Yup, and this is my age range.
I guess I should have specified, knowing the average age on HN is... just a little higher to say the least.
But to a progressively lower extent it applies to older generations as well.
For me, the appeal of the smartwatch is more advanced health tracking, custom applications, NFC, and GPS. As far as I know, Pebble lacks most if not all of these features. I really want to want a Pebble, but it's far closer to a customizable watchface than even a Fitbit. On the other hand, daily charging of smart watches is completely outrageous.
I canceled my pebble preorder when I found out it can only record audio for a couple minutes at a time. A big use case for me is to record voice notes without going into the distraction center that is my phone, but often they can be 20+ minutes
PebbleTime 2 has a pedometer, HR monitor, and sleep tracking. You can set it to do continuous HR measurements during activities. This covers all the basics.
GPS is covered by the phone that you're going to be carrying anyway.
OP specifically called out GPS in relation to a watch as a desired feature. You can’t just summarily dismiss that with a hand wave of “you have a phone don’t you?”
> GPS is covered by the phone that you're going to be carrying anyway.
I leave my phone at home when I go for a run. Connect my headphones to ma watch (which as my podcasts and audiobooks on there), remove the house key from my keychain and carry nothing with me besides key, watch and headphone. Feels so much better than having a phone with me
You can, but it's pretty awful. put it in a pocket and it flops around. Wear a band that slides in your phone in and get it soaked (i'm a sweat monster).
I own a pebble, but I'll gladly just run without a phone.
There are button-sized Bluetooth GPS loggers. They can record a GPS track, and you can later download the data from them. Since it's freaking GPS, it automatically has timestamps, so it's easy to correlate with other activity.
As a bonus, I think it should be possible to connect them directly with the phone.
BRB, I think I have a ESP-based Tiny Arudino somewhere...
Heh, I used to use bluetooth GPS tracker with my nokia 770. It worked well since I could place the gps where it got the best signal. I could start a track, have it record it, and then check in with the n770 only when I needed to see a map. That way I made the most of my n770's battery life, but still got continuous tracking.
Beware that they take much longer to start since they don't know the GPS coords of the nearest cell tower, nor do they download the GPS almanac over the cell connection. They will however remember the almanac so you can leave it on for 30 minutes and not have to redownload it the next day.
I have a small Meshtastic device, not quite button-sized but still tiny. The chip on it supports aGPS, so I can upload the almanac and prime it with the approximate location. I'm very familiar with this process, I wrote a small utility for my cell phone back in ~2010 after I screwed up its factory image by installing Cyanogen.
Nice, I have a few mestastic widgets, but do want something small enough for a dog collar. That way my wife and I can carry a radio and keep one in the car so we have a good chance getting in range.
Sad that most of ham radio, which has similar APRS for tracking, doesn't do async or multi-hop.
Looks nice for some uses, but pretty big for a dog collar, almost 3" on a side. I've some long/thin dev boards that I could pair with an 18650 that should be closer to 1".
I'm planning to use a small LiPo battery with a JST connector. The whole footprint should be slightly larger than 3x4x1 cm. Still a bit too large for a pocket device, but perfect for a collar.
Sounds great, best I found so far is the RAK19007 (30x60mm), then add a GPS (RAK12500). It will be kind of long (60mm + case) but not too wide (30mm + 3d printed case).
Or the Mesh Node T114 Development Board V2 (23mm wide).
That isn’t advanced health tracking. Advanced health tracking is when my Apple Watch watched my activity versus heart rate over time and warned me it saw signs of hypertension, which caused me to buy a wrist BP and do a health log for BPmin Apple Health, then produce a report and go to a doctor who prescribed medication for me. Does the PebbleTime do that?
Pebble Time has the HR sensor, and it has activity monitoring. You can upload the data into Google Health or Apple's health tracker. So it should work? It's the same data, after all.
They have some heart-rate and some health tracking an as others have mentioned, so many of the more fringe features are way less useful than a watch that lasts anywhere from a week to a month on a charge versus a daybor two with the ultra
Well, right, that's why I said "advanced" health tracking. A pedometer is enough to measure steps.
And then, I dunno. We've clearly made this trade-off before with mobile phones. As much as I like the Nokia I had that went weeks without a charge, I also rarely notice the charging time of my phone.
Lately I've been thinking about a mode in which a "smartwatch" serves as a fitness tracker, heads-up display, and wallet, while a real, mechanical watch, which never runs out of battery, becomes the timepiece (and fashion piece?)
7:30 is consistent with my experience in Oregon. Work does not count in lieu of volunteer time if you're writing an essay about your involvement with the community. I don't think schools NEED both ACT or SAT but you only have so many shots and may have an affinity for one or the other, so people like to take both.
Okay it sounds definitely regional/State specific. Some states are more flexible such as counting work hours towards volunteer hours and allowing ACT/SAT/alternatives.
