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Still the best cloud service for me for my Windows. But I'm interested to hear how you set up Drive and Syncthing. Is the UI as familiar to use as the the standard Windows folder?


The battery is the single reason why I got the Amazfit. I use as a dumb health tracker and occasional GPS running. It easily lasts 4 weeks on a single charge. That's one less proprietary charging cable to bring on a trip.


I've been dying to ask about this somewhere where I might get a really informed response:

What's the deal with Amazfit? I have an Amazfit GTR and it's been rock solid for a couple of years. Before that, I had an Amazfit Bip for a few years which was incredible. It did notification, GPS, heart rate tracking, always on display and battery life of 2 - 4 weeks. It did this years and years ago, when the best Android could do was 24 - 48 hours, and it did it for like £60 instead of £200. It still works too!

The Bip in particular seemed so ahead of what the average person expected from a smartwatch due to state of Android and Apple offerings at the time.


Before that, I had an Amazfit Bip for a few years which was incredible. It did notification, GPS, heart rate tracking, always on display and battery life of 2 - 4 weeks. It did this years and years ago, when the best Android could do was 24 - 48 hours, and it did it for like £60 instead of £200. It still works too!

I don't know about Amazfit, but I have a Garmin that also lasts weeks. There are some differences: WearOS/WatchOS watches essentially use a more power-efficient/less powerful version of a smartphone-class SoC. They have to because they run a full Linux/XNU kernel and a pretty complete userland. Watches with weeks-long battery life typically use something that is more akin to a powerful microcontroller with operating systems tailored to such low-end hardware.

Besides that some watches (like several Garmin models) use transflective displays. They do not have to actively emit light during daytime (in contrast to OLED), sunlight is reflected. In contrast, OLED displays have to be more bright in sunlight to be visible.


> Watches with weeks-long battery life typically use something that is more akin to a powerful microcontroller with operating systems tailored to such low-end hardware.

This is what I'd assumed. But then I also assumed that's actually an exceptionally expensive and high resource approach to take compared to using higher level smartphone chips. By using lower level hardware, they're having to do more bespoke hardware design, and more bespoke low-level firmware and software creation, and also support all of that extra creation. This seems like the super expensive, heavy, slow way of building a smartwatch.

So I guess the "what's the deal" what's trying to understand how some random knockoff looking company ("Amazfit" in 2016) took the super expensive, heavy, slow way of building a smartwatch, and got better results than some of the largest most notorious software/hardware companies on the planet.

Ultimately, they took the pebble approach, and pebble also got a huge amount of backing and extra funding, time, support etc. and seemed to commercially fail. But Amazfit is still going strong.


Your question is “what is the deal with Amazfit?”

There is an implied question there, but you may want to get a bit more specific. The deal seems to be that you get a really good fitness watch for a fraction of the cost of Android and Apple offerings, if your statement and my first review of their website is accurate.


> The deal seems to be that you get a really good fitness watch for a fraction of the cost of Android and Apple offerings

Fair point, I elaborated a bit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854032

You're right in your assessment. My "what's the deal" was more asking "how did such a small unknown-to-me company do this with similar or better results to the worlds largest hardware/software companies (Apple/Google) in 2015/2016?" It sounds like they did it with even more specific and low level hardware and software, which makes it even more impressive.

Like I said, my bip did GPS, bluetooth notifications, hardrate tracking and most of the other things an iWatch did, but it had 20x the battery life and cost 1/5 of the price. I find this an unbelievable achievement that I don't understand, and it's rarely talked about.


The BIP used e-ink, it's a shame they stopped using that IMO.


As someone who' just counting steps, I'm genuinely curious what's your average steps per day? And how many steps over 10 years?


And here I thought after reading the headline: finally a reliable Arabic OCR. I've never in my life found a good that does the job decently especially for a scanned document. Or is there something out there I don't know about?


I wouldn't say it's a downgrade, but I had to run Windhawk and other mods just to make sure the start menu doesn't look like a phone's app drawer.


Interestingly while the minorities have a higher birth rate compared to the majority Chinese, the ethnic breakdown remains the exact same throughout the decades. This is because Singapore's unsaid migration policy is such that the government takes in more immigrants of Chinese ethnicity to make up for the shortfall.


Keeping it at a fixed ratio indefinitely has a plausible legitimate reason, preventing the inevitable backroom political battles and bribery schemes by various groups seeking to tilt the immigration ratio in their favour.


This is obvious yet brilliant. I've been working for so long without realising that meetings are a process, not the end. I.e. they have to lead to something.


I would appreciate an archive link though



I'm sad Bookdepository is closing.


Notice they don’t make independent or sell it to management, they kill it.


How many buyers are there for a company in a declining niche that did a $6m loss? Is it worth anyone's time?


If it had a significant customer base, lots. There are lots of 'turn around' experts out there.

Most of the tech companies people on this site work for are making a loss, but they still find buyers.


Where are you getting the $6m loss from? I can't see anything about it online.


You seem to be describing an Android tablet with e-ink display. Aside from Remarkable, what else is out there worth buying?


Supernote, Onyx have a wide range of options.

Onyx relationship with Open Source licensing is… delicate. This could be a stopper for some.

I had a Remarkable 1 but I feel the company is trying to be the next Apple. Everything now is subscription. Shame, as The reading experience was good, writing was excellent, software was open but clunky.


I can't wait until e-paper tablets become mainstream and more companies start making them. Having a generic OS like Android or Linux, instead of the closed off system of a kindle or whatever, would be amazing. Imagine how many different kinds of apps you can run on something like that.

With colour e-paper screens slowly picking up speed it's going to be even more interesting. Right now their quality is going to be disappointing if you expect the same quality as your phone or laptop, but it's an enormous step up from greyscale screens - and it's still getting better.


I used the Remarkable 1 for many years, until recently I got bored of hum converting hum my kindle library to epub to read on the remarkable.

I switched to an Onyx Boox Tab X (effectively an android tablet with eink screen) and wouldn't go back.

I have the Kindle reader app and can read very comfortably all my books, with the same comfort as with a Kindle device.

But I can also take meeting notes, brainstorm, etc thanks to the writing capabilities similar to the Remarkable.

As a bonus, I can also use it as a whiteboard in video calls.


> $879.99

Jeepers - not sure I am going to swap my $50 kindle for that one.


Calibre let's you convert in bulk fwiw


Indeed, but I was really over with the process of maintaining a Windows partition with a 10 years old version of the Kindle App, with updates disabled, for the sole purpose of manually downloading Kindle books for conversion to epub for transfer to the Remarkable.


Kobo Sage or Libra 2 are also worth a look.


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