I don't have any fancy watches in reach, but was just talking about watches in general. I think it makes sense to compare $200 Pebbles to similarly-priced watches (smart and otherwise) in this regard. I can imagine that diamond-encrusted or otherwise dearly-priced watches differ in terms of use case and design tradeoffs.
My Seiko Kinetic that I got for around $100 has the crystal surface about 1mm above the case (it is beveled though, so slightly narrower on top than where it meets the case; I assume a right angle would be both unpleasant to touch and more liable to break the glass; it's too cheap to be a mineral crystal.
I'm very minorly into watches and $200 is very "mid/base" for watches.
My most expensive watch is a Fenix7 (used) @ $300. Then ~$150 for a "Svalbard" single hand automatic (winding) watch, and a smattering of "$50-80, used off eBay" watches.
I had two (used) pebble watches back in the day, pre-ordered the PT2 before they went bankrupt, and have preordered the "new" PT2 (at ~$200 price range).
Freaking Timex Expedition is costing $60-80 on sale nowadays. No smart stuff, just "chunky Casio vibes" and it's $80. Timex "Transcend" is a fun one in the $100 price range.
Apple Watch SE is $250, and all the re-pebbles are $200 price range? Color me impressed!
I hate to say that Pebble Round 2 is "almost an impulse buy" (prior to Time2 shipping), but there are occasions (eg: last night) where my Garmin was out of battery, I went to a friends house, so I pulled out my slightly fancier round-dial analog watch.
The fact that pebble is hitting $200 price points is actually an incredible (and hopefully sustainable!) value for what they offer!
nice, so i'm not the only one with a single hand Svalbard watch :D one day i thought "i wonder if there's a watch with one hand and 24h", pretty soon landed on the Svalbard website and ordered one. i must say that i rarely wear it as it's pretty hard to get an accurate time reading from it, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a watch.
I call it my "weekend watch". Specifically taking off the "notifications" watch, a few quick turns to "take the approximate time" with me and it's perfect! I have the 12hr (not 24hr) which effectively gives you "metric" minute markings (10 min increments instead of 15/5). https://svalbard.watch/pages/Svalbard_Gauge_FK21.html
My next "grail" watch is something pilot-y, with inverted hour/minute markings (ie: 55m on the outer rim of the face/dial, 12h on the inner), eg: search "Laco Men's Pilot Aachen Automatic Watch", but obviously not that expensive. I just can't justify "yet another watch" and since getting the garmin (w/ sleep tracking, heart-rate, and notifications) it's even less justifiable.
Ah I see, your model gives more details in a simple way. The one I bought is veeery barebones[0], I basically have to stop what I'm doing and look at the watch for a couple of seconds to figure out approximately what time it is...
> I just can't justify "yet another watch"
Same, there's a watch I find absolutely beautiful[1] since years, but it costs around 3.5k, could never justify spending that much for a watch.
The other two watches you posted are interesting, fun to meet another person who likes cheap and/but quirky watches. Took longer than I'd like to admit to understand how the SHENGKE works :D
Since getting my RePebble a couple weeks ago I haven't worn another watch.
I change my Garmin watchface to be something different during nights/weekends, as a reminder that I'm off the clock. I hope that Eric offers a way to automate this in PebbleOS!
Indeed, and thanks for flagging the 'disable wrist backlight trigger' in sleep mode as well. I like that Garmin does this. It's nice to use Pebble as a dim light when stumbling around in the dark, but it's easy enough to press a button to turn on.
> Apple Watch SE is $250, and all the re-pebbles are $200 price range? Color me impressed!
I have wondered why Eric didn't price them higher, and I think it comes down to wanting to make sure there is sufficient demand to justify production runs, and staving off competition that could front-run him and use his open source software too.
I am genuinely curious to see what competition emerges, and how long it takes to appear.