The Bangle.js 2 is pretty cool
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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That's what I use. It's way more stripped down than a modern smart watch, but it has good battery life, a transflexive LCD, can discretely give me notifications so I can keep my phone on silent, and can show me the weather at a glance.
There are more things it can do, I just find my phone is better for the majority of them.
That covers all my smart watch use cases tho.
Are the notifications actionable? (Snoozing alarms, canned replies to messages, etc)
I couldn't find that important detail on the website easily.
You can snooze alarms, play/pause/ff/rw media, and mark messages as read
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That looks like the closest successor to the pebble I think I've ever seen.
I may need to order one and test it out.
So frustrating that their logo is a nice looking round watch, but their product is an ugly rectangular one.
The original one was round.
And priced for the average human! Wow.
Damn, if I didn't need the fitness tracking support of my Garmin watch, I'd be all over that!
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I think I've just found my next watch. It looks more useful than my current Fitbit Versa. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Now I miss my Pebble and Pebble 2 :(
I held onto my Pebble for so long, wearing it from launch until about a year ago, where I got a Garmin Smartwatch.
So many things I loved about it, especially its simplicity and legendary battery life (at that time).
Samesies! The Garmin battery is starting to deteriorate after about 3 years use though. That said I don't regret buying it, it's been great.
Garmin watches have screws everywhere, I would assume they're easy to repair and to replace the battery.
Big fan of the PineTime for minimalism and extraordinary battery life, but the Bangle looks compelling. Maybe once the PineTime dies.
PineTime
Bangle.js 2
TIL
I would reall love to have an open source watch, but unfortunately both the pinetime and bangle.js 2 lack severely in the activity tracking, which is the primary reason for me to have a smart watch.
I'm not sure how the screen is on the pinetime, but on the bangle.js 2 it's surprisingly bad. Not a deal breaker by itself, but combined with a sort of limping experience on other parts, it's not a good product (yet).
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PineTime is nice, wearing it right now.
What all can it do?
Notifications, media control, minor navigation aids, some heart rate stuff (they've linked some papers for their algorithm which I think is cool cause now we can discuss the validity of said algorithm for heart rate monitoring) and most importantly 1024 (the game)
And 1 week (approx) of battery life
I thought the game was 2048.
oh my bad, yeah. its all the same game to me.
Similar to what most smartwatches can: measure heartbeat, show notifications and answer calls from your smartphone, flashlight (by showing white write screen), show weather, etc.
You can't actually take calls on the PT, you can use it to pick up your phone.
It's pretty barebones, but I like it for the price that it costs and the freedom it gives.
Gatgetbridge (your link) has a breakdown of devices they support https://gadgetbridge.org/gadgets/ . You can click through the vendors to find devices which are both "highly supported" and "no vendor-pair". Meaning most/all the features work without any reliance on the vendor app.
As for the similarity you are asking about with pixel->GrapheneOS, there are very few watches that can run an alternative open source firmware or operating systems apart from the ones that are already open source, like bangle.js, pinetime, etc. Wearables are even more specialized than phones, they require specialized code designed specifically for them and would likely require pretty extreme effort to reverse-engineer.
I use a pebble 2 HR with gadgetbridge but the watch it self runs the old pebble firmware which gadgetbridge talks to. This is fine for me, but if you are looking for a more modern watch you may have to make some compromises.
There's AsteroidOS but I couldn't find any of the supported watches (all quite old IIRC) at a reasonable price.
Gadgetbridge with some proprietary watch is fine privacy-wise (I had an Amazfit GTR3 pro, I needed to register an account with the Zapp app and use it once, but then uninstalled it once I got the required password and used Gadgetbridge exclusively).
Bangle and the Pine Watch are low-res and IMHO quite ugly compared to alternatives from big brands.
Old Pebble if you can find a working one that someone will part with.
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I just picked up a banglejs 2 and I love it. I was using a galaxy smart watch 5 but didn't work without gapps on my lineage phone. Its obviously not as good as the Samsung smart watch but I've been super happy with it. No creating accounts, getting tokens etc. Just pair it via Bluetooth and gadget bridge and you are good to go. Its a little pricey but for open source watch its awesome, I've heard good things about pinetime as well.
I have a PineTime, but I'd have to go with the Bangle.js.
I have a pinetime and I basically just stopped using it. I thought it being open source would mean I could add my own features, but development for it sucks and it's massively limited.
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I use the AmazFit Band 7, the last sensibly sized watch that exists it often feels like.
Weather fails to sync, but then it's probably the least important feature on a watch. The only feature I really wish Gadgetbridge could do that even the official stack can't is "nap mode"
As a narcoleptic person still recovering from major depression, I wish I could either press a button to silence the watch and set a "smart alarm" for 30 minutes. Even better if it would turn on automatically if it detects me sleeping during the day!
The only other thing GB can't do is stand in for the phone-side ZeppOS API functionality, but who needs that, let's be honest!
Fantastic battery life to boot. I have gone two weeks after forgetting to charge it while wearing it almost 24×7!
Weather works on my Zepp OS watch. Breezy Weather syncs it to gadgetbrige
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Idk if it can be called a smartwatch, but I just found out about the sensor watch, and now I really want one. Basically a hackable Casio f-91w
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I only know of the Pine Time, however they warn that their watch OS is community driven and under active development.
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I'm using an Amazfit bip watch. Is full supported from gadgetbridge.
This. And battery life is amazing.
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Lilygo T-Watch. Sorry, I know I'm late to the party but no one mentioned these. They're a little closer to a development platform, but basic enough for anyone to pick up and learn. They're similar to the PineTime in terms of being low-power, more simple options. But this uses a more powerful ESP32-S3 SoC and is a lot more responsive.
If you want something feature rich, I have the Amazfit Balance Watch and its just as nice as the Pixel Watch hardware wise. It runs a closed source Chinese Zepp OS but if you pair it with GadgetBridge, none of your data can go anywhere except your phone local storage, and 95% of the features work well.
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