You joke, but Google does not take hardware as seriously as they should. I say this as an owner of a Pixel 7. I actually really like the hardware, but the simplicity and clean look of the software is why I actually love the phone. I have to baby the phone because I know Google doesn't actually care even if they swear up and down they do.
Garmin does pretty well. Although you could argue they're more fitness and sports oriented, they do have "normal" smartwatches too like the Venu and Lily series, and also hybrid watches like the Vivomove. All Garmins have excellent battery life and there have been very few complaints about them. If anything, the most common complaint is that they've got too many watches to choose from, which can be confusing for someone new to the Garmin lineup.
Garmin also has titanium watches with sapphire glass on their high end. I'm ridiculously clumsy with watches, so I got one thinking I'd stand a chance of not breaking it. Now the new problem is, the watch is way harder than anything else I accidentally smack it into, and can break stuff around it instead.
I have a Venu 2 and I love it. Battery lasts forever and I can pretty much do all the things I'd want to. The best part is that the performance is always top-tier. The OS is very lightweight and that makes it nice and snappy.
My girlfriend and I both got Garmin watches and we absolutely love them. I got the Forerunner 265 and she got the venue 2sq. I like that they support both android and Apple, and don't have subscriptions!
I have the Venu and the only thing I'm waiting for Garmin is YouTube Music support. I know most fully featured smart watches have 1 or 2 days but I get like multiple days even when I go for runs so often.
I've had a Samsung watch for a few years and I'm definitely not careful with it but it has easily put up to all of my abuse and the battery still lasts a couple days or more. Nothing I can really complain about.
Similar experience with my Galaxy Watch 4 classic, had it since launch, don't treat it carefully and I haven't managed to damage it, and it's been pretty much faultess for me.
I had a gear s3 frontier that I got about a year after it released. I didn't baby that thing at all, and I took it swimming pretty often. It lasted until about 3 months ago.
A little water got in and stuck it in a boot loop. I went out and ordered a replacement battery, and viola, it still works minus the back button, which is probably a reassembly fuck up and fixable. I had already bought a watch5 pro, so I don't really care about fixing it further.
The galaxy watches are pretty good, and as usual, Samsung carried Wear OS on its back while Google was planning on killing it, up to a point that Google then decided to have their own smart watches.
Pebble watches were awesome! 1 week battery eink screens with app support. Too bad fitbit bought them and went nowhere. It shut down 5 years ago, but the hardware is still supported by third party alternatives. In fact I'm using it right now.
I was a Kickstarter backer for the Time. It really set the bar for me in smartwatches. I sold my Pebble Steel to a fledgeling developer after owning it for a year or so and I think I gave my Time away to a family member. Big regret.
My 5 something years old Fenix 5s still works great with like, a week and a half battery still lol. So yes, it's just that brands like Garmin don't advertise as much as Apple's.
I've got a ticwatch, it's excellent. Only thing it's not capable of that the flagships are, is loading a sim to function without a phone, but this isn't a feature I want or need. I've definitely bashed it around quite a bit too, and aside from a few scratches (none on the screen), it's perfectly fine.
I mean, why would you pay to replace the screen? The cost of a screen repair on a smart watch is about $300 for most comparable devices.
Guess how much the watch costs? About $300. It sucks, but it's literally not worth the parts and labor hours required to repair it. Buy a protection plan if you're worried about it, but otherwise, you just need to eat that cost. That's the risk you take with devices like this.
No they don't. Google doesn't say it costs anything to repair, because they don't offer repairs. That's the whole point of this discussion in the first place, the fact that Google doesn't repair Pixel Watches.
I'm making a comparison to services offered from Apple and iFixIt, however - both of which will charge about $300 for a smart watch repair.
The screen is definitely adhered to the glass. You’d need to use gold razor wire to get it off, then assuming you don’t break the screen you’d need to clean it and install the new glass with adhesive. Definitely not a repair most people should attempt and you need more than just the glass.