u/TadUGhostal

I get that this is the way it used to work back in the day but in 2026, I don't really have a use for a multi-day list of all my notifications on my watch. I can't imagine a scenario where I would be hunting item by item through a bunch of tiny already read notifications looking for something in particular. I definitely don't need my dismissed and active notifications all mixed into one list either. Whatever is unreviewed on my phone generally needs to be something I prioritize.

What would make me very happy is the ability to add filters to the notifications on my watch to just show me the unread ones. Alternatively, it could also organize them by read and unread, so I can at least clearly see what I've yet to review. It would be even better if there was little icon on whatever watch face I use that would remind me that I still have a notification I need to review.

These would just be additional options in the menu though, so if you like the way things are, then nothing would change.

Thoughts?

I find modern smart watches… too much. All I really want to do is deal with notifications, check the weather and set reminders, timers and alarms. Basic health tracking is a nice to have, but I (fortunately) don’t have a need for a watch that will take an ECG or anything. I’ve used a lot of different smart watches over the years from LG, Samsung, Apple, Amazfit and Garmin. But, my first ever smartwatch as a Pebble Time. When I saw they were coming back I was kind of skeptical at first but the pitch won me over with features like local only voice dictation, up to a month long battery life and an open source OS. So I took a gamble on ordering a Time 2. Here are my thoughts after two weeks that might be helpful to someone considering a purchase as I have a few thoughts I haven’t seen in a review anywhere else.

Build Quality

Build quality on the Time 2 is good. Compared to something like the Garmin Vivoactive 5 or 6 or and it feels quite premium. Buttons are clicky and satisfying to press. It’s nice and light too.

My main complaint is the raised glass above the bezel. I think there’s some degree of gaslighting going on about how ”normal” of a design choice this is. Like yes, the Apple Watch has raised glass, but it’s also got rounded corners what won’t snag on a hard surface. It’s also not using 10 year old Gorilla Glass either. I can’t think of another manufacturer that that actually has long exposes edges like this. That said, you can work around this issue by putting a bumper around it, which is what I did. Customer support seems to be handling this well too, but it would be better for this just to have ever been an issue in the first place

The included band is… fine. I like it more than the stock Garmin Vivoactive one. I don’t see it lasting for years and years and I dislike the tuck under design, but it‘s functional. I ended up getting a nicer nylon strap for it, though I did need slim pins to get it to attach correctly.

Display

I think there’s very much a your mileage may vary aspect to how this works out. I‘ve been using Quartz and I find I can tell the time without the backlight in the vast majority of lighting conditions. With the backlight on to default settings, I can easily make out the time in even complete darkness. No issues telling the time with polarized sunglasses on either. However, I can tell from the surrounding decretive elements of the watch face that lower contrast watch won’t fare as well. There’s so many options in the store that have a high contrast level for the key elements of the watch face, I don’t find this to be a major issue.

My big complaint with the display is that it can destroy colors on the screen in certain conditions. I color code my notifications, but certain colors like purple just turn grey once the backlight turns on. It’s a minor issue, and it would be nice to be able to have the backlight match the notification color in the settings to work around it. I do also have an annoyance sometimes where the display will just be a blank white when I look down. Happens once or twice a day, resolves itself in a few seconds and can be “dismissed” by hitting the back button.

Setup

This was pretty straight forward initially. I paired the watch got the apps I wanted and was good to go… for a little while. I didn’t initially want to tie the app to any other account I own, so I didn’t sign in with the app. However, I later wanted to submit a bug report. This ended up triggering a bug where a few hours after I signed into an account on my watch, the whole thing reset. However, this only happened the once and was told by support everything would be fine in the future.

