Edit: I absolutely love the watch so maybe I've just learned not to care, I agree it's a little bulky but the value I get out of it makes any bulk worth it.
My midsized Garmin is significantly thicker than my iPhone 13 mini. I don't really care though because it's lightweight. It's much lighter than any of the watches I ever wore as an adult.
I think if you decide at all that you want a smartwatch, with all the functionality that entails, you are aware that you’re going to have a thick object on your wrist, so you’re either not bothered by this in the first place or you make peace with it. For what it’s worth, I have an Apple Watch— which is considerably thicker than the Pixel Watch— and I don’t notice the thickness at all, except maybe when putting on formalwear with tight cuffs.
How can people tolerate charging a watch each night? I can't get behind this idea of having a basket of electronics you need to babysit all the time so they don't run out of battery. Especially when we already have really battery efficient tech, like hybrid watches with e-ink display.
It’s quite easy - I just put it in the charging cradle ($10 on Amazon) every night. Since the 4th edition it essentially lasts 2 days if I’m not doing heavy workouts so I can skip a charge.
I'm more on the level of wondering why people want a mini smartphone on their wrist. Isn't one in your pocket enough?
I do like having a heart-rate tracker, but having had a couple of fitbits the novelty eventually wears off and the reality that knowing the numbers isn't important sets in.
For me having the watch allows me to use my phone a lot less. I now often have to dig for my phone somewhere in my home since I haven’t used it in many hours. I get the important notifications I need and because the watch is limited I don’t feel the urge to open it every 2min to check what’s on social media.
Not having to reach for the phone is pretty convenient, I can just leave my phone on my bed while cooking or working or whatever else and thus only care about truly important notifications, and because it doesn't involve a full "context switch" of pulling out a phone, it doesn't really feel intrusive, being just enough info for me to be able to determine if it justifies pausing what I'm doing and reaching for a phone or just making a mental note to get back to it after finishing what I'm doing.
Also, if my hands are full/dirty I can still control media playback (granted that using the nose to tap on a watch probably looks pretty funny), and have weather right on my wrist (which is surprisingly handy).
Edit: Also it turns out to be the best kind of alarm for me. Audio alarms are annoying (also to anyone else who has to hear it) and don't really tend to wake me up nicely. Turns out the slight vibration of the watch wakes me up pretty nicely without bothering people in other rooms.
The ai for day of charge is important so that in a few years it will no longer last a day and you’ll be motivated to buy a new device. That and the blatant software obsolescence
I’m pretty good about going to bed every night and manage to get through the ritual of putting on pajamas at the same time as I put my watch on its charger.
While many replies point out that you can charge at night, this would defeat one of the main reasons I use a smartwatch, which is to have an alarm that vibrates to wake me up without waking up my wife. Other people use watches to track sleep. If you don't ever use it for either, I guess charging every night isn't an issue (though it means one more cable to bring whenever you travel). But for those of us who like the alarm or sleep-tracking features, that's pretty much a non-starter.
I understand that they're getting to the point where you can charge just while showering, but aren't quite there yet.
You already charge your phone every night, whats one more thing?
I can't sleep with a watch on at night, so I take it off and put it on its stand, which is the charger- my phone goes on it's charging stand at the same time.
I 3d printed a stand for my watch which embeds the charging puck, and so whenever I take it off for any reason, it just goes on the stand. It doesn't even really stand out as a task unnatural enough to need tolerating, kinda at the level of hanging your clothes on a hook/hangar after changing.
For all other situations, I just have to stick the watch to the back of my phone to charge it, so don't even need to carry around a separate watch charger.
My Garmin Descent Mk2 smartwatch is even thicker at 17.8mm. Not ideal, but the functionality is so good that I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of comfort.
Notably, that page has many photos of the watch from the front, but you have to scroll down to get to a profile shot. It looks like a tank! (even to me, a fellow Garmin-owner)
I really wanna like Google products but so many abandoned Google projects, inconsistent ecosystem, Google privacy nightmares, poor aftermarket experience, and lack of attention to UI and UX (remember the jump from Android 11 to 12?) have made me settle on iphone and Apple’s ecosystem.
