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by gbil 12 hours ago
The title is misleading at least, to compete with garmin you need the similar offering, with swimming/waterproofing being the huge outliar here but also the ecosystem and like it or not features like the notifications.

Very valiant first effort for sure but after 6 years with a Garmin Fenix still holding 90% of its battery (and being able to replace it), I'm not their potential customer.

5 comments

We removed "Garmin" from the title and used some representative language from the site.
I would say the big outlier is the battery life (for Garmin). Theres other options for waterproof stuff and a lot dont need something good enough for swimming. Of course its a huge plus.
All of that stuff is the norm in the industry. There isn't anything remarkable about it.
> but after 6 years with a Garmin Fenix still holding 90% of its battery (and being able to replace it), I'm not their potential customer.

What kind of battery life did you have when you bought it, and how long is it now?

Does Garmin still upgrade the firmware?

Talking about a 6s pro and got at the beginning around 10 days without much GPS enabled exercise, after 6 years I get about 9 days!

Good thing with the Fenix line is that you stop the updates which I did a year in so I don't really care about them, but I do think they stopped firmware updates for the 6series about a year ago.

Garmin doesn't really upgrade the firmware after the next model release.

But you'd be a fool to believe a hardware startup would do so anyway.

I have a 7S and it still gets updates regularly.
Can you analyze the data your watch and body generates locally using FOSS without uploading it all to surveillance capitalists? That'd be the true alternative.
> without uploading it all to surveillance capitalists

I by now often see the term "surveillance capitalists"/"surveillance capitalism" on HN.

While it is a great thing to fight surveillance organizations, don't forget that communist countries had/have (for the latter: People's Republic of China) much worse surveillance in place.