TL;DR
- Google has confirmed to us that the Pixel Watch 3 can’t be repaired and can only be replaced.
- This is bad news for environmental reasons, suggesting that broken watches will end up in landfills.
- This isn’t the first Pixel Watch model that can’t be repaired, though.
For all the sustainability push and saving the planet green talk. They like other manufacturers were quick to remove the charger from the box.
But, now nothing. Replace or throw the Pixel watch in the bin if broken.
first galaxy watch 7 lineup sucks, now this… im about done with these smartwatches
These smart watches are garbage. Even Apple watches have rather short lifetimes
My Garmin is going strong 5 years later, and I’ve got no incentive to upgrade
I’ve worn my Series 4 every day since September 21, 2018. My son is still using the Series 3 I gifted him the same day. I bought that one September 22, 2017. I don’t baby my watch in any way
Thought about an upgrade a few times, but haven’t had a compelling reason to do so
How’s the battery life holding up?
I put it on at 7 am, it’s 12:19am now and I’m at 37%
And I’m still at work… fml
So not far off 24 hours? That doesn’t seem bad seeing as they only say 19 odd hours on a Series 9?
I’m thinking about giving the iPhone a try again. I haven’t used one since the 4S. It’s been Nexus/Pixel up to now but I’m getting a bit bored.
I’ve got no incentive to upgrade
aaaand thats why they make them disposable.
I’ve been using a pinetime for a while now. While it’s far from a full smartwatch, it does all I need it to do, which is pretty much just tell the time and show me notifications from my phone. Has been working great so far.
It’s also theoretically repairable, but the production models get glued shut so they’re watertight, so idk how easy that’s gonna be.
Would you recommend a pinetime? Controlling yt music, morning alarms, notifications, and replying to texts (if even possible) would be my main use case.
For those use cases I don’t think I would, no.
You can control music, but it’s very primitive and doesn’t have a home-screen widget for example. The watch itself has alarms you can set, but it won’t ring when one on your phone goes off afaik, and you can’t reply to notifications, only view them.
My pebble’s been running happily for nearly a decade and there’s actually nothing new that’s really a proper replacement
Hope it sees many more years to come!
I was interested in a steel but they’re hard to come across where I am - most likely going to go with a Bangle.js instead for the always-on screen, long battery life and programmability
Smart Watches are pretty much garbage. I was contemplating getting one for years, but always decided against it. When I got my S23 Ultra about 2 years ago, they gave me an offer of a “free” Gear 3, but I had to pay $5/month for the LTE service. I decided it was a good deal and accepted.
It wasn’t. The battery on it doesn’t even last 24 hours so it’s always dead at some point when I would like to use it other than just to tell time, the UI is clunky, and the cell connection is slow as hell. Attempting to download an audiobook via Audible takes like 5-10 minutes.
If you want simplicity and something between a smart and dumb watch, check out PineTime. The battery on mine lasts for about 8-10 days.
It has basic features like notifications, timers, and step counter. You can also customize the UI.
I just wrote a post lamenting there being no suitable replacement for a pebble, this looks like it might have immediately proved me wrong! Did you ever use a pebble and would you liken the pine to one?
Never used a Pebble, sorry.
This is my same complaint. I have been using Garmin watches for fitness, and when they got got a little less utilitarian looking I started wearing it full time to be a watch/track steps and continue tracking fitness activities.
I would like a better notification handling and ability to reply to notifications/message but not at the expense of battery life.
I got a Pixel 2 watch ‘free’ with the purchase of a Pixel 8Pro last year. I tried wearing it for a few weeks, and no surprise, the battery life is just not enough for me (non starter). Second, IMHO that watch overall is too small. My Garmin is the largest they have (Fenix 6X Pro) as it had the best battery life. Going down to the tiny screen/battery Pixel watch 2 was just never going to work for me.
The 3 has two sizes now which is nice, but the battery life is still way to short.
I had a Galaxy Watch 4 previously 40mm model and it’s battery barely lasted a day, especially with AOD enabled. Ironically, Samsung had released previous models like S3 Frontier with 3 day battery life, so their brand new smartwatch was actually a downgrade. Wear OS sucks so much at battery life.