The Apple Watch isn't anything to write home about, but it gets the job done (for the most part). Battery life is horrible. I'm charging daily. After using a bunch of form factors, only Garmin seems to get the circle right and WearOS seems like there wasn't a lot of thought put into doing smartwatch tasks on that form factor.
They are seriously going to need to come up with something out of the box that you mentioned to draw users. There is no wow factor at all with this thing.
Same. I have various "accounts" with google to manage various services and I can never find the right place to login for the set of services I am looking for.
It's ironic or a bit disingenuous that a device putting constant notifications on your wrist is advertised for stress relief. Not unique to PW2, quite common in tech, but regardless...
I can’t speak specifically to the Pixel products, but my Apple Watch has significantly reduced notification angst for me.
I limit my watch notifications to the most important ones, allow more on the phone but the mute switch is always on, so I’ll check it when I feel like it.
And because I don’t need to drag my phone out of my pocket when important notifications arrive, I can respond or ignore them with much less literal and figurative friction.
Well, you can mitigate some of the negative effects of notifications by reducing them everywhere - on your phone, on your PC, on your watch. But a watch is a new way for them to reach you. It goes in the opposite direction to reduction.
I'm probably showing my age here, but there was a time that's hard to remember now when there were no notifications, no devices constantly vying for our attention. You would know what you deemed important when you wanted to know it. No notification angst to reduce, no distractions to fight, no productivity to claw back, no sleep disruption to schedule DND around, no cognitive overload of all the systems on your machine, let alone a computer we carry around all the time, trying to tell you their state. That was for engineers operating complex systems, for 8 hours a day - very rarely more.
Perhaps we are accepting things like "you can snooze notifications now" because we've adjusted to the new, quite crappy, normal. Imagine an advert for a car that says "you can turn off sudden unintended accelerations on your preferred hours" in a market where cars would never SUA. That's the normal we had for notifications - none of the stress or anxiety.
I also remember what it was like to not be able to reach loved ones in emergencies, to periodically find a pay phone to check a voicemail system while waiting for an important call, to have no idea that a tornado was coming.
I’m happier with the choice to monitor in real-time what’s happening in my life, or not monitor, vs what we used to have: no choice at all.
In the early and mid 00s we had means to do all these things without notification spam. Even in the 90s, were these things problems? In which emergencies were you not able to reach loved ones or were unable to tell a tornado was coming? A lot of the public warning systems we have are from that time.
What you say makes sense if you go further back, but I feel like you're ignoring at least a decade where we had all these conveniences but no spam.
I grew up in Texas in the 90s and there was no way you would not know there was a tornado warning. People coped quite well with that reality, we live in a time where there is far more expectations to be always available. Before most people had cellphones if someone didn't know how to get a hold of you, they waited, and it was largely ok.
Emergencies are probably the only thing I will agree with you on, but, and this could be just my luck, I just didn't have many of those. One in particular I can think of was when I went off the road into a ditch in the middle of nowhere while trying to avoid a deer and my car was suspended over the ditch so I couldn't get it out. I walked down the road to a local factory and hitched a ride with a trucker who took me to the security office so I could call a tow truck. Yea it was a hassle but it wasn't impossible to get through emergencies without a device in your pocket.
I agree, I'm not sure if I'm just a complete blind Apple fan boy but I truly think their products have mostly improved many aspects of my life including their "Focus Modes". I am rarely disturbed when I don't want to be and I get the notifications I need at the right times.
By far the greatest feature of my Apple watch is being contactable while out on a hike without access to any Meta products. It's absolute bliss. I guess someone at Meta is trying to workout how to make us all completely addicted to our watch screens too but until then, it's paradise. A smart phone on my risk with zero distractions.
I found this one out 10 years ago when I got a Pebble.
Getting notification on my watch was increasing my stress rather than decreasing it.
Also looking at my watch for a notification got many people thinking I was late for some appointment or that I was trying to find an excuse to stop talking to them.
When I disabled the notifications I was left with not-so-smart watch with terrible battery life (still many times better than current models!).
Nowadays I stick either with a Casio Waveceptor or a mechanical watch depending if I need the time precision of the Waveceptor or not.
Based on your other replies it's probably just a fundamental disagreement on how you view notifications compared to those who find watch notifications to reduce stress.
For me, watch notifications reduce stress by allowing me to get absorbed in the moment while still being able to quickly check up on any important things without having to "context switch" by pulling out a phone.
It means that I can actually take advantage of my flexible work schedule and go out on a walk or be visiting my niece and playing with her, yet still available to others who might be working at the time.
In the early 2000s, sure there weren't devices vying for your attention, but such flexible work requirements were also not that common.
I get to do things whenever I want as long as the overall work is progressing at a decent pace. If I had to avoid getting into something enough to remember to keep checking my phone, it'd defeat the point of such flexibility, and if others had to wait an hour or two for me to notice and reply to them, work would not progress at a decent pace and the flexibility would be taken away.
This is probably also a function of my position. I'm at the start of my research career, so most of the emails I have ultimately involve me asking someone else for something which benefits me much more than them. My being extremely prompt with my replies helps a lot with making a good impression and getting things done, and a watch helps a lot with pulling that off without having to actually stress about paying attention to my emails.
If you get stressed by fearing you'll miss an 'important' message to which you want to 'react' immediately outside of your working hours (I'd argue even within work hours unless it is that once a year true emergency) to make a 'good impression' let me tell you now that that is not a winning strategy.
The hard truth is you are conditioning others to see and treat you like a good servant. One they want to keep as a servant.
If you want to serve yourself and advance your carreer, bring other values to the table when it matters. You want to be the person that shows promising skills for the next few carreer steps, not be the 'good ata boy, fetch'.
If you are truly needed for something urgent, because you are the only person that can do it rather than anyone that will do it. they will find a way to contact you even with your phone notifications turned off.
Making the "good impression" is a negative if you are impressing the wrong image.
You can ignore this advice from someone who has been through many stages of a carreer, and it can be scary advice givin your current perception, but trust me, this is an important worklife lesson.
I expected to get this kind of response, but applying it so broadly is kind of overly cynical and doesn't really account for the realities of early career research.
These urgent emails can be about things like quick questions about my code. If they had to wait for me to reply (which would cause them to just switch to another in their large backlog of tasks in the meantime), it'd take even longer than the year it has already taken to make meaningful progress on integrating my work.
Alternatively they may be requests to have a quick call to discuss a paper draft I sent for their review (because that's the only reasonable time they might have to discussit that week). With these, of course I should care about expediency as there are only a handful of papers with me as primary author. They directly count towards the progress of my career. Plus, with these there are strict submission deadlines to deal with, which are more important to me as primary author.
I'm in a research group of 4 people, 2 of whom are more scientist than computer engineer, and the other is mainly a Python person and also mainly a Windows person. Thus, any of our new developments relating to GPU acceleration, parallelization, automations and relating to our Linux systems are, in most cases, my child. This isn't a large company where there may be many different people who can handle the same task and where it's reasonable to make it difficult for them to reach me to avoid giving the impression of being a slave.
Plus, it isn't like I'm just doing everything I'm told either. I understand when someone's just asking me to do something that they likely won't even remember asking for and know to deprioritize those things appropriately.
I understand. I did the same when (I guess) I was your age. I do not think I was being cynical. By nature if people have great utility or satisfaction from something, they do not want it to change. Is that bad of them?
I had no idea the battery life on most smart watches is so bad that "24 hours of screen on battery life" is something to brag about. The apple watch is no better.
My Garmin Forerunner 945 (a running focused smart watch), more than two years old at this point, gets nearly two weeks of battery life on a single charge, and it's got an always-on screen as well.
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Quick edit:
Even the latest Forerunner 965, which has an AMOLED touch screen, gets 7 days of battery life in display-always-on mode, and 3 weeks in default mode (display turns off)^1
Yes, transflective screens consume MUCH less energy than a OLED/LCD or whatever display tech that these watches have that require backlights to function.
The Garmin works just fine without an active backlight (due to transflective) and has much fewer colors and worse resolution and worse refresh rate. It also does not have a touchscreen which also consumes lots of energy.
The modern smart watch advertises always on screens because it manages to get a day of battery life with a "good" display
All good points, though even the latest Forerunner 965, which has an AMOLED touch screen, gets 7 days of battery life in display-always-on mode, and 3 weeks in default mode (display turns off)^1
My Amazfit GTS 2 mini also manages 2 weeks on battery and it's got an OLED screen that I've set to always on, and it's got a touchscreen. And it's a small and light watch so the battery can't be that big.
I think the biggest battery waste is the full OS. Like the Garmins my watch doesn't have installable apps.
Ps Garmin also sells OLED touch models with long battery life. Like the venu
IME the OLED Garmins don't have that long of battery life if you have the display set to always-on. For me (Forerunner 265), it lasts maybe 3 days. Better than an Apple Watch, but not nearly as good as an Amazfit.
Garmin devices are generally great on battery life but the display on the Forerunner 945 isn't really considered "always on". It always displays an image but isn't readable in the dark without turning on the backlight.
Some newer Garmin devices do have true "always on" displays. Their battery life is slightly worse, but still pretty good.
I think the screen quality is very different. Newer Garmins have screens that are more comparable, but if you run them in always-on mode, battery life is a few days IME. I don't leave my screen on, and the battery lasts 5-6 days.
I agree that 24 hours is lousy, and I won't buy and Apple/Google watch for this reason.
I have a Forerunner 265, which I think was refreshed earlier this year to have the new AMOLED display. It looks nice, but it doesn’t last more than about 3 days in always-on mode.
I don’t understand how the Amazfit watches get 2+ weeks, with such nice-looking screens. I would have gotten one but don’t feel comfortable due to data/privacy issues, and the menus were clearly not written English-first. But the battery life was amazing!
My Fossil Hybrid HR has (real) motorised hands sitting on top of an e-paper display. 2 weeks of battery pretty easily. Just a shame that the syncing software halves the battery of your phone, requires privacy-invasion talking-back-to-the-server bullshit, and is ugly and useless to boot. But still required for watch functionality.
Christ I wish more smartwatches were hybrid & e-paper displays. I just seems the most obvious form for a smartwatch to exist in, yet there's almost none around.
I've flashed every phone I've ever owned with custom firmware but the gadgetbridge route confused the heck out of me for some reason. I ended up just using a previous version of the software for a while until I changed phones, and never bothered downgrading or flashing after that.
I miss my Pebble. I have a Garmin now, but it lacks many basic functionalities, especially around notifications. For example, if someone texts me a few times in a row, I can't scroll to get to prior notifications. Lame!
Same here. I'm really surprised that after Pebble's implosion nothing appeared to fill the void. I could've bet real money that within a couple of years we're going to see at least a couple of products at least close to what the Pebble was.
Fossil seems closest in terms of functionality, but their UI/UX is not nearly as smooth. The watches look nice, but they're much harder to read and navigate. Also super slow/laggy. I was hopeful when they first came out, but it seems like they've hardly innovated. They added Alexa a while back, but since there's no speaker (just a mic), responses are text-only. But the core OS is the same, four years later.
I've got a Skagen Jorn Hybrid watch with an "always on" e-ink screen and it lasts 4 weeks on a charge. I would be severely annoyed at having to charge a watch every day. A "nicer" looking screen is not worth it.
I have used Garmin's more consumer focused watches for years (currently have a Venu), and get great battery life too. Not two weeks, but a week is not out of the question.
Of course, I've found that after a couple of years the battery life starts to fade fast. Eventually I'm charging it every other day, at which point I usually start shopping for a new one.
Yeah I hear a lot of people bring up the battery life thing but the Apple Watch and wearOS devices are fully functional computers in their own right. If you do want a fitness appliance of sorts it's really not these devices.
Regardless, I find a fast charger while showering makes the watch last plenty long.
As with all things, your usage is the thing that matters. I haven’t worn a watch longer than a day even when watch batteries lasted literal years and sleep tracking doesn’t interest me (I sleep like the dead - it’s great). So whether it’s 3, 5, 7 or more… anything after about a day is just a flex and isn’t particularly interesting to me.
I had a Pebble smartwatch for years and loved it. I was a very reluctant switcher to Apple Watch and battery life was one of my biggest concerns.
Turns out it doesn’t really matter. When going to bed at night I used to plug my phone in. Now I plug my phone and my watch in. Pick up both in the morning and I’m ready to go.
Ironically I find myself in fewer low battery scenarios than I did with my Pebble: because I need to charge every day it becomes part of my routine. With the Pebble I’d lose track of when I last charged it and leave the house with it running on fumes. Still miss it, though.
It doesn't take long to charge, so you can top up before bed. When I've forgotten to take mine off it usually lasts all night anyway.
One exception: exercise hammers the battery. It'll work but it's not as good as my Garmin bike computer for multi-hour rides. 2 or 3 hours might mean it won't last until bedtime, 4+ and it might not last the ride.
Never really impacted me. I take my watch off when I go to bed and stick it on the charger beside my bed. Never have to think about the battery life.
I used to have a pebble watch that had 10 days battery but it would always go flat on me mid day because I didn’t have a regular charging schedule. Apple Watch has never gone flat mid day for me.
Just got a Venu 3, largely because my OG Venu battery life was down to two days after 4 years.
I've had thing thing a week and haven't charged it yet. It's even a 3S (shorter battery life than the base model). I've had it always-on, HR tracking, done three indoor workouts, a hike, and a run...
I could never have a device that needed to be charged every day.
I've been buying previous generation Garmin watches and I could never go back. Earlier this year I bought a Fenix 6X Pro Solar for $400. It's not the latest and greatest but it's still a phenomenal watch at that price. During the summer I average maybe an hour of GPS a day and I still get a week and half of battery life easily. If I don't use the GPS at all it's 3-4 weeks depending on how much solar power it gets. And it has several power save modes that extend it even further if for some reason that isn't enough.
The device’s utility is what gives it value. I appreciate that repairability is a desirable aspect, but it’s not the tipping point for most people. Repairabilty is a “what if” feature.
Per footnote 11, the "monthly sleep analysis" requires the FitBit premium subscription.
I am very hesitant to support a smartwatch that locks features behind a subscription, even though I don't particularly care about the sleep analysis.
I don't really see who this is for anyways. If you want a fitness tracker, you are better off with something from Garmin or FitBit. If you want the best smartwatch experience, nothing comes close to the Apple Watch. The Galaxy Watches are cheaper and have more size/style options.
This is just another copycat product line that exists solely because competitors have them and probably won't exist in 3-5 years.
Fitbit Premium appears to cost $80/year, but side-loading an app so you can play with data yourself is free.
On the other hand, the Apple Watch requires buying a macbook ($1000 one time) + a $100/year annual subscription for ad-hoc distribution to run your own app on your watch and play with data.
I assume the majority of hacker news users who buy a smart watch are going to end up writing a few simple apps/widgets/whatever for themselves, so it seems to me like, even if you do buy the optional fitbit premium subscription, you'll end up paying less per year than for an apple watch.
I'm quite hesitant of smart-watches that lock writing and running my own simple widgets behind a subscription.
> I assume the majority of hacker news users who buy a smart watch are going to end up writing a few simple apps/widgets/whatever for themselves
I’m not so sure about that! I’m very content to be an Apple Watch user, not a developer. It already does the things I need it to (and the Shortcuts app is a great way to automate things).
Worth noting they are offering a promo, at least in some markets, that you get the pixel watch 2 for free if you preorder the pixel 8 pro, or $200 off if you preorder the pixel 8.
I pre-ordered the Pixel 8 Pro with Koodo in Canada and it comes with the Watch 2 LTE which is like $549 CAD, so a good deal I thought as I was in the market for a phone and a watch.
Android really dropped the ball on their watch OS, it is absolutely unusable. I heard that they even pay a shitton of money for Samsung so they won’t create a new base OS for watches..
There's a lot of legitimate reasons to be skeptical of pixel watches. But I've never heard anyone cite aesthetics. They are some of the best looking watches in the market
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadEdit: I absolutely love the watch so maybe I've just learned not to care, I agree it's a little bulky but the value I get out of it makes any bulk worth it.
I do like having a heart-rate tracker, but having had a couple of fitbits the novelty eventually wears off and the reality that knowing the numbers isn't important sets in.
Also, if my hands are full/dirty I can still control media playback (granted that using the nose to tap on a watch probably looks pretty funny), and have weather right on my wrist (which is surprisingly handy).
Edit: Also it turns out to be the best kind of alarm for me. Audio alarms are annoying (also to anyone else who has to hear it) and don't really tend to wake me up nicely. Turns out the slight vibration of the watch wakes me up pretty nicely without bothering people in other rooms.
It’s never been an issue.
I understand that they're getting to the point where you can charge just while showering, but aren't quite there yet.
I can't sleep with a watch on at night, so I take it off and put it on its stand, which is the charger- my phone goes on it's charging stand at the same time.
For all other situations, I just have to stick the watch to the back of my phone to charge it, so don't even need to carry around a separate watch charger.
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/633356#specs
...but its 12mm thick?! xD
And it's free with purchase of their flagship? Who could resist?
PS> I don't work for Google/Pixel or any affiliated group.
For better or worse, Apple's rectangular form factor is something people have gotten used to and frankly it's more space efficient than a circle.
To really make a dent in the market place, they should build a product that has a Wow factor that is good enough to lure even Apple Watch users away.
They are seriously going to need to come up with something out of the box that you mentioned to draw users. There is no wow factor at all with this thing.
Why?
I limit my watch notifications to the most important ones, allow more on the phone but the mute switch is always on, so I’ll check it when I feel like it.
And because I don’t need to drag my phone out of my pocket when important notifications arrive, I can respond or ignore them with much less literal and figurative friction.
I'm probably showing my age here, but there was a time that's hard to remember now when there were no notifications, no devices constantly vying for our attention. You would know what you deemed important when you wanted to know it. No notification angst to reduce, no distractions to fight, no productivity to claw back, no sleep disruption to schedule DND around, no cognitive overload of all the systems on your machine, let alone a computer we carry around all the time, trying to tell you their state. That was for engineers operating complex systems, for 8 hours a day - very rarely more.
Perhaps we are accepting things like "you can snooze notifications now" because we've adjusted to the new, quite crappy, normal. Imagine an advert for a car that says "you can turn off sudden unintended accelerations on your preferred hours" in a market where cars would never SUA. That's the normal we had for notifications - none of the stress or anxiety.
I’m happier with the choice to monitor in real-time what’s happening in my life, or not monitor, vs what we used to have: no choice at all.
In the early and mid 00s we had means to do all these things without notification spam. Even in the 90s, were these things problems? In which emergencies were you not able to reach loved ones or were unable to tell a tornado was coming? A lot of the public warning systems we have are from that time.
What you say makes sense if you go further back, but I feel like you're ignoring at least a decade where we had all these conveniences but no spam.
Emergencies are probably the only thing I will agree with you on, but, and this could be just my luck, I just didn't have many of those. One in particular I can think of was when I went off the road into a ditch in the middle of nowhere while trying to avoid a deer and my car was suspended over the ditch so I couldn't get it out. I walked down the road to a local factory and hitched a ride with a trucker who took me to the security office so I could call a tow truck. Yea it was a hassle but it wasn't impossible to get through emergencies without a device in your pocket.
By far the greatest feature of my Apple watch is being contactable while out on a hike without access to any Meta products. It's absolute bliss. I guess someone at Meta is trying to workout how to make us all completely addicted to our watch screens too but until then, it's paradise. A smart phone on my risk with zero distractions.
Also looking at my watch for a notification got many people thinking I was late for some appointment or that I was trying to find an excuse to stop talking to them. When I disabled the notifications I was left with not-so-smart watch with terrible battery life (still many times better than current models!).
Nowadays I stick either with a Casio Waveceptor or a mechanical watch depending if I need the time precision of the Waveceptor or not.
For me, watch notifications reduce stress by allowing me to get absorbed in the moment while still being able to quickly check up on any important things without having to "context switch" by pulling out a phone.
It means that I can actually take advantage of my flexible work schedule and go out on a walk or be visiting my niece and playing with her, yet still available to others who might be working at the time.
In the early 2000s, sure there weren't devices vying for your attention, but such flexible work requirements were also not that common.
I get to do things whenever I want as long as the overall work is progressing at a decent pace. If I had to avoid getting into something enough to remember to keep checking my phone, it'd defeat the point of such flexibility, and if others had to wait an hour or two for me to notice and reply to them, work would not progress at a decent pace and the flexibility would be taken away.
This is probably also a function of my position. I'm at the start of my research career, so most of the emails I have ultimately involve me asking someone else for something which benefits me much more than them. My being extremely prompt with my replies helps a lot with making a good impression and getting things done, and a watch helps a lot with pulling that off without having to actually stress about paying attention to my emails.
The hard truth is you are conditioning others to see and treat you like a good servant. One they want to keep as a servant.
If you want to serve yourself and advance your carreer, bring other values to the table when it matters. You want to be the person that shows promising skills for the next few carreer steps, not be the 'good ata boy, fetch'.
If you are truly needed for something urgent, because you are the only person that can do it rather than anyone that will do it. they will find a way to contact you even with your phone notifications turned off.
Making the "good impression" is a negative if you are impressing the wrong image.
You can ignore this advice from someone who has been through many stages of a carreer, and it can be scary advice givin your current perception, but trust me, this is an important worklife lesson.
These urgent emails can be about things like quick questions about my code. If they had to wait for me to reply (which would cause them to just switch to another in their large backlog of tasks in the meantime), it'd take even longer than the year it has already taken to make meaningful progress on integrating my work.
Alternatively they may be requests to have a quick call to discuss a paper draft I sent for their review (because that's the only reasonable time they might have to discussit that week). With these, of course I should care about expediency as there are only a handful of papers with me as primary author. They directly count towards the progress of my career. Plus, with these there are strict submission deadlines to deal with, which are more important to me as primary author.
I'm in a research group of 4 people, 2 of whom are more scientist than computer engineer, and the other is mainly a Python person and also mainly a Windows person. Thus, any of our new developments relating to GPU acceleration, parallelization, automations and relating to our Linux systems are, in most cases, my child. This isn't a large company where there may be many different people who can handle the same task and where it's reasonable to make it difficult for them to reach me to avoid giving the impression of being a slave.
Plus, it isn't like I'm just doing everything I'm told either. I understand when someone's just asking me to do something that they likely won't even remember asking for and know to deprioritize those things appropriately.
My Garmin Forerunner 945 (a running focused smart watch), more than two years old at this point, gets nearly two weeks of battery life on a single charge, and it's got an always-on screen as well.
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Quick edit:
Even the latest Forerunner 965, which has an AMOLED touch screen, gets 7 days of battery life in display-always-on mode, and 3 weeks in default mode (display turns off)^1
[1]: https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=FEjONGCI270wlBlREC7Uw8...
The Garmin works just fine without an active backlight (due to transflective) and has much fewer colors and worse resolution and worse refresh rate. It also does not have a touchscreen which also consumes lots of energy.
The modern smart watch advertises always on screens because it manages to get a day of battery life with a "good" display
[1]: https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=FEjONGCI270wlBlREC7Uw8...
I think the biggest battery waste is the full OS. Like the Garmins my watch doesn't have installable apps.
Ps Garmin also sells OLED touch models with long battery life. Like the venu
https://apps.garmin.com/
Some newer Garmin devices do have true "always on" displays. Their battery life is slightly worse, but still pretty good.
I agree that 24 hours is lousy, and I won't buy and Apple/Google watch for this reason.
I have a Fenix 6s and with Always On mode it lasts about a week. However, if I record activities, I'll need to charge it that night.
At one point, battery life got really bad but a factory reset fixed it.
And the thing still gets updates years after its release!
I once broke my Garmin bike computer screen and they sent me a new bike computer free of charge. Honestly, I'm a big Garmin fan at this point.
I don’t understand how the Amazfit watches get 2+ weeks, with such nice-looking screens. I would have gotten one but don’t feel comfortable due to data/privacy issues, and the menus were clearly not written English-first. But the battery life was amazing!
Christ I wish more smartwatches were hybrid & e-paper displays. I just seems the most obvious form for a smartwatch to exist in, yet there's almost none around.
One nice thing about their privacy-invading app is that it works perfectly fine if networking permissions are disabled for it, at least on Android.
It also works with Gadgetbridge, except for sleep tracking. I really want to find the time to add a sleep tracking algorithm to Gadgetbridge one day.
Of course, I've found that after a couple of years the battery life starts to fade fast. Eventually I'm charging it every other day, at which point I usually start shopping for a new one.
My apple watch has 4g and can stream spotify for example, I can take phone calls from anyone anywhere.
Regardless, I find a fast charger while showering makes the watch last plenty long.
And for many the Garmin is not a suitable alternative.
The strategy I found for charging is to habitually plug in when in the shower, the few mins of charge per day provides "forever" battery life for me.
Turns out it doesn’t really matter. When going to bed at night I used to plug my phone in. Now I plug my phone and my watch in. Pick up both in the morning and I’m ready to go.
Ironically I find myself in fewer low battery scenarios than I did with my Pebble: because I need to charge every day it becomes part of my routine. With the Pebble I’d lose track of when I last charged it and leave the house with it running on fumes. Still miss it, though.
One exception: exercise hammers the battery. It'll work but it's not as good as my Garmin bike computer for multi-hour rides. 2 or 3 hours might mean it won't last until bedtime, 4+ and it might not last the ride.
I used to have a pebble watch that had 10 days battery but it would always go flat on me mid day because I didn’t have a regular charging schedule. Apple Watch has never gone flat mid day for me.
I've had thing thing a week and haven't charged it yet. It's even a 3S (shorter battery life than the base model). I've had it always-on, HR tracking, done three indoor workouts, a hike, and a run...
I could never have a device that needed to be charged every day.
Google Pixel Watch 2 = 306 mAh
A small improvement I suppose.
Just telling the customers "just buy a new one" if they have a cracked screen is just not acceptable in 2023.
I am very hesitant to support a smartwatch that locks features behind a subscription, even though I don't particularly care about the sleep analysis.
I don't really see who this is for anyways. If you want a fitness tracker, you are better off with something from Garmin or FitBit. If you want the best smartwatch experience, nothing comes close to the Apple Watch. The Galaxy Watches are cheaper and have more size/style options.
This is just another copycat product line that exists solely because competitors have them and probably won't exist in 3-5 years.
So, this product is for the part of the world that doesn't use iPhones, I suppose.
I'm kinda keen. Awaiting a MKBHD video, as per.
.edit: Guessing that feature's locked because it's part of FitBit, which was purchased by Google but probably still functions a bit separately.
On the other hand, the Apple Watch requires buying a macbook ($1000 one time) + a $100/year annual subscription for ad-hoc distribution to run your own app on your watch and play with data.
I assume the majority of hacker news users who buy a smart watch are going to end up writing a few simple apps/widgets/whatever for themselves, so it seems to me like, even if you do buy the optional fitbit premium subscription, you'll end up paying less per year than for an apple watch.
I'm quite hesitant of smart-watches that lock writing and running my own simple widgets behind a subscription.
I’m not so sure about that! I’m very content to be an Apple Watch user, not a developer. It already does the things I need it to (and the Shortcuts app is a great way to automate things).