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Pebble Time Smartwatch Receives Overwhelming Support On Kickstarter
DJAdapt writes: Pebble Time, the successor to the Pebble & Pebble Steel smartwatches, has gone up on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, hitting its $500,000 goal in 17 minutes and hitting the $2M mark in less than an hour. The new wearable is touting a color e-paper display and microphone for responding to notifications. It also has features Pebble users are already familiar with, such as seven days of battery life, water resistance, and an extensive library of watch faces and apps. Will any of you be jumping on this? Holding out for the Apple Watch? Waiting for wearables to get more capable?
I freed myself from wearing a watch about 10 years ago. No longer having the familiar restraint around my wrist has made me feel free. I much prefer a phone in the pocket to a phone on my wrist.
Why we ever moved from pocket watches to wrist watches is a mystery to me.
Waiting for a 2+ year battery life which is what I expect of my watches.
Pebble was already a HUGE success. To continue to exploit kickstarter like that is super douchey. Kickstarter is for getting your project off the ground, not charity.
And quite excited about it. This is essentially the first consumer device with wide appeal that I can think of which will have a color e-paper display. It also comes with better materials than their first watch (which it obviously directly supersedes, unlike the Steel which is classier), especially the Gorilla Glass front, as well as a mic and a new, quite neat UI. The price might be a bit high overall and I'd have wished for a larger screen with less bezel proportionally, but getting the same battery life on a much more dynamic and modern watch is great.
The fact it's well on its way to beat all previous Kickstarters by a long stretch should be a testament to the fact that yes, people want smartwatches, but not necessarily any sort of smartwatch. For me, Wear devices are automatically out because they have poor battery life and their screen shuts down while inactive on top of being not great to read in the sun. A smartwatch should be usable in all situations a normal watch is, at the very least, and the battery should be long enough that you can make a trip for a few days without worrying about a charger. The Pebble guys seem to have understood this, and it's paying off.
I also joined in because I want to support the tech of color eInk.
And I really liked the idea of a UI based on time for a watch, being able to scroll forward or backwards in time...
It will be really interesting to compare this with the Apple Watch, which I also plan to get. It will be very interesting to see which resonates more with the public - a more polished experience, or a much stronger battery life?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Every person contributing gets a watch (there are no "supporter only" level tiers in this one). That's not a charity; that's a pre-order.
I don't see why there's anything wrong with this. Everyone can see enough money is going in that pre-orders will be fulfilled. The company can see that enough pre-orders are in place that they can begin an earlier run of production.
To me using Kickstarter for a pre-order of a product is LESS "douchey" than putting up a pre-order payment form on your website that is collected immediately but that you have no assurance will ever be fulfilled...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I love my Garmin Fenix2. Accurate Heart Rate Sensing, GPS, swim stroke analysis, power meter, plus it keeps time pretty well. 7 Days of Battery Life, 24+ hours of continuous data collection. I'm eagerly looking forward to the Fenix3.
Prior to that, I'm normally a bit fan of purely analog for the watch.
There are no "assurances" from Kickstarter (nor should there ever be; that is why the system works).
The assurance for me as a backer of the Pebble Time comes in the form that (A) they have produced products from a Kickstarter before, combined with (B) each person contributing is paying a realistic sum of money to receive a product, and there are enough people already committed that the production will go forward.
Supporting every Kickstarter is a matter of risk assessment. I'm just saying that the risk of not getting what is being promised is realistically near zero in this case.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can't help but notice how over-exposed most of the live videos of the actual display are (brightly washed out hand/wrist in the background), which makes me wonder how readable the screen really is without using the backlight...
(The first generation pebble has a pretty low contrast ratio too, using a Memory LCD screen -- not true e-ink, although it was advertised as such)
That said, the new model does look interesting.
In other words, the only thing that makes preordering shit on kickstarter "less douchey" than preordering shit on another random website...
Is as mentioned; the fact that you can see the level of financial support for pre-orders, and the other aspect is that if there is not enough support they do not get your money. With a pre-order form on any other website when they have collected my money it's much harder to get it back, even if they fail to deliver.
Why do you continue to deny this simple but significant difference? You seem instead overly obsessed with fluids, which makes little sense as the Pebble Time is water resistant.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Good to see there are people to whom buying cheap trinkets is a matter of personal pride and sense of achievement.
The achievement is not in the trinket; it is in the advancement of technology generally. I don't care for trinkets, I care for things I buy to be useful tools. It may or may not be, but as a side effect I support color eInk which is a technology I hope spreads to other products because I like the qualities it offers.
It is because of heroes of conspicuous consumption like yourselves that the capitalism and the global warming are strong
It is because you do not support eInk and the huge savings in power consumption it offers that global warming is strong. You are by far the greater ecological offender.
you are what you watch.
Amusing! Though as you can see the catchiness of the phrase improves substantially by removing the contraction (and fixing the spelling error...). It would actually make a great advertising phrase for some watch trying to convince someone it was more desirable than other watches.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The joke's on you here as well, I'm wearing a watch that doesn't need electricity.
A) I'm pretty sure it required electricity to manufacture.
B) Whatever you are typing on also requires electricity.
