Thursday 5th December 2024
About a dozen years ago, I got a smartwatch.
Boxes were less flashy back then.
For its time, the Pebble was pretty neat. Meaning that it was pretty simple: it told me what time it was, and its battery lasted for six weeks, and I could do silly things with it.
This is entirely real and you can't prove otherwise.
But, again, that was for its time. Which was a dozen years ago. Before anyone knew what a smartwatch even was, because Apple hadn't stolen invented the technology yet.
I assume I still have that Pebble here somewhere, burned out though it probably is. On the back, it's engraved with Kickstarter Edition since I'd crowdfunded its invention in the first place for around a hundred bucks.
68,928 other people helped.
It lasted for about a year, if memory serves. Then the screen tore itself up, bleeding eInk all over its ePaper—or whatever you call it.
I mentioned that to Allerta, who were the parent company behind the Pebble before they just spun off into Pebble Technology Corporation, and Eric Migicovsky [presumably] shrugged and pushed aside the ten million bucks I'd helped to raise in order to reach over and grab me a new one. The new one wasn't a Kickstarter Edition; but the old one hadn't eBled all over the embossed superspecial thing on the back, so I'm still officially an early adopter.
Of course, arguably, anyone who ever bought any model of Pebble was an early adopter. Eventually, Pebble Technology Corporation got bought out by FitBit, which itself got eventually bought out by google.com. So keep that in mind for a minute....
Also eventually, my new, unkickstarty Pebble started to burn out too. Because nothing lasts forever. So now I'm in the market for a new smartwatch, which I don't want to be a FitBit, and which I really don't want to be an Apple Watch now that those stupid things are starting to exist in the world.
The short version of the story is that I went through a few smartwatches. Amazfit made a couple decent ones; though I noticed that, with every new and improved watch I got, the batterylife cut roughly in half.
Roughly.
Which brings me to not really wanting whatever Samsung WearOS thing was eventually invented too.
But, then, a couple years ago, google.com announced the Pixel Watch. Three hundred bucks or so, and better than any smartwatch on the market to date. So I went ahead and preordered one of those, getting it whenever exactly it came out.
Or two. Hunter wanted one too.
So, here's where it's funny that the Allerta Pebble moved to Pebble Technology Corporation, which moved to FitBit, which moved to google.com: to some degree, the Pixel Watch is utilising elements of the Pebble Kickstarter Edition I got a dozen years ago. Just...not really the battery part.
My fault for turning it on.
But it's got its uses otherwise. Like being a WearOS Watch after all, and therefore letting me run apps on it directly.
Now I don't hafta open the OneWheel App on my phone to change modes, like some sorta caveman.
Though I do hafta stop and get off the OneWheel to get a clear phonecam image of the speedometer reading zero but telling me how fast I'd got riding around in the basement when it was hard to phonecam my watch.
All of which is pretty much in the past, at this point. A year ago, the PixelWatch2 came out, and I handily ignored that because it looked pretty redundant.
But then, this year, they announced the PixelWatch3; and, optionally, I could get one sized for a grownup, with stronger a battery. So I ignored that too.
But then there was Black Friday, and the 45mm PixelWatch3 I'd nearly loosely considered getting dropped from $400 to $330 or so.
So I got one after all.
Of those.
Also a 41mm PixelWatch3 for Hunter, because even that reportedly has better a battery than the two PixelWatches we've had for two years. Possibly the two combined.
So this showed up today:
The box is flashier now.
Which of course led to setting the thing up, and hitting Continue, and hitting Skip, and going back to set up things I'd skipped and hitting Continue again. And all that.
The PixelWatch3 is on the right, and a bit larger than the PixelWatch on the left.
Of course, nothing can ever just be easy. So, in setting up the PixelWatch3, and telling it I'm okay with just cloning all the settings over from the PixelWatch, I ran into this:
This isn't what I gave you some amount of money to hear.
So that's a bit tragic: the cool thirdparty watchface I bought to replace the disinteresting watchfaces endemic to the PixelWatch can't for whatever stupid reason run on the bigger, better, newer PixelWatch3. Though my suspicion is that the people making the thirdparty watchface just got lazy and never updated the coding to work with a newer model. Something similar happened to Hunter a couple months ago, when the thirdparty watchface she'd bought for her watch just stopped working one day even on her watch from 2022.
There oughtta be a law, or something....
The good news is that, this time, in the PixelWatch3, the native watchfaces are better and more numerous. So I was able to build up something I can live with, just within the watch itself.
My pulserate was ninety-six because you already know what I'd just gone through to make anything the hell happen.
So, that's about where I am now. Or, in fact, I'm about an hour and seventeen minutes later, with a pulserate down at eighty-nine. I'm kinda organically overclocked. Just don't ask.
And my battery has dropped from the seventy-eight percent it'd dropped to after I'd talked it into building me a watchface to seventy-six; and a large part of that is that I'm typing this out instead of bothering to tell the Ring to stop buzzing my watch with an Emergency Broadcast System of panic every time the wind blows a leaf across the Motion Detection Field of any of four running Ring Doorbell Panic Machines.
So, as reviews go, I haven't got much to say just yet. My thing showed up and I got it more or less working; and it's still working; and that's about what I can really expect.
I didn't get the thing for free or anything—just somewhat on sale. The watchface I built up [above] is a basic analogue clock with a sweeping secondhand that disappears after a few seconds to stop murdering the battery for no reason; then it's a static analogue clock updating once a minute, telling me that sunset happens at 16.35 today, and that the UV Index is currently One, and that my battery is at seventysomething percent, and that it's forty-eight degrees outside, and that it's Thursday and December the Fifth, and that I'm overclocked, and that my alarm goes off at 23.00 to remind me that I've got an hour until midnight when I have things to do, and that the moon is waxing, and that there's nothing on my calendar today and it seems unimportant to tell me about the thing on my calendar on Monday because that's next week.
Otherwise, having had the thing for two percent of its battery, and judging by anything less annoying than my Ring Doorbell panicking about leaves blowing around, I don't hate it. The incompatability of the watchface I was used to notwithstanding, I like that it's bigger than the standard PixelWatch, and probably that it does more FitBit things, and whatever else. It's an upside overall. To date.
It's reportedly waterproofed to some decent number of metres. But I never trust that. In the last two years, I've submerged my preordered PixelWatch in water a total of zero times—mostly because, if I'm underwater, it's because I'm in the bathtub and the water is a hundred and forty degrees [see other anomalies about me at Overclocked]; I don't know what the operational temperature of a smartwatch is, but it's probably more fragile than I am.
I'll probably know more after I've slept on it. Literally. Since one of the functions of the whole WearOS/FitBit environment is to complain that I don't sleep very much.
Shaddup.
But my assumption for now is that I'll be okay with it in general.
Have a webcomic:
