Can we stop picking on this startup? They’re just hardware hobbyists, give them a break.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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?
I need that sapphire stuff for my watches to survive my work environment.
How’s the battery life? I have a Pixel watch and I like it but the battery life is kinda bothersome.
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!
Even the basic ones are almost as expensive as my phone, how do they cost so much?
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.
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.
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’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 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?
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.
