The Pebble Has Been Brought Back
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I pre ordered, and I'm usually annoyingly loud about not pre-ordering.
That being said, i love my pebble time. I Kickstarted it back in the day, and it still works but the battery is weak. I could replace the battery, but i want more devices like this, so I'll put some money in and eat Ramen for a few weeks.Preordered here too, for all the same reasons. I went for the Time2, even though it's not due to ship until later. I've waited nearly ten years, I can wait another six months...
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Does it spy on us?
One thing about the Pebble - and, I assume, these watches - is that they didn't have WiFi or LTE, only Bluetooth. So it wasn't possible for them to do any communication except through the apps already running on your phone. So, broadly, it's a no.
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Google recently open sourced Pebble and today, Repebble has put some of the watches up for preorder.
I backed the original pebble on kickstarter and it’s what got me into smart watches. Happy they’re coming back and that they’re open source.
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Is there any company that let's you export your health tracking data in a non proprietary format and doesn't charge you a monthly subscription to use your smartwatch's health tracking features?
Withings
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Fuck I want that so bad.
Withings
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I backed the original pebble on kickstarter and it’s what got me into smart watches. Happy they’re coming back and that they’re open source.
I recently did out my old 401B after the screen fell off my Galaxy Active2. It charged right up and still lasts about a week.
Finding a new band was a PITA because of the weird segmented hinge bit but one person was selling diver bands for it on Amazon (I think it was Amazon)... Really not bad for a watch from a decade ago.
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Fuck I want that so bad.
If only there was a company out there that did it. Alas...
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No NFC !!???? Whyyyyyyyyyy
Basic payment options would be sick
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Google recently open sourced Pebble and today, Repebble has put some of the watches up for preorder.
I still have my circa-2016 email confirming my pledge for the Time 2 Silver, which ultimately got cancelled just before the fulfillment date due to Pebble selling out to Fitbit.
While I loved my original Pebble back then, I would really want something similar to look and function of the T2S so will watch this project in hopes it too is resurrected
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Is there any company that let's you export your health tracking data in a non proprietary format and doesn't charge you a monthly subscription to use your smartwatch's health tracking features?
Garmin allows you to export data to a csv file. I'm not sure if it's all data because I haven't used it, but I know it's simple.
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Withings
One pro of Withings is that they're French, so their policies on data in general are pretty great.
One con of Withings is that they're French, so it's not actually pronounced how you think.
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I still have my circa-2016 email confirming my pledge for the Time 2 Silver, which ultimately got cancelled just before the fulfillment date due to Pebble selling out to Fitbit.
While I loved my original Pebble back then, I would really want something similar to look and function of the T2S so will watch this project in hopes it too is resurrected
due to Pebble selling out to Fitbit.
Due to Pebble going bankrupt, and managing to sell its software assets to Fitbit to gain just enough money to refund the kickstarter pledges and pay off it's biggest debts.
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Google recently open sourced Pebble and today, Repebble has put some of the watches up for preorder.
can it play tetris
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I backed the original pebble on kickstarter and it’s what got me into smart watches. Happy they’re coming back and that they’re open source.
Pebble still works thanks to the Rebble project. Everything else is free, but the dictation and weather services require a monthly $3 subscription to use as those are the parts that have rather hefty API call costs.
Though the experience is miserable on iOS. That's entirely all thanks to Apple.
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Epaper and eink are different. Eink consumes no power when idle, and epaper consumes almost no power.
Yet they are also the same - E Ink is an e-paper display.
Electronic paper is a category for any low energy display tech that looks kinda like paper, E Ink is a very specific technology from E Ink Corporation. -
Pebble still works thanks to the Rebble project. Everything else is free, but the dictation and weather services require a monthly $3 subscription to use as those are the parts that have rather hefty API call costs.
Though the experience is miserable on iOS. That's entirely all thanks to Apple.
What makes it miserable on iOS?
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Google recently open sourced Pebble and today, Repebble has put some of the watches up for preorder.
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How's navigation with Pebbles? If I start bike navigation in Google Maps on my phone, can I get turn-by-turn directions on the watch, and does it not suck?
There was/is a companion app called PebbleNav/NavMe that worked okay-ish, as long as you could survive with "Turn left in 100 metres to x street" type instructions with no map view (not really something you can do with 144x168 pixels).
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How's navigation with Pebbles? If I start bike navigation in Google Maps on my phone, can I get turn-by-turn directions on the watch, and does it not suck?
There is an Android and a companion Pebble app ("Nav me") that reads the Google maps notifications ("In 300 meters turn left onto Jefferson Street") and displays them on the watch. The remaining distance until the next navigation instruction decreases real time. Nothing fancy like minimap view, but can be useful in some situations.
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What makes it miserable on iOS?
The Pebble app was removed from the App store, so you have to manually sideload it every 7 days.
And:
Here are the things that are harder or impossible for 3rd party smartwatches (ie non Apple Watches) to do on iPhone:
- There’s no way for a smartwatch to send text messages or iMessages.
- You can’t reply to notifications or take ‘actions’ like marking something as done.
- It’s very difficult to enable other iOS apps to work with Pebble. Basically iOS does not have the concept of ‘interprocess communication’(IPC) like on Android. What we did before was publish an SDK that other apps (like Strava) could integrate to make their own BLE connection to Pebble. It was a clunky quasi-solution that other apps didn’t like, because it was hard to test (among other things)
- If you (accidentally) close our iOS app, then your watch can’t talk to app or internet
- Impossible for watch to detect if you are using your phone, so your watch will buzz and display a notification even if you are staring at your iPhone
- You can’t easily side load apps onto an iPhone. That means we have to publish the app on the iPhone appstore. This is a gigantic pain because Apple. Every update comes with the risk that a random app reviewer could make up some BS excuse and block the update.
- Because of iOS Appstore rules, it would be hard for us to enable 3rd party watchface/app developers to charge for their work (ie we can’t easily make an appstore within our app)
- Getting a Javascript engine to run in PebbleOS forced us to go through many hoops due to iOS — creating a compiler inside the Pebble iPhone app that in itself needed to be written in (cross-compiled to) JS to work with Apple's restriction on downloadable code can only be JS
- As a Pebble watch/app developer, using the iOS app as relay to the watch sucks since the "developer mode" terminates every few minutes
https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-awesome-with-iphones
