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Pixel Watch 5

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Re: Pixel Watch 5

#321

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

chanux wrote: post #307
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #286

> AI, Advanced Gemini, Google Health Coach The fitbit users already have "google heath coach" in the latest googlified version of the app. And https://www.reddit.com/r/fitbit/ is full of commentary on how laughably crap it is. I'd pay more to avoid this kind of "feature".

Thank you, this made me feel glad I switched back to Xiaomi. Battery life Time Vibrating alarms Sleep/Step tracking Happy with these (and the ux and price)

As mentioned here (1) the IMHO cool and useful features are good battery life, heart rate and sleep tracking, "find my phone" and "tap to pay" / NFC payments.

Find my phone: because sometimes you'd rather not spend 5 minutes checking where in the house you might have put it down, so making the phone beep saves time.

Tap to pay: I live in a big city. Serious crime is low, but phone snatching is common. Paying without even taking a wallet or phone out of your pocket is ergonomic. People use it for public transport too.

However, Tap to pay requires payments infrastructure and certification. A watch that does it will always come from a larger corporation because of this. e.g. Pebble watches do not do it.

The "AI health coach" is pointless shovelware. The inevitable "AI feature" that no-one asked for. This is a failing of larger corporations too, so the sweet spot (if it exists) would be NFC without "AI health coach".

1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49279527

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#322

Post by JeremyNT »

belZaah wrote: post #234
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…

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 and even had an Android Wear device early on).

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#323

Post by NetMageSCW »

cyberax wrote: post #185
danilafe wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the appeal of the smartwatch is more advanced health tracking, custom applications, NFC, and GPS. As far as I know, Pebble lacks most if not all of these features. I really want to want a Pebble, but it's far closer to a customizable watchface than even a Fitbit. On the other hand, daily charging of smart watches is completely outrageous.

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?

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#324

Post by tormeh »

rf15 wrote: post #268
wraptile wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been really enjoying the reboot of Pebble with their new Time 2 for a few months now. I'm using ForecastWatch 2 watch face which crams calendar, watch and weather data into one screen and it's perfect. Lasts weeks on charge too. For apps their built-in workout apps etc are perfectly fine and I built some of my own apps quite easily. My only complaint is that app limitation are apollo moon lander level of bad, li…

> but building fun stuff is really hard with these limitations What is your idea of fun stuff? Code and data is cheap enough with these constraints, though fancy graphics are what will eat your budget.

This practically means you can't ship any runtimes, standard libraries, nor any big libraries with your app. Your app has to be just the business code and all the extras has to be stuff already on the watch. Crucially, size requirements like this doesn't mean you can't write slow python apps or whatever, so long as the watch ships with a python interpreter.

I suspect 10MB might be more friendly in the current day and age.

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#325

Post by NetMageSCW »

pbmonster wrote: post #244
tty456 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where specifically do you think they lack, and what do you suggest they focus on?

Compete with Garmin instead of Apple.

Garmin has less than 8% of the market versus Apple with 23% and the largest share. Why would they compete with the market loser?

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#326

Post by ugi »

benrutter wrote: post #282
ugi wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to consider myself a watch power user. I've started with LG G Watch in 2014 and had almost every generation in between, and from a lot of different manufcaturers Huawei, Skagen, Samsung, etc. I've even wrote and published a couple of Android Wear apps back in the day. I love the idea of having a computer on the wrist that I can program. But in the end, what I'm using it for is notifications, time, timer or sto…

That sounds like a cool project! Did you write it up anywhere at all? (or have any plans to?)

Yeah it is quite fun, I've also replaced the speaker that the devkit comes with, with a little vibration motor, which adds a small soldering adventure to the whole process, but it wasn't that hard.

I didn't write it up anywhere, I might at some point, but free time/willpower I have to spend on it is minimal. Although I have an itch to make a v2 with a combo of rp2350 and nrf52840

If you're interested here is the devkit I was using it's this: https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-c6-touch-amoled-2.06.htm

Apart from some unfortunate GPIO pin selection they made, and a bit of bugs and missing features in esp rust hal, it wasn't that bad to work with.

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#327

Post by rf15 »

wraptile wrote: post #310
rf15 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but building fun stuff is really hard with these limitations What is your idea of fun stuff? Code and data is cheap enough with these constraints, though fancy graphics are what will eat your budget.

One obvious app I tried to build here is a calendar with a daily message and I've tried to include a little graphic emoji with each day. You can't do that because you can only fit around 100 emoji graphics and the font on Pebble Time 2 only has 50 emojis. So at best you can get 150 icons which is not enough for unique icon for each day. This is kinda sad in 2026 ngl.

Should be doable with the vector graphics system they have, or compressed images depending on the size of the images used.

Point me to your project on GH or wherever if you want me to have a look, I've optimised a lot of code in this life.

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#328

Post by rf15 »

tormeh wrote: post #324
rf15 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but building fun stuff is really hard with these limitations What is your idea of fun stuff? Code and data is cheap enough with these constraints, though fancy graphics are what will eat your budget.

This practically means you can't ship any runtimes, standard libraries, nor any big libraries with your app. Your app has to be just the business code and all the extras has to be stuff already on the watch. Crucially, size requirements like this doesn't mean you can't write slow python apps or whatever, so long as the watch ships with a python interpreter. I suspect 10MB might be more friendly in the current day and…

It already comes with a standard library, but, since the drawing algos left a lot to be desired, my watchface ships with its own image format and rendering code to allow for handling of transparency and blending modes (since you can not only use the integrated render utilities, but simply draw directly to buffer with whatever you bring)

So all in all: it has been done.

That being said: you mention python, and I'm not sure where this is coming from. When in rome, you don't drag your favourite language throught the streets unless it is roman latin.

Re: Pixel Watch 5

#329

Post by r_lee »

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 primarily use it for steps, stopwatch/timers (the best part imo), quick weather check

that's about it

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