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."

Comments

Douglas Adams was correctâ¦

[grahamlee]

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."

Re: Douglas Adams was correctâ¦

[grahamlee]

...but do not, apparently, see text encoding in the same light.

Re:Douglas Adams was correct

[Penumbra]

Too wordy. How 'bout just "harmless".

Re:Dumbwatches

[jamesh]

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.

Re:Douglas Adams was correct

[wftaylor]

Too wordy. How 'bout just "harmless".

Too brief. How 'bout now "mostly harmless".

I don't

[Viol8]

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.

Re:I don't

[DJProtoss]

Battery life is (for me) ~10days
Mostly, yeah most apps are silly on that screen*. However for what it is designed to do (which is basically act as a second display for notifications from your phone) it is fine.
$150 for a device that means I don't miss calls / txts when out because I didn't hear it go off / was listening to music at the time? Easily worth it. If you don't need that functionality? Then no; but then again that is true of any device.
Oh, and actually yeah, the hipsters do rather like the pebble, from the ones I've met. Heck, they (and a few geeks) are the only ones who know what it is when they see it.
*The one app I have installed is the google authenticator which is ideal for the form factor. I've not found / thought of another one.

Re:I don't

[dfghjk]

"$150 for a device that means I don't miss calls / txts when out because I didn't hear it go off / was listening to music at the time?"

Except that it doesn't do this unless you use it in a way that enables those notifications...which you could simply do with the phone itself. The phone has a means of notifying silently already. You could also ignore the notifications from the watch thereby justifying the need for the next gadget that costs another $150.

Re:I don't

[pdclarry]

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.

"The days of the digital [watch] are numbered"
                      - Tom Stoppard, the original script of The Real Thing
                          (he dropped the line in later revisions)

Re:Dumbwatches

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up and take my money!

Re:Dumbwatches

[badzilla]

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

Ok

[The Cat]

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.

going backwards

[slashmydots]

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?

Re:Dumbwatches

[FatAlb3rt]

There's a slight chance you might be overthinking this.

Is there an app

[Anonymous Coward]

that answers you in the voice of KITT?