I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about what features she used - which were pretty much step counter and payment. He somewhat dismissively sneered, "Well, you're not exactly a power user, are you?" I'm trying to imagine what being a "power user" of a watch is like. Can anyone enlighten me? I think smart-watches are much like Alexa. Wh…
I bought a Slow Watch precisely because a real watch power user only needs a one handed watch for the 24 hour day.
Why aren't any smart watches incorporating e-paper displays? Seems like a perfect tech to use there, especially now that newer display tech allows pretty quick refresh rates.
Modest gain in battery life for a tremendous drop in capability.
I want all the things. Overlay an OLED display on top of e paper.
I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about what features she used - which were pretty much step counter and payment. He somewhat dismissively sneered, "Well, you're not exactly a power user, are you?" I'm trying to imagine what being a "power user" of a watch is like. Can anyone enlighten me? I think smart-watches are much like Alexa. Wh…
Maybe it’s niche, but if you do endurance sports like triathlon, you can easily become a power user. I think I did. You constantly look at your watch during workouts. It does navigation on trails, it measures your heart rate, tracks workouts, keeps pace during races. The metrics it gathers about hrv, sleep, rest hr etc are vital to adjusting the routine. It acts as a data recorder for multiple sensors: hr strap does a million running metrics, a separate strap does hydration, on a bike there’s a power meter. It supports my routine alerting me about the fast, timing my morning porrige (14 min). It’s my payment method on long rides when I need water and could play audio if I wanted to. I care about advanced features like multi-band gps and handover with my bike computer. It’s a vital tool, I need it for so many things. But vast majority of smartwatches do not cater for this crowd at all. Even the Apple Ultra feels like a toy. Garmin upper end stuff is where it is.
I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about what features she used - which were pretty much step counter and payment. He somewhat dismissively sneered, "Well, you're not exactly a power user, are you?" I'm trying to imagine what being a "power user" of a watch is like. Can anyone enlighten me? I think smart-watches are much like Alexa. Wh…
Maybe it’s niche, but if you do endurance sports like triathlon, you can easily become a power user. I think I did. You constantly look at your watch during workouts. It does navigation on trails, it measures your heart rate, tracks workouts, keeps pace during races. The metrics it gathers about hrv, sleep, rest hr etc are vital to adjusting the routine. It acts as a data recorder for multiple sensors: hr strap does…
Yes, before I read the last sentence I was going to comment that this niche seems entirely taken by Garmin/Suunto/Polar.
> * Up to 30 hours of battery life on the 41mm (40 hours on the 45mm) with fast charging. Is this a typo? I get 20 days on the Pebble Time 2.
It would be neat to see the power budget breakdown. I suspect power draw is primarily the oled display, with the "more difficult" health sensors being second.
For devices that are entirely controlled via an MCU and lack wireless connectivity, that is probably true. However that's not true for the pixel watch. The cpus and dram take significant power.
I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about what features she used - which were pretty much step counter and payment. He somewhat dismissively sneered, "Well, you're not exactly a power user, are you?" I'm trying to imagine what being a "power user" of a watch is like. Can anyone enlighten me? I think smart-watches are much like Alexa. Wh…
The killer feature of modern watches is the vibration alarm - you can wake up even if you use earplugs/headphones/noise machine and you won't wake up anyone else along with you. Health stuff like sleep tracking is likely useful for the vast majority of population, at least to everyone who needs time and thus lives on a schedule of some sort, without the possibility to fall asleep and wake up whenever one feels like i…
> The killer feature of modern watches is the vibration alarm - you can wake up even if you use earplugs/headphones/noise machine and you won't wake up anyone else along with you.
I came here to say exactly this. That's not the reason I bought a smart watch in the first place (I didn't even know that was a feature), but it's the only reason I still use a smart watch now over my old Seiko.
I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about what features she used - which were pretty much step counter and payment. He somewhat dismissively sneered, "Well, you're not exactly a power user, are you?" I'm trying to imagine what being a "power user" of a watch is like. Can anyone enlighten me? I think smart-watches are much like Alexa. Wh…
This. Totally. I would say I'm quite a power user usually. I very carefully explored every feature my apple watch has and tried to incorporate as many of them as I could. Very, very few features stuck because they were genuinely helpful. Almost everything being pushed is a gimmick or a feature bullet point from some product manager. The actual good stuff: Time Workouts Payments The occasionally useful stuff: Notifica…
> Unless you go for a run, for example. You can bring your phone with you! Then you can combine its GPS tracks and the information from Pebble. > And custom applications, not the least of which are navigation tools like Google Maps or Citymapper. They won't work without the phone connection because Pebble does not have a cellular modem. But there are mapping apps for the Pebble that use the phone's GPS: https://apps.…
>You can bring your phone with you! You can, but it's pretty awful. put it in a pocket and it flops around. Wear a band that slides in your phone in and get it soaked (i'm a sweat monster). I own a pebble, but I'll gladly just run without a phone.
Have you tried one of these upper arm holsters?
Actually, you gave me an idea!
There are button-sized Bluetooth GPS loggers. They can record a GPS track, and you can later download the data from them. Since it's freaking GPS, it automatically has timestamps, so it's easy to correlate with other activity.
As a bonus, I think it should be possible to connect them directly with the phone.
BRB, I think I have a ESP-based Tiny Arudino somewhere...
I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about what features she used - which were pretty much step counter and payment. He somewhat dismissively sneered, "Well, you're not exactly a power user, are you?" I'm trying to imagine what being a "power user" of a watch is like. Can anyone enlighten me? I think smart-watches are much like Alexa. Wh…
Surprised no one has mentioned Gemini. That's the highest value add feature for me. I have pixel watch 3, which I got cheap second hand. Gemini is a little laggy but still useful. If the experience was similar to the latest open AI voice model when used on a phone, it'd be incredibly useful