To make things worse, GW 4 took nearly 2 hours to charge fully via it’s slow WPC based charging. To make things worse, it constantly throttled and overheated in hot summers.
Samsung stuck to it’s wireless charging mechanism even on GW 6 and 7. So, while Xiaomi’s smartwatch with ~500mAh battery can charge in 40 minutes while my GW 6 takes ~80 minutes to charge a ~425maH battery.
I’d guess I get about 10 days which would include 5-6 50 minute GPS activities and, wearing it / tracking HR 24/7.
Watch estimates 21 days on full charge (not accounting for activities).
I just don’t have to think about /manage is
Go Garmin. Not only they are actual USEFULL, a lot more open even if they have a custom OS, and battery actually last like one or two weeks…
They are also very durable
I am confused, the gear s3 came out in 2016, so even 2 years ago it was already 6 years old.
That is not what I would consider new smartwatches these days.
I don’t remember the exact model, whatever one came out like 2 years ago.
Huh, well I got myself a galaxy watch 6 for like $200, and so far it seems solid.
It easily lasts a day, could probably go for 2 if I tried.
Yeah my galaxy watch 6 can go 2 days on a charge. I say “can” because it does depend on usage, but it’s not a rare thing to happen.
Smart watches really feel like the palm pilots/pdas of this generation.
Thank God they removed the charger, the environment thanks them
Even more bazinga trash made for planned obsolescence that requires rare earth minerals extracted from blood-soaked and exploited parts of the world. EPIC!
One of the reasons I bought a steam deck is because it’s one of very few consumer electronics that allows the user to buy replacement parts and repair it themselves.
I was so mad at the video of Louis Rossmann being upset about valves repair video because valve’s the only tech company not actively making stuff harder to repair. Even if the video is cringy and overestimates lithium ion batteries, the help it’s given right to repair (what Louis fights for) is large and it’s upsetting to see him bash the deck as a whole. Here’s a comment that summed it up pretty well,
Valve:
-is safe from lawsuits because someone died while
handling a lipo battery with a knife.
I get:
-repair documentation
-replacement parts
-upgrade path
great device that has a potential to finally bring desktop Linux to the masses.here’s the video btw https://youtu.be/2qVUlO8-cl4
I don’t know why you guys are complaining, this watch is awesome. It lets you know when you’re dead via a helpful alert!
Lol
Wasn’t that already the case for the previous 2 models?
Yeah, but I wasn’t aware about this. I assumed they would be slightly hard to repair but not throw in the bin hard to repair.
I was a big wearos fan, after trying out a garmin im never gonna use that crappy malware that has 1 day battery life. When you buy a garmin, of course youre paying for the hardware as well but one of the great things about it is that the software is also good. Thats why it can use s weak ass cpu and still practically do everything wearos does but with 1 month of battery. Also the connection between your phone is so much better. Amazing how pairing android with android is unstable and latency is high while the garmin bluetooth connection is snappy… also you can use garmin independently from a phone which is also really usefull. Overall just get a 600€ garmin and use it 5 times as long as any other smartwatch.
Irrepairable items are a hardpass for me. Ever since my surface pro 3, if it cant be user serviced im not even looking at it.
BMW cars are rapidly approaching this point.
I got a pre owned Fossil Gen 6 Hybrid. No idea why they stopped making these things. It looks good, has most features that you’d actually use from a smartwatch (except calendar, unfortunately), lasts two weeks on a single charge. However, the software support has ended which is especially annoying when they revamped the whole OS ages ago and didn’t add some features back. But the hardware has a lot of potential.
pikachu face
Smartwatches are a really interestingly sad storyarc.
I got into smartwatches early on with Pebble. It was the correct balance of battery life to functionality. Then Big Tech accelerated to, “let’s run a phone OS on a watch” - which came with terrible battery life and sluggishness. Still, the OG Moto 360 was actually “not bad”. The LG Watch Sport added a SIM card slot and a cellular modem. Now we’re cooking with gas! I’d trade off bad battery life to have a parasite phone on my wrist. Also Google acquired and killed Pebble, because of course they did.
At the time of the LG Watch Sport, T-Mobile also released DIGITS, which made it so I could cobble together a parasite SIM card that receives my calls and texts on the watch and build out what “modern smartphones + smartwatches” do without the high bill and vendor lock-in. It also had cellular antennas built into the strap, so you couldn’t replace the strap, but you at least had decent RF.
