Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 3

For a long time I’ve thought that if I wanted to get a smart watch, it would be a Pebble, because they actually understand that a smart watch needs to work as a watch. So when they announced their Kickstarter for the revamped Pebble 2 and Pebble Time lines this summer, I decided it was time to try out wearable computing. My Pebble 2 arrived in late October, just in time for LA Comic Con, and I’ve been figuring out how best to use it over the past month and a half. I feel like I haven’t really found the watch’s full potential yet.

Getting to Know the Smartwatch

Pebble 2 does work great as a wristwatch. You only need to charge it once every 5-6 days, and the screen is always on, so you can see the time and date at a glance. I’ve already gotten back into the habit of glancing at my wrist for the time instead of reaching into my pocket and pulling out a bulky phone.

Third-party watch faces range from the aesthetic (mimic classic designs) to the informative (cram every bit of time, weather, and health tracking data you can onto the main view) to the whimsical (show time using a binary counter, or Pac-Man, or the dots on a pair of dominoes). My six-year-old loves picking new designs and seeing them show up on my watch, but I keep coming back to the basic one because it works for the key thing a watch needs to do: let me tell the time quickly.

Notifications and calendar events are a key use case for a smart watch, but you have to manage them. I always pare down my phone’s audio notifications in order to avoid getting distracted, and that goes double for something that buzzes on my wrist. Once I got it down to just texts, calls and calendar appointments, it helped me avoid missing texts…for a while. Eventually I started missing them anyway. I’m not sure whether they’re not reaching the watch or my brain has started tuning it out.

When I do catch them, though, it is nice to see a preview of the message so that I know whether I should pull my phone out right away or it can wait a few minutes.

Fitness tracking is most useful if you have an actual workout routine (which I don’t) or you wear the watch constantly. It checks your heart rate every 10 minutes, counts steps, and tracks sleep and deep sleep. The watch shows your current status, and the phone app tracks daily, weekly and monthly stats. It’s interesting, but I can’t wear the watch 24/7 because the wristband ends up irritating my skin. A nicer watchband might help, but it might not, since I need to wear it tightly to keep the heart rate sensor in place.

I haven’t explored the Pebble app ecosystem as much as I could (but who knows how long it’ll be around). A few things I’ve looked at:

• Music control is nice: you can pause and skip your phone’s music player using actual physical buttons.
• I don’t want to play games by tilting my wrist.
• Transit apps would be helpful if I rode the bus or train more often.
• There’s a to-do list app that syncs with Google Tasks, which seemed great at first…but it’s a lot easier to pull up the tasks on my phone and look at a dozen items at a time than to scroll through three items on a tiny screen.

And that brings me what I think is key for smartwatches:

What a Smartwatch Needs to Do

To really be useful, a smart watch needs to be better than a phone at certain tasks. Cases where it definitely works:

• Always-on at-a-glance info. Time/weather/step counts/etc. most of the time, with notifications and events as they occur.
• Health/activity sensors.
• Quick actions. Dismiss a reminder, or reply to a text message with a pre-canned “OK.” Menus are a pain, but I can imagine voice commands would help a lot.

If it takes longer to do something on the watch than to dig out your phone, unlock it, and do it there, the watch has failed at that task. If the watch makes it more convenient, then it’s succeeded.

October 2018

The company went under. Fitbit bought what was left and agreed to keep the cloud services up for a year or so, and they updated the firmware and phone app to reduce the watch’s dependency on those services when they finally shut them down.

I kept putting it on every morning for maybe eight months, using it for step and heart rate tracking, alerts, music control, and of course time. After a while, though, I got out of the habit of putting the watch on in the morning. I misplaced the Pebble, found it again, wore it for a few days, and forgot it again. Repeat.

Only a narrow range of the watch’s capabilities really appealed to me, and it turns out they weren’t enough to keep me using it.

Repurposed

Every once in a while, the kid would ask about the Pebble. I finally found it again and charged it, and decided to pair it with an old phone and give it to him instead of wearing it myself. He’s been wearing it 24/7 for a week now.

It’s basically a watch and fitness tracker only right now. Fitbit shut down the Pebble services over the summer, and I haven’t been able to get it working with Rebble (the volunteer group that’s put together a replacement server), so the marketplace with apps and watch faces aren’t available. And I only put limited apps on that phone, so there’s not much in the way of alerts. But he likes the step/heartrate tracking, and having a buzzing alarm that he can set.

Though he’s somehow learned to sleep through the tactile version of “Reveille” already! 🤦‍♂️

Update: I did eventually get it connected to Rebble. The first thing he wanted to do afterward: A round of random watch faces, for old time’s sake.

July 2019 (LOL)

I feel like it’s taunting me over not charging properly.

September 2020

The pebble still functions! I had to sideload the app, but Rebble has good directions and is still around with alternative services.

April 2023

Everything’s touchscreens now. Obviously a touch screen is the way to go for versatility, but key things you might want to do in a hurry without pausing to look closely and make sure your finger hits the right spot — like turning off your watch alarm when it goes off while you’re driving or biking — should really be tactile!

March 2025

Google has released the source code for PebbleOS, and the original founder of Pebble has put together a new company to make Pebble-like watches…in part because no one else has, and he wants a new watch that works like the ones his company made a decade ago.

