Google won’t repair cracked Pixel Watch screens
Google won’t repair cracked Pixel Watch screens
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Google won’t repair cracked Pixel Watch screens
79 comments
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I miss Pebble. ePaper Display, week long battery life, and I can see all my phones notifications and reply to texts on the watch itself.
Made my old phone with bad battery life usable.
Garmin is the only "smart watch"/fitness tracker that does this and does it well. Wish it wasn't as pricy for the week long battery devices.
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Same, Garmin has made me swear off from owning any modern smartwatches. I mean having to charge every other day is just nuts lmao
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i personally don't find smart watches interesting or really that useful (to me). I tried out a samsung watch for a while and had fun making my own watch faces but that's about it. Charging it every few days was a pain. I ended up going back to my trusty Casio F-91W. Super thin, 8-10 year battery life, alarm and stopwatch built in. Not much more I need from a device on my wrist.
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Which one do you have?
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I have the forerunner 965 and it's so much better than I thought it would be. Unless Garmin make some horrendous decisions I'll stick with their watches in future.
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Has a smartwatch other than the Apple Watch ever done well?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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Just got my Garmin watch and it's been fantastic already. Battery life is the best I've had since my Pebble smartwatch.
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Even the basic ones are almost as expensive as my phone, how do they cost so much?
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I feel like my Garmin could probably survive being run over by a car
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Garmin's are excellent. Mine takes a beating.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Samsung wasn't using wear OS until the watch 4 IIRC, they were using tizen
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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.
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My Pebble Time Steel is still kicking ass! The only repair I had to do was replacing the battery a couple years ago
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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.
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Fitbit has a good niche.
Samsung is shit
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Fitbit is owned by Google and has the same policy of not repairing cracked screens.
I owned a Sense 2 and was in a bicycle crash. Screen hit the pavement and shattered. Absolutely no options from Fitibit/Google to get it repaired.
I switched to Garmin and couldn't be happier.
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I've been using a Galaxy Watch 4 Classic for about 2 years now. Apart from the usual scuffing, no other issues really.
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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.
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PineTime is cheap and FOSS
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I love my Watch 6!
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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.
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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.
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You realize replacing the screen costs that much because google says its supposed to cost that much... i wonder why they would do that...
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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.
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You're not the kind of guy who really spends much time thinking about how things are made are you?
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Pixel watch replacement glass is like $10 on ebay
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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.
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Form over function. It is a wearable, give it a bezel to bump with instead of cuved glass.
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Pixel lineup is garbage and getting worse on price to performance every year
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Well my Pixel 7 is awesome so I certainly wouldn't say it's garbage.
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Their initial model and the 2 were great. I'm seriously considering greener pasters on my next phone though.
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I really hope the pixel watch 2 will be repairable or even be able to do a glue less repair.
Especially since Google already partnered with ifixit for parts for the Google phones
79 comments
Can we stop picking on this startup? They're just hardware hobbyists, give them a break.
Outside of showing ads, Google is an everything hobbyist.
Well they're certainly not a video game streaming hobbyist.
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.
Google does not take anything as seriously as they should.