Smartwatches with transreflective display. In search of pebble replacement

[tripleoh]

Because I didn't know about this, until I got to my current one after trying several watches, I thought some people may not be aware or forgot about this old tech. So let me repay the community a little by informing about this.

(Skip to 3. if you just want to know what a transreflective display is. skip to 4 if you want to know what watches use it) 

 

1.  I am a pebble user and most important features of a watch are notifications, more than a day battery and always on display showing time. With these conditions, I started to research and try out different watches in preparation of pebble losing support in the future. Even trying some hybrid watches. The time and battery time part was great but not much on notification side. I left the OLED watches for last as those are expensive and slowly got to an Amazfit Pace. A very cheap in LCD display fitness tracker ($120 on ebay). When pairing it up with my phone, I noticed, that while waiting for connection, it turned off the back light but i could still read what was on it just fine. Ook... Time to do some research to understand this glorious thing.

 

2.  What is a transreflective display? 

Let's start with types of displays we have today. (Very simplified and I'm pulling this from my head. I might be wrong about some details. Let me know)

LED - a bunch of LEDs that light up to show text or image. one LED doesn't have to be a dot/pixel. It can be a different shape like ones in clocks. 

LCD - a right electric current turns crystals in an element (pixel or as above, any shape) to filter out light. It needs additional light to be readable.

OLED - organic LED. Works like LED but an element can be much smaller and thinner. Usually on color displays 3 LEDs make one pixel. 

E-Paper - an electric current moves capsules into a cluster to create a dark spot. Like pigment on squids. This spot is a pixel.

 

3.  So a transreflective display is an LCD panel, that is on top of a layer that reflects external light back through the LCD panel on your eyes. Making it unnecessary to have a backlight at all times.

Here's an image from wiki

An example is a simple calculator or a digital casio watch. If you used mobile phones from long before smartphones came. You might remember most of them show time, operator, signal and battery levels at all time. At night you would press a volume button to make it light up but it was not needed most of the day. See? I did say it was an old technology.

Nowadays, phones just don't use these anymore because color reproduction is way more important than battery life. Without direct backlight, the colors are just going to be weird and washed out. these types have light under the reflective layer or have a "side" light.

 

4.  For some reason, smartwatches follow the same route. Mostly anyway. There are fortunately some exeptions

> A pebble watch is one. They just always marketed it as e-paper. It's not. It's an LCD display. Which is why colors on pebble time were so bad with light on. It had to shine through a reflective layer. 

> Sony Smartwatch 3  

> Weloop Hey 3S

> SMA-TIME

> And Amazfit Pace I'm using now. 

> Garmin Fenix watches

If anyone know any other, let me know. I'll add to the list

 

After 2 full days (from Thursday morning to Saturday morning) it had 46% of battery left. That was with "backlight on" on wake up, steps tracking, notifications on, several heartbeat measurments and my playing around with its software and settings a lot as I was getting used to it. It's also bigger = bigger numbers. I would say I found a perfect replacement for pebble watches. It shows time, it shows notifications and has some extra features I could use to track my fitness. People with very skinny wrists might find it too big though it's also about 2 mm thicker.

Using the pebble to compare display with, the old black and white pebble display still has better contrast, readability is similar to color pebble time but is larger and with higher DPI. 

 

Anyways. I hope this helps those in search of a simple smartwatch. This is not a review. I just wanted to inform people that this exists and maybe start a conversation on why are bigger smartwatch makers so invested on power hungry display technologies and leaving out a better alternative.

 

EDIT: added garmin watches to the list

 

 

Edited December 18, 2017 by tripleoh

[kelvinhall05]

Can you still easily find a Pebble 2 and 2 SE? I'm considering getting one if it's compatible with my iPhone 6.

 

EDIT: And yes, I completely agree with you. I like simple smartwatches. 

[tripleoh]

I still see them on ebay. Prices are pretty low too but a risk is, that we don't know the future of them at all.

[kelvinhall05]

3 minutes ago, tripleoh said:

I still see them on ebay. Prices are pretty low too but a risk is, that we don't know the future of them at all.

I find most new ones hover between 100 and 150 CAD. Also, quote me next time. It's the little arrow under my reply, next to the plus sign.

[GigabitXe]

43 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Can you still easily find a Pebble 2 and 2 SE? I'm considering getting one if it's compatible with my iPhone 6.

 

EDIT: And yes, I completely agree with you. I like simple smartwatches. 

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=pebble+2

 

A simple search on amazon turned out this. However, if you are not in the US I do not know if you could get them here. 

[kelvinhall05]

7 minutes ago, Space2867 said:

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=pebble+2

 

A simple search on amazon turned out this. However, if you are not in the US I do not know if you could get them here. 

Yeah, I'm in Canada. We have a P.O box in Michigan, but I don't know when will be the next time we go check on it since it is a couple hours each way.

[tripleoh]

4 hours ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Yeah, I'm in Canada. We have a P.O box in Michigan, but I don't know when will be the next time we go check on it since it is a couple hours each way.

What about forwaders? I'm from Czechia and used them a few times to order from US Amazon. Of course you have to pay for shipping and a little for the service

[kelvinhall05]

30 minutes ago, tripleoh said:

What about forwaders? I'm from Czechia and used them a few times to order from US Amazon. Of course you have to pay for shipping and a little for the service

Czechia? Don't you mean Czech Republic? My mom's from Slovakia if you do mean Czech Republic haha.

[tripleoh]

15 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Czechia? Don't you mean Czech Republic? My mom's from Slovakia if you do mean Czech Republic haha.

Yup. Totally serious here :-) 

It's a small thing people still don't understand. It hasn't been long so i don't mind explaining. Czech as a noun only means a czech language. Otherwise the word czech itself is an adjective. Czech Republic is an official name like United States of America or United Kingdom of great Britain and Northern Ireland. Amost nobody uses those in aconversation and use shotrtened "states" "Britain" or "the UK" instead. We lacked a proper short name thus came Czechia.