothing about the English locale which implies an optimal placement for the Back button. The same devices are also sold in other locales. These devices have to work in all conditions with some complex functionality available through only five buttons so some level of overlap is unavoidable. Do you also complain that your computer keyboard lacks separate…

Ideally, in LTR locales, we move from left to right. This means that objects appear from the right side of the screen (as going forward would mean going right), and a back button is more intuitively perceived on the left side.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#469

Post by angristan »

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…

Weathergraph is the best weather app I've ever used, thank you so much for it!

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#470

Post by hk__2 »

timanderson wrote: post #436
seanhunter wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Opposite experience here. Went from Apple Watch to Garmin, couldn't be happier. Never had an issue with the charging point chafing, it is recessed and no problem. Buttons to start/stop/pause/resume activity work as expected, so much better than trying to swipe and tap the Apple Watch screen especially in wet conditions. GPS sync never been an issue for me, you can start an activity before it syncs and it figures it o…

> GPS sync never been an issue for me, you can start an activity before it syncs and it figures it out.

I’ve had a lot of issues with this, like going running 15 km and it registers only the last 10 km. My workflow now is to put the watch on the balcony while it finds the satellites, and then go out when it’s done.

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