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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?
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.