They’ve announced two models, for pre-order only. The Core Duo 2 is an updated version of this model (with even longer battery life, among other improvements like sturdier buttons, a barometer, compass and speaker). And when I say it’s an update of this model, the form factor is identical. One of the original suppliers still had some unused frames left over.

The other model, the Core Time 2, is more of an update to the Pebble Time 2, with a slightly bigger, color screen. It’s got the same updates as the Duo, including the 30-day battery life. Plus simple touch-screen functionality, but it’s keeping the physical buttons. (whew!)

We’ve lost the original Pebble 2 again.

I want one of these, probably the higher-end model.

So does the kid, now a teenager.

They’re only producing a limited run, aiming for the Duo shipping in July and the Time shipping in December. (Assuming the US still has any sort of shipping infrastructure by then.)

Here goes…

An interesting experiment in finding different ways to use the web, on the idea that people don’t want to use it more, they want to use the web less to accomplish what they want. Arc has a sidebar-based design that encourages organization. It can open a “mini” temporary window that you close when you’re done, or that will close itself after a few hours. Room for a handful of pinned tabs, multiple workspaces, all to keep what’s visible easy to deal with instead of a zillion open tabs or a long list of a zillion bookmarks.

Useful AI?

When browsers like Opera and Brave were jumping on the bandwagon and just tossing AI chatbots into the browser for the sake of buzz, Arc was adding small AI features to do useful tasks, like generating link previews with summaries, shortening long titles so you can see something meaningful on the tab, or organizing your downloads. Unfortunately these “Max” features still require calling out to a remote service to do it.

Customization

It’s built on Chromium, and can run most Chrome extensions, but has no concept of bookmarks. If you import bookmarks from another browser, you get them as pinned tabs.

You can create a “boost” for a website which modifies its appearance. Arc gives you a color scheme map, some font options, and the ability to hide (or “zap”) elements, or you can write custom CSS or JavaScript for a particular site. Early in the beta, back when boosts were entirely JavaScript, I used one to create a pair of buttons to fill in for the Wayback Machine bookmarklets. If I stick with Arc for a while, I may do something similar to add an item to Postmarks.

Where

I used Arc regularly on macOS for several months and multiple releases, but lost interest by the time they finally released a version for Windows 10. (For a while there I was seriously wondering if they’d end up postponing until after the October 2025 end of support and just stick with Windows 11. Also: There’s no Linux version, and it doesn’t run on Wine.) I came back to it to refresh my memory and see what’s new since then, and also to compare it to Zen, which is building a similar browser on top of Firefox instead of Chromium.

There is a mobile app, Arc Search, which is different enough from both the desktop version and other Android browsers that I think I need to use it more to get a good handle on what it’s like.

Late last year, Arc went into maintenance mode. It’s still getting bug fixes, but all new feature work is going into the next browser the company plans to release, Dia, sometime in 2025.

Weirdly enough, Arc still requires you to sign into an account just to use it, instead of waiting until you’re actually going to use their online services. Early in the closed beta, when you needed to sign up just to download it, that made sense, but now? Why bother?

Online web app for managing your bookmarks using your own Nextcloud server. You can save pages to it using a bookmarklet on a desktop web browser, and you can install it to your home screen on a phone. There are also mobile apps that can connect to it.

Usually I use it indirectly through Floccus Bookmark Sync, which can use this as the online storage to sync across multiple desktop web browsers.

The main web view of the app is a bit slow and unwieldy, especially on lower-spec hardware (like VMs and the PineTab2), but that’s not so much the fault of the Bookmarks app as it is the design of the general Nextcloud UI. One of these days I’ll get around to writing a script that exports it to HTML for use with Dillo, or syncs it to Falkon bookmarks. (Falkon can handle it just fine on faster hardware, but I mostly use it on slower systems.)

I also had to block it from allowing network access so it wouldn’t check every bookmark for broken links - including some that really shouldn’t be spidered!

There are several Android apps that can sync with Nextcloud Bookmarks. I settled on the mobile version of Floccus since, well, I was already using it.

A full-featured, if awkward Gemini Protocol client for Android and iOS. I keep looking for settings and features in the meatball menu instead of under the tab button, which is where you actually find things like bookmarks, subscribed pages, etc.

Early on when I was first experimenting with Gemini, I preferred Ariane (now Buran) because I didn’t have to keep second-guessing myself while using it. These days, Lagrange is a better choice IMO, being more intuitive than Deedum and more capable than Buran.

The iPad version can run on recent versions of macOS with M-series hardware. It’s fast and light, but it’s still designed for a touch screen, so you have to use mouse gestures or a trackpad to imitate swiping instead of dragging a scrollbar or using the wheel.

Deedum hasn’t been updated since 2022, but it’s still available through F-Droid and on Apple’s App Store.

Ariane was a simple, fast, intuitive Gemini Protocol client for Android with a clean interface that quickly became my favorite mobile client. It was discontinued, forked first by the original author as a paid app called Seren (also discontinued) and later as a free app called Buran.

Buran hasn’t been updated since 2022, but it’s still available through F-Droid and still works great! Bookmarks and client certificates are both supported. It feels faster than Lagrange, though I’m not sure it actually is, and it doesn’t support subscriptions.