Over the last few months, I kept using my Pebble watches for many things but over time every single Pebble 2 (I have 2 which still kinda work) died, even with no buttons.The last survivor is the Pebble time but it got to a point where I need to charge it everyday and partly in the day. I looked into moving the battery from some of the dead Pebble 2’s to the pebble time but its so simple.
The pebble is a great smartwatch but I had to look at my options, so decided to look at the hybrid smartwatches again and wasn’t impressed. After looking at smartwatches which have longer battery lives, I found a number changes and low power modes increasing the battery lives from 1 day to a 3-5 days.
In the end I bought the Ticwatch Pro 3 Ultra with Wear OS (automatically updated to wear 0s 3), although I did originally buy the Samsung Galaxy watch 4 and considered one of the Huawei smartwatches, but I decided I should stick with Wear OS (even with the battery drain). I had hoped the Google Pixel watch would be the answer to my needs but was let down.
The idle mode seems to be the key to battery usage, and the viewable screen on the ticwatch 3, although not as clear as the epaper screen of the pebble time. Is still good even at extreme angles.
Its a shame having to say goodbye to the rebble (post pebble community, they were amazing and the rebble software engineering is incredible. But it had to happen, as little things like not knowing who is calling and not being able to reply to non-sms messages (signal for example) was grinding on me. The health side is useful but mainly covered by the Oura ring.
A little while ago posted how I have finally stopped using the Pebble smartwatch (I still own one and hold on to it). Funny enough a few people sent me posts about how about a quarter of a million people still use the pebble smartwatch. Of course I was one them for a long time.
I moved to a TicWatch3 which is a Android wear OS smartwatch. It was good and the Android wear system was quite good but the Android overhead is a massive resource hog. It was on a recent trip to London while using using the sleep tracking, I woke up to find the watch dead after 36hrs. I decided enough and swapped it for the Amazfit GTR4.
Its a good smartwatch with lots of options and great battery life (generally about 6-8 days on a charge). I was aware of the complexity of options but the interface and ecosystem makes things more tricky.
For example, I currently have two apps installed on my phone. Zepp and Notify. Main reason for Notify is because of sleep as android. There has been a few times when the watch has disconnected from the phone during night leaving zero feedback about my sleep stages, heart-rate, etc. The disconnection happens more than I’d like and the only way to get it back is to restart the watch or mess with my phones bluetooth.
Other annoying things include not being able to voice reply to messages, this was built into Pebble’s since the Pebble Time & Pebble 2. Its strange because it has everything needed to do it like the voice assistant (which is annoyingly the Alexa voice assistant, wish I could change that)
Right now I’m looking through the FAQ, forums like XDA and even Reddit.
Generally its a great smartwatch and I’m generally happy but really need to spend time understanding how to do simple things like control my remote music. Ideally it needs a well thought out UI with a paradigm like the Pebble has.