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The future of Rebble

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Re: The future of Rebble

#21

Post by Groxx »

will0 wrote: post #16
MostlyStable wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never had one, but doing some quick googling, it looks like at least some models had an e-ink display. Certainly several commenters seemed to think it did.

It was a transflective memory LCD, which Pebble marketed as "E-Paper" (not the same as E-Ink)

An excellent one at that. It boggles my mind that others didn't follow suit.

I've got a Bangle.js 2 at the moment and while I mostly like it, the screen is nowhere near as nice. Transflective is still very obviously what I want in a watch though, even the best oleds don't even come close in visibility.

Re: The future of Rebble

#22

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #9
MostlyStable wrote: post #5

Some commenters mentioned that the e-ink screen (and the accompanying battery life) was one reason why the Pebble is so beloved, which reminded me of the Basis Peak, which was primarily a health tracker watch with some (very limited) smart functionality (mostly just some notifications, if I recall), that also had an e-ink screen and a nearly 1 week battery life and had a sort of similar trajectory: Bought by Intel, t…

Pebble had an LCD screen. It didn't use Eink at all. You can look this up, it was an LCD display manufactured by Sharp.

A transflective LCD[0] though (that they call "e-paper"), which, in user-facing terms, is similar to e-ink.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_d...

Re: The future of Rebble

#23

Post by terramex »

Groxx wrote: post #21
will0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a transflective memory LCD, which Pebble marketed as "E-Paper" (not the same as E-Ink)

An excellent one at that. It boggles my mind that others didn't follow suit. I've got a Bangle.js 2 at the moment and while I mostly like it, the screen is nowhere near as nice. Transflective is still very obviously what I want in a watch though, even the best oleds don't even come close in visibility.

> It boggles my mind that others didn't follow suit.

Most fitness smartwatches (Garmin, Coros, Wahoo) used the same display technology for years, called it MIP displays. Nowadays they are switching to OLEDs.

https://garminrumors.com/amoled-vs-mip-in-garmin-devices-a-d...

Re: The future of Rebble

#24

Post by orangeyjuicey »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #22
ClassyJacket wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pebble had an LCD screen. It didn't use Eink at all. You can look this up, it was an LCD display manufactured by Sharp.

A transflective LCD[0] though (that they call "e-paper"), which, in user-facing terms, is similar to e-ink. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_d...

Well now, users would notice if the screen has to constantly flicker like their Kindle instead of looking like a colour Casio screen. Meaningful user-facing distinction there.

Re: The future of Rebble

#25

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

orangeyjuicey wrote: post #24
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A transflective LCD[0] though (that they call "e-paper"), which, in user-facing terms, is similar to e-ink. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_d...

Well now, users would notice if the screen has to constantly flicker like their Kindle instead of looking like a colour Casio screen. Meaningful user-facing distinction there.

Ah, that's fair enough. I was thinking of the positive e-ink-like properties, but this is a good point. "e-paper" in fact makes more sense here.

Re: The future of Rebble

#26

Post by Groxx »

terramex wrote: post #23
Groxx wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An excellent one at that. It boggles my mind that others didn't follow suit. I've got a Bangle.js 2 at the moment and while I mostly like it, the screen is nowhere near as nice. Transflective is still very obviously what I want in a watch though, even the best oleds don't even come close in visibility.

> It boggles my mind that others didn't follow suit. Most fitness smartwatches (Garmin, Coros, Wahoo) used the same display technology for years, called it MIP displays. Nowadays they are switching to OLEDs. https://garminrumors.com/amoled-vs-mip-in-garmin-devices-a-d...

Somewhat!

The vast majority I've seen are black and white, with a color layer on top that is disabled when in "low power / sunlight readable" modes. And many of the smartwatch-focused devices (rather than Garmin's super pricey and gigantic "hiking for days without a phone so it solar charges and has gps and..." watches) only use OLED, even if the brand has MIP screens in some other product lines.

I haven't seen anything even close to what pebble's color watches did. Banglejs is by far the closest, with 6 colors and a much more muted screen in general.

Re: The future of Rebble

#27

Post by follower »

will0 wrote: post #15
freedomben wrote: post #10

I'm a little confused at the moving pieces here. We have RePebble, Rebble, and PebbleOS. PebbleOS is the easy one. OS recently opened by Google. But how are RePebble and Rebble related? Are they the same thing? Is Rebble making hardware as well as RePebble, or are they the same effort? Is RePebble also open source and community owned like Rebble?

Rebble is the open source infra that has been keeping Pebbles alive since ~2016. See: rebble.io and https://github.com/pebble-dev (Disclaimer: I'm part of the team) RePebble is a new thing by Eric, the original founder of Pebble and is unrelated to Rebble. > Is Rebble making hardware as well as RePebble? Potentially! We have always talked about it, but some of the announcements today have thrown us for a loop so plan…

> [...] some of the announcements today have thrown us for a loop so plans are still being discussed.

Feel free not to answer, but: does this imply Rebbele were aware of an impending Pebble OS source release but not... the other thing?

If so, that seems... "unfortunate". :/

Also, btw, I really like the use of the phrase "user-respectful technology" in the Rebble post.

And, rather unsurprisingly given one of my other recent comments[0], I am supportive of the fact that the Foundation's missions includes these aspects in particular:

* "educating people about why these [little oasis of user-respectful technology] are important"

* "using them as a platform to teach embedded systems"

*insert additional supportive statement & well wishes here* :)

----

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856930 [1]

[1] TooLong;Don'tRead. :)

Re: The future of Rebble

#28

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #6
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #4

I'm curious if anyone has tried one of the newer e-ink smart watches you see on Alibaba, which use ESP-32 or other low-power SOCs. I saw one recently at a meet-up and the guy who was wearing claimed it was completely open-source and he could run whatever he wanted to on it. It did not have heartrate monitoring or anything other than clock on it, as far as I could tell.

What did it look like? All the ones I've seen have been pretty ugly - plastic cases, etc.

It looked like exactly what you said. Plastic.
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