that is… a small number
Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch
261–270 of 398 posts
Re: Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch
#262[deleted]
Re: Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sad that tech did away with replaceable batteries. I would love to use my 5-inch 16:9 Samsung phone from 2016. It still works fine, but the battery barely lasts an hour. Instead I have to use one of their gigantic replacement phones with a ridiculous 21:9 ratio.
It's strange to me how 'newer' phones (referencing my iphone 5s) seem to have software control battery life? I got the battery replaced multiple times on an iphone and none of them really provided a sustained increase in the battery life of the device.
I've replaced my iPhone SE (2016)'s battery three times since I originally bought it.
Every time, I waited until the phone started to shut off or rapidly drain below 20% battery. Replacing the battery fixed that and brought my battery life back to original (impressive!) longevity each time. As in, I can reliably use my phone for 2 days without charging, as opposed to barely making it to midnight of the first day.
You do have to "recalibrate" the battery by fully charging it, sitting on the charger for a few hours, then fully discharging it, letting it sit dead for a few hours, and finally recharging to 100% uninterrupted afterward. Maybe if you leave that out it takes a lot longer to see the impact?
Re: Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch
#264I've got a friend who still uses a Palm Pilot (circa 1998) as a daily calendar manager/notepad. Works at Google and delights in telling younger colleagues it's a Pixel 8 prototype.
I would love to do this. I'd be super curious to re-experience life with an offline device in a very online world. I loved every Palm I had up through the Pre, but there was a magic about trying to play Zork on a Palm, or syncing a day's worth of light reading for the (school) bus. I really miss this app Four Point Oh that tracked homework and stuff.
Re: Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch
#265I've got a friend who still uses a Palm Pilot (circa 1998) as a daily calendar manager/notepad. Works at Google and delights in telling younger colleagues it's a Pixel 8 prototype.
I'm sad that tech did away with replaceable batteries. I would love to use my 5-inch 16:9 Samsung phone from 2016. It still works fine, but the battery barely lasts an hour. Instead I have to use one of their gigantic replacement phones with a ridiculous 21:9 ratio.
As long as you have a phone that's reasonably well designed, it's usually not too much trouble to replace the internal battery every 2-3 years.
I think our culture is really wasteful with batteries. I can't believe that my iphone doesn't have a built-in setting to cap charging at 80%. Studies show that you can decrease battery wear to negligible levels by doing this. Yet my Android e-ink tablet, my iphone, my smartwatch, and my laptop all do not support a hard battery cap.
At least I can install al dente on my laptop, and root my tablet. Everything else I just have to manually take off the charger before 80%!
Re: Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch
#266I've got a friend who still uses a Palm Pilot (circa 1998) as a daily calendar manager/notepad. Works at Google and delights in telling younger colleagues it's a Pixel 8 prototype.
I'm sad that tech did away with replaceable batteries. I would love to use my 5-inch 16:9 Samsung phone from 2016. It still works fine, but the battery barely lasts an hour. Instead I have to use one of their gigantic replacement phones with a ridiculous 21:9 ratio.
You can get a replacement battery pretty easy online. I'm sure somewhere would be willing to do the replacement. It isn't impossible, just hard without the right tools
Re: Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch
#267I've got a friend who still uses a Palm Pilot (circa 1998) as a daily calendar manager/notepad. Works at Google and delights in telling younger colleagues it's a Pixel 8 prototype.
I miss the old Palm Pilot and even Windows CE devices. Despite the massive amounts of computational power and an endless library of software I find modern smart phones PDA inferior.
Re: Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch
#268Every time Pebble is brought up it brings a tear to my eye, and I wonder what would have happened to the brand if they had accepted the offer from Citizen, who were obviously interested in continuing the line. The Pebble Time 2 was so far ahead of its time, I promise you I would still be rocking it (or whatever came after it from Pebble) if they had shipped it to me.
Never got my Pebble Time 2 either and I'm still sad about it today. The continuous trickle of articles about how great these second generation Pebbles turned out, and my ongoing wait for an alternative that comes even close certainly haven't helped me forget! Just noticed the Kickstarter page is still up https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-2-time...
Ah man, it still looks great in comparison to the stuff in the market today
:(
Re: Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch
#269Seeing as several folks have recommended the Amazfit Bip as an alternative, and I’m considering getting one, I’m wondering if anyone who owns one can comment on: 1. How well it plays with iPhone and 2. Do you have any privacy concerns? I don’t know much about Amazfit as a company.
If you're at all concerned about privacy with the Bip, you can use the open source Gadgetbridge app[1] instead of Zepp for collecting metrics/syncing/uploading faces/etc. https://gadgetbridge.org/
Thanks. Looks like it’s Android only, but I’ll look to see if there’s anything similar for iOS
Re: Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have fond memories of rooting early Android devices, and having to constantly rip the battery out when the phone would inevitably lock up. I have less fond memories of waiting all day for a newer phone to run out of battery when the same thing happened.
I've never ever ran into a situation where holding the power button for ~15 seconds didn't reset the phone. This stuff runs at a _way_ lower level than the software you can mess with. Non-removable batteries are still stupid though.
I recently managed to "hard-brick" my Motorola one 5g ace after updating magisk, getting stuck in a bootloop, and naively deciding to attempt to boot from the B slot instead. On qualcomm-based devices you can get into EDL (Emergency DownLoad) mode where you have nothing that is actually bootable on the device, and the phone will remain entirely unresponsive save for appearing as a serial device when plugged in over USB. You then need to "talk" to the phone with the appropriate protocol (Sahara or Firehose depending on the age of the device) and you can gradually work towards recovery. In my case I was able to manually reconstruct a valid bootloader.img for my particular software version, re-flash it, and get back into a "soft-brick" state from there.
However, I do know of some slightly older HTC devices that would have the EEPROM straight-up completely die, leaving the device permanently trapped in a "hard-brick" state unless someone felt like doing some BGA soldering.
Modern phones do have a lot of stuff running under the hood that makes it a lot harder to mess things up, but once you go off the beaten path things become much less certain.