C (most important)) The eco-crime you have committed is not specifically in *a* watch. It is in your failure to support technology which enables a vast worldwide savings of electricity by consumers that were going to have an electric watch one way or another. By backing the further use of iInk I am encouraging tens of millions later on to use the same technology. Your throwback watch help not at all, since the use of it will not convert people to your luddite ways.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are some functional benefits to a wrist watch over a pocket watch such as the ability to tell the time even with your hands full, but really, watches (particularly at the higher end) are more about being a piece of jewelry than funcitonality. Consider the fact that a $10,000 Rolex or Omega automatic is typically substantially less accurate than a $100 Seiko with a quartz yet people still pay the substantial premium. Heck, I've found myself guilty of wearing an automatic watch set to the wrong time because I was in a rush in the morning and wanted to wear the watch for the look.
There's tons of better, more accurate sources to tell time, but people wear watches anyway. When you start viewing watches as just a piece of socially acceptable (typically male) jewelry, they tend to make much more sense.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Unlike the colossal cluster fuck that is Matchstick TV which is nothing more than a half million dollar bait and switch vaporware.
Kickstarter should only ever be used for new projects. Established businesses, artists, engineers, etc should not be allowed to sully the waters for people or projects that could legitimately use it.
Will any of you be jumping on this?
NO
Holding out for the Apple Watch?
NO
Waiting for wearables to get more capable?
NO
I still wear a nice Tag watch, but it is more bling than an essential, I "currently" see no value in a smartwatch over my smartphone which I always have with me anyway and my phone has a much better size screen.
I'm getting ready to go to jail. I say this because someone with a wearable watch is going to use it as a hands free device to talk when I am stuck on some sort of public transport causing me to commit an assault.
Sorry guy. I know e-paper displays are great for battery life, but they just look like shit. To each his own I guess.
'nuff said.
random: "Hey, you got the time?"
SlashdotOgre: "Yeah it's exactly... the wrong time."
That will be a swell date.
And this is why those Pebble things are useless. They look like something you only bought because you couldn't afford a proper watch.
Anybody know the processor it uses? Read it might be Cortex M4 based, and since original uses an STM chip, does that mean M4F core?
ask me the time and you will get one of two responses. Daytime or Nighttime depending on the darkness.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
That is the problem with a lot of these smart watches. The Pebble is awesome in terms of functionality and battery life (well, compared to other smart watches anyway), but it looks like a cheap digital watch from the 70s, and most other smart watches look like crap. There's a couple of ones that look at least halfway decent: the Moto 360 and LG Urbane are round (which I prefer) with a choice of metal bodies and metal or leather straps. I was disappointed by the appearance of the Apple Watch (square, but at least it's their patented rounded square), though the high-end models look like they might be acceptable.
But the real problem is that the expected life of these watches simply isn't that long; technology moves too fast for that. Who would spend a couple of thousand on a premium smart watch in a gold case, if you'll want to replace that watch in a few years' time? It would make sense to commit to a case design for a longer term, and allow owners to swap out the electronics every so often.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The new wearable is touting a color e-paper display and microphone for responding to notifications.
So how long before a controversy (like Samsung's current one concerning its "Smart TVs") is discovered by a security researcher that the company is selling your private conversations to unidentified third parties? First everything started coming with cameras, and the FBI (and other TLAs) granted themselves the power to turn on those cameras for espionage purposes. Now everything is starting to come with microphones for much the same purpose. Wake up people, companies monetizing your every word is not in your best interest.
https://www.ischool.utexas.edu... This reminded me of this inspiring paper.
...I was excited to see this, and backed it immediately. My Pebble has changed my use pattern of my phone quite a number of positive ways. I didn't realize how many email notifications, calls, texts, etc. that I was reaching in to my pocket to check and respond to, but could have ignore for a while (or forever). Also, I have Tetris (err... Pebtris) on my wrist! :)
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
Recently, I saw a picture of a diamond-encrusted Apple watch band / case. I'm sure there will be a market for third parties, catering to people with more money than either common sense or fashion sense to 'improve' their smart watch in one way or the other.
Now that nobody has a 'classical' style computer, case modders have to go somewhere.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Don't laugh. Turns out custom straps actually are quite important, and it's a mistake many Swiss watchmakers forget about. The fact that Apple provides a wide range from the get go signals other manufacturers to step their game up.
A horologist's take on the Apple Watch. It's not perfect, and it's still a digital watch, but the Swiss need to get their heads out of their asses, and take a look at what Apple brought to the table because there is genuine improvements Apple did.
http://www.hodinkee.com/blog/h...
Pebble Steel. You can even download a watchface that says Rolex!
But not a $179 upgrade.
You can't bend reality to meet your perceptions.
It looks like the site has gotten Slash Dotted.... they need to upgrade the server from the TRS80 they seem to use
I was a supporter of the original pebble, and I still love it. I feel no need to replace it with anything else because it already does everything I want. Also, it looks like the new one is slightly bigger, which makes me less interested. However, I support the company, and like their general philosophy -- that the watch should supplement, not replace your phone. I like the 7-day battery life, and the ability to read the thing even in direct sunlight.
I don't see a strong need for color, but as long as it looks good, I'll support it. I don't see the microphone as an important feature, but maybe I'd use it, I don't know. So yeah, I don't plan on buying one, but neither would I argue against them.
I bought a Pebble steel, lasted all of 2 months of light use until it irreversibly bricked itself.
And this isn't a one off: check any Pebble forums and you'll find similar tales of woe.
And as a 'Smart' Watch, frankly it has fewer brains that some Casio watches.
Single tasking: so it can't handle displaying a clock and running an app that might generate alerts!
Utterly brain dead.