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Developers Rolling Out Pebble Smartwatch Apps
itwbennett writes "When it first launched, the Pebble smartwatch was a nifty, if pricey, way to get notifications from your phone without having to go to the effort of pulling your phone out of your pocket. As previously posted on Slashdot, the real promise of the watch wouldn't be realized until developers got their hands on the SDK. Now, a few months after launch the apps are starting to roll in and Pebble wearer Kevin Purdy has rounded up some of the best apps and projects — and also where to find them."
Earth "is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."
As opposed to seeing it on your phone, where the UI helpfully displays the first line of text, in any message, for anyone to see?
... whatever
Too wordy. How 'bout just "harmless".
Me too
Well if she accidentaly and without targetting you just so happens to have a full copy of all your communications and can reasonably believe you're hiding something from her, she's practically duty-bound to check, right?
Citizen Eco-Drive watches are great. They charge themselves with sunlight, office light, etc.
I love mine. It helps that mine has an aviator slide rule built in.
Are there watchmakers out there with good accuracy/price ratios?
Borrow a pen and write 5pm on your wrist. Now you have a timepiece that is accurate once per day, and costs you nothing. Assuming your desired time granularity is a millisecond, this watch is accurate for 0.000001% of the day. That's actually better than most watches, and when you divide by price the ratio becomes very attractive.
... are there any really good 'normal' watches out there these days? I'm looking for a thing I can wear on my wrist and (almost) never have to recharge or change batteries ....
I've been looking at various automatic watches...
I have an oldish Citizen ProMaster. It is an automatic diver's watch (being water-proof is another feature I wanted in addition to the telling time and no changing of batteries - and it displays date/day of week too. The mechanism is also still mechanical, no charging of some internal storage device to power some electronics - so should still run after that EMP event :-) ). Admittedly, it is a bit more pricey than the cheap chinese digitals (about $300 when I bought it).
Over the years, I have never been able to get it to stay accurate. Mostly it started to run fast when cooler weather sets in for whatever reason. Bringing it in to a watchmaker involves a couple of weeks' wait while it is sent to the local agent for a "service", which is quite expensive and involves amongst others a pressure test after reclosing it. Considering that for a simple diver's watch, the battery can be swopped and the waterproof-isity tested onsite by most jeweler's shops for a fraction of the time and cost, it does seem not worth it.
I have recently found a non-agent watchmaker, and will see if his service and repairs are any better than the agent's. If not, I guess it's a write-off and back to some cheap digital, which admittedly sometimes runs for a number of years on one battery.
Another concern with diver's watches are the rubber straps, which I had a number of crumble suddenly, presumably after exposure to sunscreen - which is not what you want in the sea - or even standing on a hard surface.
Too wordy. How 'bout just "harmless".
Too brief. How 'bout now "mostly harmless".
Recharge a watch every day? No thanks.
Try to use apps on that tiny little screen? No thanks.
Have to connect it to a smartphone to do anything useful? Wtf??
I'm sorry, how much does it cost?? $150??
If you want a gimmick watch Casio will do you a nice one for about $30 but I have to warn you that the days of digital watches being cool ended in about 1980 so you won't be getting any Hipsters putting down their skinny lattes in shock and envy by buying a Pebble either.
Shut up and take my money!
Nah, he should stick to an analog watch. Draw a circle on your wrist, with the big hand upwards and the little hand at 5 o'clock. It may not have the precision of your watch, but at least it's +/-5 minutes for 1.4% of the time.
For that steampunk feel, draw a fob watch on your nipple.
I have been waiting to buy a pebble since Christmas. http://getpebble.com/ has been a static page for the whole year so far. Yes I have signed up for updates but not a peep out of them.
When are they coming!!
Since this seems to be as good a place and time as any to ask, are there any really good 'normal' watches out there these days? I'm looking for a thing I can wear on my wrist and (almost) never have to recharge or change batteries for, that will do exactly two things: tell me the time accurately, and not be awkward to wear.
With most Casios you'll only have to change the battery a few times in your lifetime. Hardly a drag.
If you want to splash out you can get them with built-in solar panels and radio sync for atomic-clock accuracy.
No sig today...
Borrow a pen and write 5pm on your wrist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tjHlFPTwVk
No sig today...
Leave out the "pm", and you double the accuracy while saving ink!
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
The Casio F-91W goes beyond mere timekeeping and is virtually guaranteed to enhance your lifestyle in ways you never expected.
http://gizmodo.com/5795554/people-wearing-this-casio-watch-might-be-terrorists
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
My watch is 1. Analog for easy reading, 2. Solar powered so it will never run out of power, 3. radio synchronised so it is always more accurate than I need. It has day/date, but rather hard to read. The only extra feature I would add is an alarm, plus make the day/date more reasonable. It cost me GBP40 from a magazine special offer.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Fossil makes good watches. Price point is ~$150 but there's a variety of styles. http://www.fossil.com/
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Leave out the "pm", and you double the accuracy while saving ink!