Watch App

The default apps are all underwhelming by modern standards. Things I’m used to doing that aren’t available by default are:

1. Pausing the next instance of an alarm
2. Naming alarms and timers
3. Quickly setting a timer (I find the buttons awkward for this purpose)
4. Setting reminders
5. Seeing an hour by hour weather for case

Thankfully, all this can be fixed by a quick trip to the store. The community has already come up with apps that blow the default ones out of the water. Honestly, some of the apps in the store work better than the stock ones that the tech giants have come up with. On paper I have everything I could ever want, but the watch still has some issues that need to get ironed out before it can really shine. In the two issues that hold the watch back for me are:

1. Out of the box my touchscreen worked fine, but after one of the updates, it seemed to lose calibration around the middle of the screen. My inputs now register much higher than they should. This makes the quick wind up timer I really like useless. Also means I can’t name timers or alarm with Another Alarm or Another Timer. Support says it’s likely a software issue with no ETA on a fix date. However, if the software fix doesn’t resolve my issue they’ll send me a replacement watch. I’m a little unclear though that if the software fix doesn’t work, if a replacement will fix the core issue, but I don’t really have another option.
2. Having a Tasks.org app is AMAZING. It was already my go to so being able to add and complete reminders from my wrist is awesome. However, the offline dictation that I would use to create a new reminder is unreliable for me. If I hold the microphone kissing distance from my mouth it seems to pick up my voice okay, but whether the transcription goes through or not seems to be a crapshoot. Sometimes it errors, sometimes it hangs, sometimes it hallucinates words. The cloud based transcription is rock solid for me though. Still a limited word count, but for the purposes of a quick reminder it’s fine. My main complaint with the cloud service is that from a privacy standpoint I have no idea what gets shared. The app or the website doesn’t make it super clear what gets sent to Wispr and what logs (if any) get kept. Again, support is working on the offline dictation thing and I asked in the Pebble forums about the Wispr privacy stuff but haven’t seen a response yet.

Notifications

Buttons rule. Being able to take quick actions on notifications using the side buttons is so much easier than trying to use a tiny touchscreen. It’s pretty much how I remember it working on my original Pebble Time and I don’t think anyone has done it better since. I don’t miss having a super tiny keyboard to reply to messages, because it was always faster to just take out my phone. There’s quite a few ways to customize how notifications come in as well. One complaint is that there could be greater icon variety or some ability to have them display a simplified version of that the app is on the phone. The other complaint is that the watch is only aware of notifications, not necessarily the entire conversation like you would see on a WearOS or Apple Watch. That said, I don’t really expect that level of integration with Google Messages or iMessage and it’s not really a huge deal.

Battery Life

In my first week I got almost exactly 2 weeks out of it. That’s with heart rate tracking every 10 minutes and about an hour of tracked activity each day. I also wore it to bed every night. My watch face was not tracking seconds and shake to enable backlight was on. If I was tinkering with it less and turned from the frequency of the heart rate tracking, I think I could push beyond two weeks. 30 days seems like a stretch, but practically speaking, I’ll never have to worry about the watch dying on me mid day like my old Apple Watch did constantly after the battery degraded for a year.

Phone App

Phone app works pretty well. Doesn’t seem to drain too much battery relative to the 4 different apps a samsung watch needs to keep it working. Healthy data is pretty basic, but functional. There’s a lot of options to customize how things work if that’s what you’re into. Sleep and activity tracking work okay for me, though sometimes the sleep tracking doesn’t notice if I wake up at night, but it’s close enough. Weekly view for sleep tracking doesn’t work correctly for me and it always underreports the sleep on the last day in the window. It does seem to know when I go for a walk and track that activity, though I don’t seem to be able to actually see the continuous heart rate data in the app. Health data stays local on the device which I like.

Support

As they make clear on the website and as should be obvious by this point in my review, you’re buying a watch that will hopefully someday be better than it is. The encouraging part is, when you submit a bug report in the app, someone from the team will respond with a meaningful reply. From my interactions with them, they do seem legitimately interested in fixing issues if you report them. If you check their Github page, you can see that they’re pushing out one or two updates to Pebble OS each week. So, they’re a small team, but they’re clearly dedicated. It does irk me a little that given that they’re a small team, they are trying to juggle the 3 new watches (if we’re counting the duo) with the Index. I’d be happier if the watch was in a better state before they went off to make a smart ring.

Conclusion

I’m critical of the watch because I love it. I admire the core (pun not intended) ideas of the watch, but right now, the team haven’t quite nailed the execution of it. I’m really hoping with time, they will and the Time 2 will be a success, because there isn’t anything else quite like it on the market. For what it is, it’s fairly expensive (There’s a Pixel Watch sale today that’s less than half the cost of what I paid for my Time 2 after shipping and duties), but this is a product aimed at a very specific market. The team is upfront about this on the website too, the product has rough edges. If those are ever smoothed over though, this is pretty much my ideal smartwatch.

Update: I've realized my issue with voice dictation is apparently a bug other people have reported. If the phone is locked local voice processing doesn't appear to work on Pixel devices. Doesn't really change my opinion just an FYI for Pixel owners.

Randomly a couple times a week I'll look down at my watch and the screen will be blank. It will last for a few seconds or until I press a button. I don't know if the watch face crashed for a few seconds or if a background app decided to fire up or something.

I submitted a bug report and they asked me to catch it on video. Problem is that since it's random and only for a few seconds that's easier said than done. Anyone run into something similar and have any insight on how to reproduce it?

So I was kind of having a bad week, and when I heard about the whole Proton doing a paid sponsorship with someone who has close ties to holocaust denial, I impulsively switched my email from Proton to Tuta. I'd already heard it was great, so I didn't do much research, however there are some catches I didn't know about until I switched. I'm hoping this might also help someone who is a little more patient than I am.

Catch 1: You have to have a legendary subscription to import your emails from another service

This one left a bad taste in my mouth. It isn't clear in their support article, but if you want to import your emails from another service you need to buy the Legendary account. So if you signed up for a yearly Revolutionary account you need to switch over to the Legendary for a month and then back to Revolutionary to import your emails. This ends up costing you a bit of extra money, and it really shouldn't.

Catch 2: There are some common app features that don't exist in Tuta

I snooze emails all the friggin time. This has been a very common feature in the various email clients I've used and I'm reliant on it. Also, I'm very used to being able to customize my swipe gestures in my inbox. Neither of these things exist in Tuta which make the app feel like it's from over a decade ago.

Catch 3: Notifications on Android might have some tradeoffs

So huge props to the team at Tuta for not relying on Google Play Services for notifications. However, even though I set up my device to have unrestricted battery usage I did notice that sometimes notifications could be delayed for 20-30 minutes. If you're worried about getting time sensitive notifications, make sure to test with a free account before pulling the trigger. Notifications on my iPad worked well enough, though I did have one come in without any sender or subject line which was weird. It just said something like "you have a new email".

Catch 4: There's no notification customization based on inbox rules

I get a lot of emails that while they're important enough to read, I don't need to be immediately notified of them. Proton has a slightly janky solution to this, but they do have a solution. Tuta doesn't seem to offer this at all.

So this is all complaints so far, but overall the app on iPad, Android and Linux is... fine. They seem like a decent company and don't seem to have a CEO that needlessly tarnishes the brand, so by all means give them a try, just maybe have a bit more impulse control than I did. They do seem to offer a refund within 14 days though, so I guess I haven't lost much but some time. If a combination of any of the above are a deal breaker for you, now you know!

I’ve been a GrapheneOS user now for about a month after coming from about a decade on iPhone. I know people seem to ask about this quite a bit so I thought I’d share how it went. Much of this is very specific to me and may not reflect your specific needs or tastes. I’m also not drawing clear lines between things the GrapheneOS team can control, and what is outside their control. This is meant to be a practical review of the whole experience. I’m hoping this can help set expectations for other people with similar goals and make the decision and/or transition a little easier. Hardware wise I’ve moved from an iPhone 13 Pro to a Pixel 9.

First, what am I trying to do? Depending on what you want, GrapheneOS is either great out of the box, or will require some tinkering. Personally, what I’m looking to do is reduce my dependence on large American tech companies while still also still function in the same social and professional settings I‘m in every day. I’m not looking for my phone to be a hobby project, After I set it up, I don’t want to fuss with it. I’m willing to take some hit to functionality, but there’s some things I still need to rely on one way or another. I’m mostly outside the Apple ecosystem when it comes to things like email and photo backup.

TLDR; it’s doable but there’s some homework involved.

So to get started:

The Install

The web install is pretty straightforward. Worked the first time. Instructions were easy enough to follow.

The Basics of Getting Apps

So now that the OS is installed things really open up. Sandboxed Google Play Store works really well. I had no issue signing up with a fake name though I’ve read some people need to provide a phone number. I have one banking app that will not work, even with compatibility mode on, but for the most part apps just work as normal.

