- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Can we stop picking on this startup? They’re just hardware hobbyists, give them a break.
Outside of showing ads, Google is an everything hobbyist.
Well they’re certainly not a video game streaming hobbyist.
And I’m still sad to this day about this.
Me too, imagine what the very talented people behind the platform could have actually made if managers hadn’t wasted their potential on this boneheaded cheap money grab.
Yeah… Stadia was actually good. I wish they’d just come out and make a promise that if they shut the service down in the next 10 years they’d refund everyone’s purchases.
That’s what they ended up doing anyways, but having a guarantee might have gotten it to the critical mass that it needed.
You joke, but Google does not take hardware as seriously as they should. I say this as an owner of a Pixel 7. I actually really like the hardware, but the simplicity and clean look of the software is why I actually love the phone. I have to baby the phone because I know Google doesn’t actually care even if they swear up and down they do.
Google does not take anything as seriously as they should.
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I miss Pebble. ePaper Display, week long battery life, and I can see all my phones notifications and reply to texts on the watch itself.
Made my old phone with bad battery life usable.
Garmin is the only “smart watch”/fitness tracker that does this and does it well. Wish it wasn’t as pricy for the week long battery devices.
I still wear mine. Steel and 2hr. The OG finally went kaput sadly. Battery life on the 2 is great (its my backup), Steel is about 3 days usually
My time steel still easily hits a week with about 20% left
I’ve been looking for someone reputable to replace the battery. There used to be a guy on Spez’s Folly, but he quit long ago…
My pinetime has a really similar feel to the pebble.
Same, Garmin has made me swear off from owning any modern smartwatches. I mean having to charge every other day is just nuts lmao
i personally don’t find smart watches interesting or really that useful (to me). I tried out a samsung watch for a while and had fun making my own watch faces but that’s about it. Charging it every few days was a pain. I ended up going back to my trusty Casio F-91W. Super thin, 8-10 year battery life, alarm and stopwatch built in. Not much more I need from a device on my wrist.
No smartwatch will appeal to me util it last a full week at LEAST.
This daily charging for a watch is insanity.
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The Xiaomi Mi Band 8 and Huawei Band 8 are rather nice watches that do essentially the same thing as the very expensive smart watches for about $40 and they last about 2 weeks
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PineTime lasts a whole week with the current firmware
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They’re just sharing their opinion on a public forum, keep it civil.
No need to be confrontational.
Yeah, let’s not attempt to paint any watch as a survivalist and hiking tool that needs regular charging, otherwise it stops.
Didn’t mean to get you so riled up, was just expressing an opinion. If you like your Garmin that’s awesome I’m happy for you! Most of the cool features you talk about i can get from my smart phone so I don’t need that in a watch, but it sounds like we live very different lives and what I need in a wrist watch is not what you need
Nobody survived in the wilderness before smart watches.
What car dealership do you work at?
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I’m on lemm.ee, but okay.
Which one do you have?
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I have the forerunner 965 and it’s so much better than I thought it would be. Unless Garmin make some horrendous decisions I’ll stick with their watches in future.
Form over function. It is a wearable, give it a bezel to bump with instead of cuved glass.
I mean, why would you pay to replace the screen? The cost of a screen repair on a smart watch is about $300 for most comparable devices.
Guess how much the watch costs? About $300. It sucks, but it’s literally not worth the parts and labor hours required to repair it. Buy a protection plan if you’re worried about it, but otherwise, you just need to eat that cost. That’s the risk you take with devices like this.
You realize replacing the screen costs that much because google says its supposed to cost that much… i wonder why they would do that…
No they don’t. Google doesn’t say it costs anything to repair, because they don’t offer repairs. That’s the whole point of this discussion in the first place, the fact that Google doesn’t repair Pixel Watches.
I’m making a comparison to services offered from Apple and iFixIt, however - both of which will charge about $300 for a smart watch repair.