Hell, leave out the 5 instead and "pm" will be accurate half the day!
Thank you, Miracle Max!
#DeleteChrome
There are decent, reasonably priced (for certain values of reasonable) automatic watches out there, particularly by Hamilton and Tissot. They're not terribly expensive ($300-1000 range), and generally not too ostentatious. The down-side of the automatics, though, is that they're not as accurate or reliable as a quartz-based watch. You also trade off battery replacements for cleaning/servicing every few years, which runs $75+ per service last I knew.
The Citizen Eco line of watches is very nice. They're quartz-based, so they're accurate, and they have solar charging that's not really obvious on the face, so you don't have to worry about batteries as much, and have more features than a "cheap" automatic (i.e. the one I've got has a date and enough smarts to know whether the current month has 28, 29, 30, or 31 days). They're also less expensive than decent automatics, some of which are available in the sub-$100 range.
Leave out the pm, and it becomes accurate TWICE per day. Boom, double the performance, and a 66% reduction in ink.
Are there watchmakers out there with good accuracy/price ratios?
Borrow a pen and write 5pm on your wrist. Now you have a timepiece that is accurate once per day, and costs you nothing. Assuming your desired time granularity is a millisecond, this watch is accurate for 0.000001% of the day. That's actually better than most watches, and when you divide by price the ratio becomes very attractive.
People keep on talking about a stopped watch being correct once (or twice, if you go analog) a day, but that's no good if you don't know *when* it is accurate.
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
was a nifty, if pricey, way to get notifications from your phone without having to go to the effort of pulling your phone out of your pocket.
Everything wrong with America and humanity in 27 words.
I have one of these as well. Been using it for over 10 years, still going strong.
I know I don't know what I don't know.
Is it just me or are all the tech companies today having a contest to see who can make the worst hardware user interface controls? It went from desktops to laptops with bad touchpads and bad keyboards with no number pads to touchscreen tablets that are virtually impossible to type on to touchscreen cell phones that are even worse because they're tiny to a watch that's basically impossible to control with anything. Game designers are already complaining that touch and tilt aren't fast enough to control games or other apps in Android. Now they expect them to come up with something for a watch?
Since Google killed it I am keeping my eyes open for the my next smart watch for when this one dies. If it can even do half of what my motoactv can do it end up being my next smartwatch. http://www.motorola.com/us/consumers/8GB-or-16GB-MOTOACTV/79070,en_US,pd.html
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
There's a slight chance you might be overthinking this.
that answers you in the voice of KITT?
I'm also getting closer to ten days per charge mainly running the low power Big Time watchface and not receiving too many notifications.
First win: I've programmed my own watchface with a non-standard time coordinate that matters to me.
Second win: I used to take a medication daily that had to be taken at a precise time in the mid-afternoon for optimum effect. Even after more than a year of practice, I still missed one audible watch alarm every ten days to two weeks. I don't wear my phone on my belt (it gets set down across the room when at home), so that wouldn't have been reliable either. Never miss Pebble's wrist buzzer if I'm wearing the watch. Even when I'm in the shower, if the the watch is placed on a hard surface, if makes enough noise to hear over the splashing water. I could wear it in the shower, but I don't wish to expose it to my nasty medicated shampoo.
Fortunately I've been immune all my life to any concern over whether someone out there might think something is cool, so far seeking out my own functionality. I like mine 20" square (in pairs) or small and unobtrusive. I find the 4" lifestyle most awkward of all: large enough to constantly notice you have it, too small to be completely effective. Likewise, I find Twitter completely ridiculous. Either the message should read "Beers 5 o'clock?" or it should be written with full sentences and paragraph units.
I watched a video on illicit cognitive enhancing drugs last night. I can see the appeal for the younger generation. They need to recover the 10% of their brain power they lose by the over-use of these ridiculous tweener form factors which specialize in mental fragments longer than a smoke signal and shorter than a completed thought.
Third win: This morning I received a phone call while I was still in bed. My watch rasped on my bed-side table so I opened one eye, determined it was a call I wanted that could wait for another hour, then rolled over and went right back to sleep. My phone was in the far corner of the house. I'm really surprised it works at all at that distance. (I've also missed a few from this distance. This might depend on charge status of one device or the other.)
Given that I don't actually sleep with my phone (low sex drive, I guess) my Pebble easily earns its keep.
I've got one of those; easily the most convenient watch I've ever owned; battery recharges from sunlight, apparently. I say "apparently" because it's never been down to zero charge. The cost/time/efort in changing batteries once a decade is worth the extra expense of having a non-battery watch.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
s/worth the extra expense/worth more than the extra expense/
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
But but now it has a stopwatch!!!!