[vermarish]

I love the animation when you click "No" on "Do you want a new Pebble?". So extra.

[ctkhn]

Gotta be honest I feel like Garmin is the perfect balance of pebble vs apple watch

[seanhunter]

Garmin is the perfect solution if you want a smart watch with a gps that takes 5mins to possibly sync 50% of the time and a touchscreen-only interface that doesn’t work if it gets wet or say sweaty. Ie during most of the activities it’s supposedly designed for.

When I got a garmin smartwatch I was astounded by how poor the basic ux is in almost every single way. If I’m swimming, how do I stop my work out? The touchscreen doesn’t work because it’s wet. I have to do some sort of double click of the button. No that’s pause. Maybe triple click - no that didn’t do anything. Maybe hold the button? Now it wants to delete my whole workout.

And the GPS sync thing amazes me. I put up with this problem when I was using garmin GPSs for accurate time sync for servers back in the 1990s, but 25+ years later for them not to have figured it out when literally every other GPS device does it just fine completely blows my mind. Apple watch? I want to go for a walk/run/whatever I hit go. If I move during the 3-2-1 countdown nbd it figures it out. Garmin I want to do it I hit go, it tries to sync the sattelites. If I move during this process it starts from scratch. Sometimes the sync takes 30 seconds or so. Annoying but not impossible to live with. Most of the time however the sync takes 30seconds or so and just fails. Also annoying but whatever. Some of the time however the sync takes a few minutes and then fails. And if I move at all during this, it gives me a message saying it’s going to have to start again and starts from scratch.

And to add insult to injury the thing has a custom charging plug with the socket on the back of the watch. It has a ridge and two spikes that physically press into my wrist making it actually painful to wear. So bad.

[rafaelmn]

I really like vivomove looks but after buying lux as a gift for my wife I think I will steer clear. App was bad, syncing issues, she wore it for a while because she liked how it looks but I think she has not charged it in over a year because of how much the experience sucks compared to apple watch or even withings.

I have a withings scanwatch right now, the app is nice, ecosystem is nice - but accuracy is very underwhelming.

I would pay 1k for a watch that

- is hybrid with subtle watch aesthetic and minimal display/vibration for notifications

- has Apple watch level metric accuracy

- has week long battery life

- ideally would have replaceable battery but not a deal breaker if warranty is 3 years

[WD-42]

I like my instinct, but Garmin is so locked down, less hackable than even an Apple Watch.

[asdff]

I can't get over garmins predatory business model. The way they bin their products by activity is terrible if you have multiple hobbies. All of these devices are just a gps reciever, screen, battery, yet they sell it to you a dozen different ways for $500+ a pop usually because why unify the software and make it easy for the consumer?

[Levitating]

I absolutely love my Garmin instict. It has an always-on display and a battery that lasts for nearly a month.

I mostly use it for reading my calendar, weather, notifications and time. Occasionally I use it for exercise.

But what it also excels at is GPS. I use it as a backup navigational tool when sailing. It has also prevented me from getting lost when running in the woods a number of times.

[Steltek]

My Pebble Time Steel finally bit the dust so I turned to a Garmin Instinct. I can't stand it. The button placement is totally random and legitimately painful to use. The Garmin software focuses on fitness activities to the exclusion of everything else.

I recoil at having been tempted by the more expensive Garmin watches. What a waste of money that would have been!

[tylervigen]

Did you randomly bring this up, or are you saying this because you see a Garmin redirect when you click "No"?

I ask because I get directed to the Apple Watch homepage.

[abraxas]

I just gave away a very expensive Garmin to my son. Its feature set is to dream of. Its user interface is hot garbage. When I'm out on a hike or in the pool trying to just measure my fsking laps I need a single click option or something. Their paradigm of "button 1, button 3, button 5, long press button 4, button 1 again to confirm. Now you can push off the wall in 3... 2... 1" is beyond fucking stupid.

Does anyone at Garmin actually practice sports? For a company with such great hardware they really need someone competent on the UX team. Throwing everything into more and more menus and submenus is not working.

The specific watch I'm criticizing is Garmin Instinct 2x solar. The name is very ironic because there is nothing intuitive about using that watch. Like, at all.

[soxocx]

On the iPhone I get redirected to the Apple Store page for the Apple Watch. Nice humor.

[Findecanor]

I got a tiny bit offended by the assumption that I'd rather have an Apple Watch.

I'd think the ideal for me would instead be something in-between a Pebble and a Sensor Watch. Something hackable with more battery life, that is a watch first (and a smartphone notification screen never). I wonder how far I could go towards that goal with the upcoming Pebble hardware and rewriting the OS kernel to sleep more.

[benbristow]

Same on Mac (Firefox)

[jacobgkau]

I think it's just a static redirect, it sent me to the Apple Watch page in Firefox on Linux. But I also wondered if it would shuffle between a few different brands or something (I guess not).

[eloisant]

The feature I use the most on my smartwatch is paying.

So if they can bring contactless payments to their new Pebble they have my attention, otherwise it's useless to me.

[ZeWaka]

There exists 'smart bands', which can be applied to any (generally non-smart, obviously) watch that uses normal pin-style watchbands. They have a contactless chip in them that can store one card. My traditional watches use them, though I had to custom-make one of the bands to be in a style I wanted.

[jsheard]

I wouldn't count on that, getting every bank on board is a massive undertaking. Even Garmin Pay and Fitbit Pay (before it was folded into Google Wallet) have/had huge gaps in their coverage, especially outside of the US.

[urbandw311er]

You could cut out the chip from a debit card and glue it to the back of the pebble?

[edarchis]

The amount of us who clicked no is amazing. I loved my Pebble Time but I'm going to give money to yet another Kickstarter and have it be killed shortly after.

[echelon]

Feels a little bit salty to send customers to Google's competitor given the fact that Google provided the exit and also liberated the code. They didn't have to do that.

A better "thank you" to Google would be to direct people to Fitbit.

[erohead]

Good call, I just changed it to send to pixel watch if opened on Android or Windows!

[alex_young]

I think it’s perfect actually.

Google used to (still?) have a page internally where if you clicked on “I don’t care about security” it sent you to the jobs page of a competitor that had suffered a notable breach.

Very on point.

[wlesieutre]

I thought they killed FitBit and are doing Pixel Watch again instead

https://store.google.com/product/pixel_watch_3

[Reason077]

> "A better "thank you" to Google would be to direct people to Fitbit."

Fitbit has already gone off to the great Google graveyard, unfortunately.

[wkat4242]

It's just a joke I think. But yeah linking to the pixel watch would have been nicer.

[hbn]

What if you clicked no because you already own a Pebble?

[pinoy420]

Upgrade option

[cryptozeus]

why not redirect to google watches specially if the team is from goodle !