What is a Pebble Watch and why would anyone want one? This was the basic theme of the Mobile Devices SIG meeting in August. Jim presented his personal experiences after becoming a $99 backer of the Pebble watch project on Kickstarter, the crowd funding website. To understand the Pebble, you should have some background. The developer’s goal was to raise $100,000 to take his prototype into initial production. In return for pledging $99, I was promised an actual Pebble watch (the term smartwatch had yet to be coined). If they had failed to reach the goal, all the supporters would get their money back. When I made my pledge, they were at about $800,000, so I felt pretty certain I would get a watch – someday. By the time the Kickstarter “campaign” ended, they had raised $15 Million.
This “success” changed the scope of the project by two or three orders of magnitude. Rather than producing a small quantity of first generation watches, they had to make millions, which meant refining the design to enable higher volume production techniques. How do I know this? They sent all the funders a newsletter every week or two keeping us apprised of progress and problems so we wouldn’t get antsy and demand our money back. I settled into wait mode and just didn’t worry about it. Eventually I got my watch!
What I got is a rather clunky black plastic slab with four side buttons, black wrist band and a 1.26-inch, 144 × 168 pixel e-paper display with LED backlighting. I’ve always liked the idea of an e-paper display as it uses very little power and is visible in direct sunlight. Battery life is claimed to be 5-7 days, but I don’t use it enough to prove or disprove that claim. It comes with a magnetically attached USB charging cable. Initially all it would do was tell time synchronized to the time on my cell phone. The buttons allowed you to turn it on and off and to change the watch face among six or seven choices. Once they got the production going, they turned to improving the software. Pebble has its own operating system. The Pebble cell phone app is available on both the Apple App Store and on Google Play. Now in its second or third version, the app pairs your phone with the Pebble. Then you access the Pebble App Store to update the phone’s firmware, install apps and watch faces. The Pebble API allows third-party developers to write Pebble apps which are available from the Pebble Store.
My Pebble still doesn’t do much in the way of life-changing functionality. What I have actually found useful in “real life” is the ability to display the caller ID information for incoming phone calls. With this enabled, I can totally silence the phone (not even vibrate) and then use the watch to screen calls. The Pebble sort of “tingles” on your wrist to notify you to look at the screen. Along with the caller ID, the watch buttons are set to either dismiss or answer the phone call. Pretty neat! Most of the other watch apps seem to be games and similar nonsense, but it’s been a while since I checked the “Pebble Store”.
Is it worth $99? Apparently it is because the current plastic Pebble sells for $150 in eight colors. The newer Pebble Steel is available in matte black or brushed stainless for $249. These prices come from the Pebble website (getpebble.com). I have also seen it at Best Buy, so it is in at least one store. I wore it at the HOPE X Conference, where it was passé.