I've said it for years on Reddit and I will continue saying it here on lemmy. I miss Pebble.

I use a galaxy watch 4 now but while it can do some more thing it still doesn't fully match the functionality of my pebble time. So many stupid software limitations that shouldn't exist.

If the battery hadn't degraded I'd still be using it.

I've looked at fossil multiple times and they've never matched the functionality I need. No current watches really do.

x

I loved the design of their watches, they looked like a watch first and foremost, but their speed and battery life was atrocious and I owned 3 generations of them before switching to Apple.

With the state of wearos where both the os maker and the chipset maker aren't believing in the platform, it's difficult to blame them.

The best way to do a smartwatch is using an embedded dedicated os that uses minimal resources to save battery. It's the reason a ten year old pebble smartwatch with 128k of ram and a 64 MHz CPU feels faster than a brand new wearos smartwatch with 2gb of ram and a 2 GHz CPU.

If for example you want to show a barcode for a membership card on the watch screen, you shouldn't run a full 100mb app on your watch with a database, internet connection, 2mb high res PNG files for icons and other shit. There's a powerful smartphone in the pocket that can do all the hard work like syncing, adding, editing or deleting cards and so on, and when a card need to be showed on the screen the phone just tells the watch "ok so using the embedded library just show this barcode, and to make it fancier use a green border because it's Starbucks"

But when people are purchasing it they're directly comparing it to the Apple Watch with beautiful display, fancy animations, and the numbers on the spec. "What? This watch only has 128k of RAM? LOL this other one with 16000 times more memory gonna be much better"

So, instead of doing it the right way and investing millions on an embedded os with fancy animations everyone took the shortcut of using wearos. "The chipset and the operating system is already done for us, just need to customize it!" And spend millions in customizing it.

But then, those Qualcomm "smartwatch" chipset are just ten year old smartphone CPUs in disguise and the operating system it's the full android os with a different skin. Congratulations, you got a ten year old smartwatch sized smartphone with bad performance and short battery life! Good luck selling that shit. Ah, forgot to mention that the company that is selling you the operating system is directly competing with your sales and at the same time it's holding exclusive features for themselves and/or delaying them for months. And they're using an exclusive chipset that's way better than whatever you can get. Yeah, customers gonna be pissed that your expensive smartwatch sized smartphone doesn't have all the features of the pixel watch.

Good. They fucking sucked, and they never supported them.

We bought 2 of their watches, brand new. The gen 4 literally had like 6 months of life in it before they stopped supporting it, and apps stopped working on it.

It had abysmal battery life and performance, basically unusable.

We also had the Sport. The front fell off. Which is not very typical, I'd like to make that point. The screen kinda opened up, flopped over and ripped itself off when going to bed. We got a replacement, horrible customer service, we had to hunt down a store that had the watch in stock, and then argue with them to make them understand that we're here for a warranty replacement, and they didn't know what to do.

That watch then proceeded to live for 3 months before they suddenly cut support and new apps stopped running on it.

I personally quit smart watches. I owned an Apple Watch 2 and 'downgraded' to a Garmin Instinct. Couldn't be happier.

Not surprising. Their watches weren't really priced well enough for a product that has such a short lifespan. They were charging as much as an actual designer watch which would otherwise last decades, for a product whose non-replaceable battery has a lifespan of only a few years.

I can't imagine they had many repeat customers, as a result.

My first smartwatch was a fossil and it almost made me give up on smart watches entirely. It was pretty nice for the first 6 or so months but the battery deteriorated quickly and it only lasted like half the day. I didn't even last a whole year before I gave up on it and just assumed Android smartwatches were kinda trash.

I actually got the free pixel watch 2 promo deal for preordering the pixel 8 pro thinking I could just sell it, but I decided to give it a shot and I actually really like it.

I had a Fossil Wear OS smartwatch, I liked it but I barely used any of its features. Basically, I'd use it to notify me of messages and then I could see whether or not to pick up my phone.

I sold it and bought a Fossil hybrid (Collider HR) and I love that thing. The battery lasts about 2 weeks and people always think it's so cool that it has physical hands.

It shows me whenever I get a message or calendar notification (or whatever notifications I want) and that's all I care about.

I haven't looked at the newer generation of watches, but I don't think I'd upgrade or anything.

I also have other Fossil stuff, like belts. They make cool stuff, but they've always been a fashion brand first before a tech brand.

If they stop making smartwatches, are there any other brands that make good hybrid, eink watches?

Also, the article just mentioned they'd stop making Wear OS devices so maybe they'll still make the hybrid watches?

Sad, but I guess somewhat understandable given the R&D competitors are putting in.