For the most part is going a bit of lifting there though. If like me, you are looking to reduce the amount you rely on American tech giants you might do things like remove/limit some of the permissions on the apps you get from Google. For example, the Google Photos app has some cool editing features, so why not download it and remove network access? That works great until you try to use it and then realize those need to be downloaded from within in the app. Some stuff like turn by turn navigation also doesn’t work out of the box and you need another app to make that function. The Samsung Health App wouldn’t function if the physical activity permission was enabled, but worked fine without it. It all worked out in the end, but there was a bit of tinkering.

Apps that seem to be tied to certain OS ‘hooks’ have functionality impacts. Those handy Pixel Calling features don’t seem to function at all. Google Find trackers also just don’t work. RCS messaging however worked first try. Also tested it across 3 different carriers with no issue (don’t ask).

Now, if my goal is to get away from American tech companies why use Google Play Store at all? This is where things get murky and you might need to do a bit of homework. You have a lot of options to get apps but some of those options have a fair bit of controversy behind them. I’m not going to say what the right or wrong decision to make here, but I would suggest at least trying to make an informed one, before you commit to a particular ’alternate’ way to get apps.

Garmin and Samsung smartwatches also seem to work just fine with GrapheneOS, though in the Samsung case, certain play Services Permissions need to be enabled.

Finding New Solutions

Say what you will about iOS but it does make backing up your data fairly easy. On GrapheneOS that’s all up to the user. How you choose to manage backups all comes with its own sets of costs and/or complexities. It definitely a topic to think through before committing in any particular direction, especially if you’re backing up something like your 2FA codes.

Want to add an ad blocking extension to the default web browser, well you can’t (to be fair, there are good reasons for this)! The appropriate choice of alternate browser is definitely a loaded topic though!

Do you sometimes need phone calls from people outside your contact list? It’s time to learn what STIR/SHAKEN is and set up a Spam Blocker app.

uTag is an amazing solution to getting something like AirTags working on GrapheneOS but there’s definitely some jank to it. Took about 20 tries to get one of my Tags paired. No shade to the developer though, it’s amazing it works at all!

I find these sorts of things interesting to learn about, so the whole thing wasn’t entirely unpleasant, but there is work to be put in. Even stuff like using the internet while on a call didn’t work initially and some settings had to be changed.

What stayed the same

After a few weeks of using GrapheneOS I have things down to a level where for over 90% of the things I do on my phone, I have zero meaningful loss in functionality. While there was a few weeks of frustration, after about a month I never really have to think too much about my phone.

In terms of things like battery life, performance and camera quality, I find them very similar to my iPhone (it had its battery replaced in the last year).

Parts that can’t be replicated

There’s a few things that I definitely still miss.

1. Being able to make quick voice to text messages, alarms and reminders. I did this from time to time on my iPhone and Apple Watch. I haven’t found a great solution for this yet, but I have a few workarounds so far.
2. Easily syncing up iCloud items with friends and family. Obviously, I don’t expect GrapheneOS to solve this, but it does add some friction to my life (which was probably something Apple intends).
3. On device voicemail and call screening. I used this a lot on my iPhone and haven’t found a workable alternative.
4. Smoothed over edges. I still have a bunch of minor, almost cosmetic blemishes I can’t iron out The Smart Things app tied to uTag crashes once every few days, though, the app still seems to run okay. The Play Store has always told me there are 2 app installs pending, but doesn’t seem to display what those are. Again, I don’t think this has anything to do with the operating system.

Conclusion

If you’re willing to put in a bit of work in the transition, switching from iOS to GOS, is totally doable. There’s probably some degree of learning involved if especially if you want to avoid Google Services, but there are plenty of resources out there if you look.

At this point I don’t miss my iPhone very much. I use my phone for hours a day and I’m not feeling like I have some hacky second rate experience. I definitely value the additional freedom over how I choose to interact with certain major tech companies more so than some of the things I’ve given up.

Frankly, it seems wild GrapheneOS doesn’t cost anything. I’d give it a recommend even if it was as expensive as a retail Windows 11 key (though if you use it and have the means, please donate!).