Apple’s watch came out, and showed promise, but to this day suffers from a few critical bugs that they’ve never completely fixed.
Bugs, namely:
- A dependency on keeping iMessage turned on to send/receive SMS from the watch. The watch can’t do any messaging directly, it has to use Apple’s cloud via data. A watch is a perfect use case for simple text messaging!
- The biggest: there’s a continual glitch where WiFi calling and/or cellular calling will get screwed up. You won’t know it until you’re away from your phone and suddenly have to place a voice call, and can’t. This is a core feature of having cellular on a watch. There is no way to resolve this other than backing up the watch and resetting to factory defaults and then restoring. This will happen every few months, you won’t know when it happens until you need the feature.
Then they all started throwing health features into the smartwatches. Likely to try and vendor-lock you into a platform. I tried some Withings watches for a while, and their hybrid (what I always call “dumb-smartwatch”) was a refreshing take back to the Pebble days with a bit of style. Unfortunately, Withings saw the sweet sweet candy of medical industry money, and their smartwatch line has really stagnated while the app rots on the vine.
I’ve been maintaining periodic cross-links to maintain health sync so I’m not vendor locked in to one set of data, like Samsung->Withings or Garmin->HealthSync->Somewhere else or the most convoluted at one point was like Samsung->Withings, Withings->Fitbit (with a donor old Fitbit used just to get the app up but then not carried) then Fitbit -> whatever health app I was using at the time. So that whole thing is a topic itself, that getting your health data around is a complex chore that nobody should have do deal with. Yet the vendors make that health data so constantly in your face! Time to sit, time to stand, time to breathe, time to drink water, DANCE PUPPET DANCE! On Apple’s platform, their health app does make cross-sync easier-ish, but also in a lot of smartwatch forums, there are many posts of duplicate data or data from the wrong user cross-syncing, so something is funky there too.
Samsung had one good smartwatch as far as I’m concerned and it was the OG 46mm Galaxy Watch with cellular, running Tizen. It had great multiday battery life, cellular capability, enough storage to put a few playlists in it, the physical rotating bezel to select UI items with a click where each click meant one menu (throwback to the old BB 8700g what what!), all the notes of being a device on your wrist that lasts a few units of time and works on its core function. It even had a barometric pressure sensor on-watch so you could see if a storm was coming without Internet.
It seems, especially with Big Tech all having AI hardons now, that they don’t know what to do with the watch lines now. The chipsets really haven’t accelerated like they should. Qualcomm took entirely too long to get their watch chipset power requirements down. The 3GPP spec for 5G IOT is mostly finished but that doesn’t mean chips exist, there will be many years until the chips start showing up in watches. They also also really haven’t nailed down thermal issues. I was once at cell edge on GW 5 Pro, and 10 seconds into placing a voice call, the modem became too hot and the watch went into thermal throttle mode where it sleeps everything until it cools. How could that ever be depended upon?? (That was actually the line for me giving up on caring about a watch with a modem. If you can’t call 911 for more than 5 seconds, what’s the point?)
Then, since carriers have always forced vendor-lock for pairing of smartwatches now, and smartwatches no longer have SIM card slots, you can only use Verizon post-paid or AT&T post-paid to pair a watch, forcing expensive post-paid plans (except the weird outliers like Visible + Apple Watch, or Fi with Samsung watch) and now they’re raising the rates to $15-20/month for a watch that might use 20KB of data a month!
Now Google’s watch can’t even be repaired? These companies want this tech to die.
Instead they could have been looking at/heading towards wrist cuffs like something out of Death Stranding that fully replaces the need to carry a pocket computer. Which they would hate, of course, because then you’re not buying 5 devices, you’re buying one.
Garmin might be the only company doing smartwatches right these days. They focus on their core functionality and iterate. They tried LTE, realized it stunk, and gave up. They have solar charging to boost battery life, low-power tech like memory-in-pixel transreflective displays, and great multi-day battery life. They don’t have all the bells and whistles of other brands, but, they seem to actually want the product line to succeed…and they’re not trying to nickel-and-dime users with monthly fees.
