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Ars Technica Goes Close Up With the Pebble Smartwatch

Posted by timothy on from the watch-out-for-these-things dept.

Ars Technica takes a close look at the crowd-funded Pebble smartwatch. The reviewer had to put up with repeated delays in production as a Kickstarter backer, but seems happy with the watch and optimistic about the future of third-party apps; an SDK is due later this month. "It currently ships with three default watch faces, as well as 12 others that you can load onto the watch with the companion app (free on iOS and Android). By far my favorite custom watch face is 'Fuzzy Time,' which rounds the current time to the nearest 5-minute interval and translates that number to what you might say if your friend asked you the time. While seemingly trivial, I love this rough approximation of time. Rarely do I need to know that it's 5:13:23pm, but seeing that it's 'quarter after five' is awesome."

7 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. fuzzy time eh? by rubycodez · · Score: 4, Insightful

    those of us who have "analog" clocks and watches are amused; also we'd probably have that smart watch just display analog clock face

    1. Re:fuzzy time eh? by rubycodez · · Score: 1, Insightful

      those of us who grew up with mechanical clocks do. also, nothing artificial about using a quartz regulated electronic time source to kick mechanical hands around; even my quartz clocks go tick tick tick....

    2. Re:fuzzy time eh? by Cow+Jones · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You know what?
      Fuck fuzzy time.

      This is one of my pet annoyances in most "web 2.0" products. All those forums giving the time of a message as "a year ago" are driving me mad. Some of them at least have the actual date and time in the title attribute, but that doesn't help much on a mobile device. Let the software be exact, and leave the fuzziness to me, please.

      CJ

      --

      Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
    3. Re:fuzzy time eh? by flimflammer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      All of my rage when I see a timestamp on something that says "5 months ago" or "1 year ago". All. Of. My. Rage.

    4. Re:fuzzy time eh? by rtb61 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Watch, I've stopped wearing one for most of the time and I am finding quite surprising how uncomfortable they truly are. I can't imagine what require me to put one back on all of the time, world war three and the disabling of the internet and all telecommunications? Once you carry a smart phone why carry a watch?

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  2. Do you rememeber when... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ..watches ran on a battery lasting several years without recharging. That was awesome.

  3. Re:seeing that it's 'quarter after five' is awesom by retchdog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    anyone is clever enough to do that approximating in his head. some people find different versions of presentation to be aesthetically pleasing.

    --
    "They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky