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Pixel Watch 5

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Re: Pixel Watch 5

#351

Post by dmaa »

mrgaro wrote: post #249
dmaa wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ Great observation. I have a Garmin Fenix 8, but if it would not have a flashlight, vibration alarm and sleep tracking, I'd happily swap it for a mechanical watch as a daily driver. (obviously still using the Garmin for workouts)

How do you like the AMOLED screen? I have a Fenix 6, which has the old screen. While it doesn't have a flashlight, I'm very happy with the ability to toggle the backlight on with a single button, which is more than enough for me to see in the dark where I'm going. I feel that I'm lucky as my Fenix 6 still works as I would not want to switch to an AMOLED screen, which draws too much power to be kept on 24/7.

I would have preferred the old one because of battery life. I wear watch to know the time by just glancing on it, so always on is a must for me. It looks nice though.

Still, even with always on, I do 4-5 days between charges with normal use. I recommend watch face 'portal hybrid', which seems to have a slightly lower refresh rate (who cares), but you gain a day of battery compared to stock.

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#352

Post by r0fl »

eisa01 wrote: post #230
futureshock wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This, but the music and podcast functionality is just frustrating. In my more than 5 years of being an Apple Watch user, I have been let down too many times It seems just unwilling to sync anything to the watch, so there’s nothing to listen to when I go for a run without my phone It’s just baffling, the watch has like 32 GB of storage?

I exclusively run listening to podcasts from my watch for years with no issues

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#353

Post by JadedBlueEyes »

kstenerud wrote: post #223

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.

You might be interested in the new Pebble watches, which use e-ink displays.

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#354

Post by cyberax »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #323
cyberax wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PebbleTime 2 has a pedometer, HR monitor, and sleep tracking. You can set it to do continuous HR measurements during activities. This covers all the basics. GPS is covered by the phone that you're going to be carrying anyway. Really the only missing part is NFC payments.

That isn’t advanced health tracking. Advanced health tracking is when my Apple Watch watched my activity versus heart rate over time and warned me it saw signs of hypertension, which caused me to buy a wrist BP and do a health log for BPmin Apple Health, then produce a report and go to a doctor who prescribed medication for me. Does the PebbleTime do that?

Pebble Time has the HR sensor, and it has activity monitoring. You can upload the data into Google Health or Apple's health tracker. So it should work? It's the same data, after all.

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#355

Post by _se »

saidinesh5 wrote: post #61
tuckwat wrote: post #2

30 hours of battery life is a deal breaker. I don't want to charge my watch every day. I've been using the Garmin Forerunner for a few years now and the battery life is 2 weeks!

I tested out Pixel 3 (or 4 .. i don't remember at this point). The 30 hours is when you have all the functionality enabled all the time. Like the always on display, always on notifications etc ... I used to auto set the watch into DnD / battery saving mode at night, and used the "raise hand to turn on the display" functionality.. I used to get 3-4 days of continuous use. Charging used to be like "put the watch into c…

My Fenix 8 lasts for about a month with 10 hours per week of training. 30 hours with everything enabled is pathetic for a smart watch.

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#356

Post by cyberax »

sliken wrote: post #345
cyberax wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Heh, I used to use bluetooth GPS tracker with my nokia 770. It worked well since I could place the gps where it got the best signal. I could start a track, have it record it, and then check in with the n770 only when I needed to see a map. That way I made the most of my n770's battery life, but still got continuous tracking. Beware that they take much longer to start since they don't know the GPS coords of the neares…

I have a small Meshtastic device, not quite button-sized but still tiny. The chip on it supports aGPS, so I can upload the almanac and prime it with the approximate location. I'm very familiar with this process, I wrote a small utility for my cell phone back in ~2010 after I screwed up its factory image by installing Cyanogen.

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#357

Post by sliken »

cyberax wrote: post #356
sliken wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, I used to use bluetooth GPS tracker with my nokia 770. It worked well since I could place the gps where it got the best signal. I could start a track, have it record it, and then check in with the n770 only when I needed to see a map. That way I made the most of my n770's battery life, but still got continuous tracking. Beware that they take much longer to start since they don't know the GPS coords of the neares…

I have a small Meshtastic device, not quite button-sized but still tiny. The chip on it supports aGPS, so I can upload the almanac and prime it with the approximate location. I'm very familiar with this process, I wrote a small utility for my cell phone back in ~2010 after I screwed up its factory image by installing Cyanogen.

Nice, I have a few mestastic widgets, but do want something small enough for a dog collar. That way my wife and I can carry a radio and keep one in the car so we have a good chance getting in range.

Sad that most of ham radio, which has similar APRS for tracking, doesn't do async or multi-hop.

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#358

Post by Steltek »

Escapade5160 wrote: post #182
edent wrote: post #81

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…

Pebble is the ultimate smartwatch because it knows what it is. Its a watch first and foremost, readable in any lighting conditions, waterproof, battery lasts for weeks. They made a watch first then added only the QOL features that most people need.

BUTTONS! Real buttons!

I can dismiss/decline/silence popped up on my Pebble without breaking eye contact with the real life human I'm talking to.

In a car, I've handed my watch to my kids in the backseat so they can control music playback. There's no accidentally closing the media app because they fat fingered a stupid teeny tiny touchscreen. Nope. Just regular buttons that anyone with functioning hand-eye coordination can use.

And unlike the Garmin Instinct, the buttons are actually ergonomic. The Instinct was literally painful as you had to contort your hand. And on top of that, the UI was totally insane. I was never quite sure how to interact with it and frequently had to experiment to do basic actions. Nothing was consistent.

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#359

Post by pandaman »

JeremyNT wrote: post #322
belZaah wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Garmin upper end stuff is where it is. The problem for e.g. Google is right here. The Garmin stuff is so good at its niche (and passable at the other "nice to have" stuff) that the market is already segmented. If you're this kind of "power user" you're already in the Garmin ecosystem. It's tough for me to imagine what a Pixel Watch could possibly do to win me over (and I say this as somebody who has a Pixel phone a…

Tbqh, it's the problem for Garmin itself - they want to sell new Fenix every year but the old one is already very good so they are segmenting their own product by holding off updates on the old watches for now but it's only going to work for so long until there is either nothing to update or they push down their value under that of competition's. E.g. Google could give Garmin a scare of its life if they made a watch with a MIP display, ANT+ support and power profile to run GPS for 8-10 hours - I'd buy such a watch from Google instead of Garmin just because Google is going to support it for longer (not that Google is known for longevity of its support but it's still better than Garmin's).

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#360

Post by sjs382 »

edent wrote: post #81

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 have a Galaxy Watch 7 that I keep on silent ("Mute all sounds"). I think I'd be considered a heavy user. I don't use it to do a lot, but I've come to rely on the things I do use it for and I use it frequently.

I use it:

  - To tell the time
  - Set one-off timers/alarms
  - Recurring silent/vibration alarms throughout the day
    Wake up, start work, mid-morning break/checkpoint, lunch, end lunch, mid-day break/checkpoint, 30 minutes before "clock out", end of work day, and medication reminders
  - For silent/vibration notifications (HEAVILY filtered. Mostly messages from VIPs, security camera notifications, reminders, "rain in 15 minutes")
  - Set reminders "Remind me tomorrow morning to schedule a vet appointment"
  - Add things to different shopping lists (grocery list, shopping list, etc)
  - Quick, short-term notes ("10 M4x20mm screws")
  - Casual health tracking: sleep, step count, activity minutes, etc
Almost every one of my interactions with it is via voice/Gemini.
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