I'm presently using the huawei watch fit 3 on gadgetbridge nightly, which I am enjoying but it definitely has its quirks.
They're also adding the Garmin watches, which are well known for their activity tracking.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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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.
Big fan of the PineTime for minimalism and extraordinary battery life, but the Bangle looks compelling. Maybe once the PineTime dies.
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I'm using an Amazfit bip watch. Is full supported from gadgetbridge.
Have an amazifit too, just found out about this, spent the last hour configuring everything. Looks very promising.
Also, amazifit tools is complaining a bit about not finding zepp anymore but seems that everything still works, including Tasker integration
This. And battery life is amazing.
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.
The Bangle.js 2 is pretty cool
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.
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.
So frustrating that their logo is a nice looking round watch, but their product is an ugly rectangular one.
The original one was round.
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.
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
That covers all my smart watch use cases tho.
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Old Pebble if you can find a working one that someone will part with.
Heh, Iโve got one banging around in a drawer somewhere - I should play with that a bit and see how modern devices interact with it
How about something more recent? :)
if it existed I would be using it. Garmin is the next closest not total crap "smart" watch.
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