Who do you think makes it so complicated and costly to repair them?
You’re not the kind of guy who really spends much time thinking about how things are made are you?
Pixel watch replacement glass is like $10 on ebay
The screen is definitely adhered to the glass. You’d need to use gold razor wire to get it off, then assuming you don’t break the screen you’d need to clean it and install the new glass with adhesive. Definitely not a repair most people should attempt and you need more than just the glass.
Has a smartwatch other than the Apple Watch ever done well?
Garmin does pretty well. Although you could argue they’re more fitness and sports oriented, they do have “normal” smartwatches too like the Venu and Lily series, and also hybrid watches like the Vivomove. All Garmins have excellent battery life and there have been very few complaints about them. If anything, the most common complaint is that they’ve got too many watches to choose from, which can be confusing for someone new to the Garmin lineup.
Garmin also has titanium watches with sapphire glass on their high end. I’m ridiculously clumsy with watches, so I got one thinking I’d stand a chance of not breaking it. Now the new problem is, the watch is way harder than anything else I accidentally smack it into, and can break stuff around it instead.
I have the same “issue” on my galaxy watch 5 pro. I can see the dents on walls I accidentally hit, but the watch hasn’t a single scratch.
And being pedantic, it’s not sapphire glass, it’s sapphire crystal. Glass is a wholly different thing. Sapphire glass would be when Apple claims their products have sapphire in them, but in reality they just mix the tiniest amount of sapphire in the glass so they can technically call it sapphire glass, but it doesn’t offer any extra resistance or hardness.
lmao that’s better problem to have no? Rather than breaking an expensive piece of super hitech hardware?
Oh yeah, definitely. I also love the no screen protector life. Last time I had another smart watch, I put on a screen protector and destroyed the first screen protector literally the day I got it. Now I just have small marks on my walls I can clean up with paint way down the line, and need to make sure I have a screen protector on my phone haha.
How’s the battery life? I have a Pixel watch and I like it but the battery life is kinda bothersome.
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Going on a long hike with literally every power draining option turned on, I still finished the day with like 65%+ battery. A normal day, again with pretty much every battery draining feature turned on, drains about 10% battery, estimated battery life is about 11 days with that set up. If I turn off the extra GPS antennas and only use the US constellation, and dial down the rest of the tracking a little, it’s easily 18-20 days I think.
My watch is also the power hungry one with an AMOLED screen. You can get closer to 30 day battery life from their Enduro lines I think.
I need that sapphire stuff for my watches to survive my work environment.
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Which model is that?
Epix for me, think their Fenix and Enduro lines also have these options
You’re saying it’s a Nokia.
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I have a Venu 2 and I love it. Battery lasts forever and I can pretty much do all the things I’d want to. The best part is that the performance is always top-tier. The OS is very lightweight and that makes it nice and snappy.
This is great input! I’m in the market right now and haven’t had a Garmin in 8-ish years. I’ll take a closer look again!
Another Venu 2 owner here. It is great, does what I want from a smart watch(notifications, calender, heart rate, sleep and some other stuff), ties in nicely with the Garmin cycle computer I own, and allows for tracking between the two. And I get 3 - 4 days(or more depending on how much I am using it to record activities) in a single charge. I do kinda wish I had gone for a forerunner, but I dont wear it when cycling and it tracks walks and runs and everything else under the sun perfectly well.
Definitely recommend a Garmin if it fits your needs.
Honestly my one complaint is when starting a workout, activating the GPS takes a bit so I usually have to wait up to about a minute for the GPS to be ready and then I can start.
My girlfriend and I both got Garmin watches and we absolutely love them. I got the Forerunner 265 and she got the venue 2sq. I like that they support both android and Apple, and don’t have subscriptions!
I have the Venu and the only thing I’m waiting for Garmin is YouTube Music support. I know most fully featured smart watches have 1 or 2 days but I get like multiple days even when I go for runs so often.
Just got my Garmin watch and it’s been fantastic already. Battery life is the best I’ve had since my Pebble smartwatch.
Even the basic ones are almost as expensive as my phone, how do they cost so much?
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Comparing a piece of tech to something your children will inherit isn’t really a fair comparison though, is it?
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I feel like my Garmin could probably survive being run over by a car
Garmin’s are excellent. Mine takes a beating.
The galaxy watches are pretty good, and as usual, Samsung carried Wear OS on its back while Google was planning on killing it, up to a point that Google then decided to have their own smart watches.
Samsung wasn’t using wear OS until the watch 4 IIRC, they were using tizen
I’ve had a Samsung watch for a few years and I’m definitely not careful with it but it has easily put up to all of my abuse and the battery still lasts a couple days or more. Nothing I can really complain about.
Similar experience with my Galaxy Watch 4 classic, had it since launch, don’t treat it carefully and I haven’t managed to damage it, and it’s been pretty much faultess for me.
I had a gear s3 frontier that I got about a year after it released. I didn’t baby that thing at all, and I took it swimming pretty often. It lasted until about 3 months ago.
A little water got in and stuck it in a boot loop. I went out and ordered a replacement battery, and viola, it still works minus the back button, which is probably a reassembly fuck up and fixable. I had already bought a watch5 pro, so I don’t really care about fixing it further.
My Pebble Time Steel is still kicking ass! The only repair I had to do was replacing the battery a couple years ago
I was a Kickstarter backer for the Time. It really set the bar for me in smartwatches. I sold my Pebble Steel to a fledgeling developer after owning it for a year or so and I think I gave my Time away to a family member. Big regret.
Pebble watches were awesome! 1 week battery eink screens with app support. Too bad fitbit bought them and went nowhere. It shut down 5 years ago, but the hardware is still supported by third party alternatives. In fact I’m using it right now.
No complaints whatsoever with my Samsung Watch 4 Classic. Best watch I’ve ever owned, smart or otherwise.
My 5 something years old Fenix 5s still works great with like, a week and a half battery still lol. So yes, it’s just that brands like Garmin don’t advertise as much as Apple’s.
PineTime is cheap and FOSS
I love my Watch 6!
I’ve got a ticwatch, it’s excellent. Only thing it’s not capable of that the flagships are, is loading a sim to function without a phone, but this isn’t a feature I want or need. I’ve definitely bashed it around quite a bit too, and aside from a few scratches (none on the screen), it’s perfectly fine.
Fitbit has a good niche.
Samsung is shit
Fitbit is owned by Google and has the same policy of not repairing cracked screens.
I owned a Sense 2 and was in a bicycle crash. Screen hit the pavement and shattered. Absolutely no options from Fitibit/Google to get it repaired.
I switched to Garmin and couldn’t be happier.
Huh… I missed when Google bought them. That sucks. Might end up with a Garmin as well when this one dies.
Does it integrate with other apps like chronometer?
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That’s a really great point and another reason I’ve really enjoyed the Garmin experience – Garmin doesn’t try to sell your own data back to you.
Getting anything more than the absolute most basic of real time data out of a Fitbit requires an annual subscription. With Garmin, it’s just there.
I’ve been using a Galaxy Watch 4 Classic for about 2 years now. Apart from the usual scuffing, no other issues really.
I swapped from a 3 to a 5 pro and same. I got it specifically for fitness stuff, and aside from issues with HR monitoring on my hairy arms, no issues.
It’s not my favorite option, but I got it on sale for like $400 while similar specced Garmin and other options push $7-800.
I really hope the pixel watch 2 will be repairable or even be able to do a glue less repair.
Especially since Google already partnered with ifixit for parts for the Google phones
Pixel lineup is garbage and getting worse on price to performance every year
Well my Pixel 7 is awesome so I certainly wouldn’t say it’s garbage.
Their initial model and the 2 were great. I’m seriously considering greener pasters on my next phone though.
