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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.
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.
People exploit it for pre-sales too.
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
>Waiting for a 2+ year battery life which is what I expect of my watches.
I assume you are joking? A "dumb" watch battery life can't be compared to a smart watch. And if you are seriously waiting for a year year battery life, you will be waiting decades (or longer). Of course, if all you want is time/date and maybe an alarm or stopwatch, then you should be fine with a traditional watch.
Meanwhile, I have been VERY happy with my Moto 360 and its 2-day battery life. As long as I can reliably get 24 hours, which is extremely easy on the 360, I (and most people) are set.
The e-ink (and now color e-ink) in the Pebble is what makes it neat and interesting, not the [claimed 1 week] battery life. But I will still choose the 360 over it every time (speed, style, functionality, compatibility, etc).
I assume you are joking? A "dumb" watch battery life can't be compared to a smart watch.
Why not?
The smart watches just need to be far more frugal and, dare I say it, smart? Passive NFC powered devices already exist, for example.
A pacemaker can run 5-10 years on a battery. A wristwatch that mechanically moves hands and dials runs for years on a single battery.
Saying it can't be done is copping out. It's like saying we could never have an electric car that could go for 300 miles on a charge.
We can, and we should.
A) I'm pretty sure it required electricity to manufacture
Good to know you think Pebble is made by fairies and involves no electricity and no electronic components, which manufacturing is one of the most polluting industries ever. You're what, 14 and in a school with emphasis on the arts?
B) Whatever you are typing on also requires electricity.
Yes, environmental-friendly nuclear, nothing to do with the coal power you're using.
It is in your failure to support technology which enables a vast worldwide savings of electricity
[citation_needed] with numbers on the full ecological impact of Pebble watches on the environment, or GTFO. You can GTFO right away, because nothing Pebble does is "supporting technology".
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.
Remember I said C was the most important.
I'm talking future numbers which are inherently unquantifiable until the future becomes present.
In other words, you can't justify your crap in any reasonable way, but you think it is important? You must be the master logician in your mom's basement.
Natural gas actually
Same thing, global warming. Exactly opposite to what I have.
you missed point C
You never made a point that could be missed. See above.
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've got a very nice Tissot watch. It has touch screen, compass (yes it actually turns to point north), barometer, altimeter, stop watch, alarm, thermometer, and both physical hands and a little lcd display, it's also water resistant to 30m and is has a titanium body. (Yes it also does time and date).
If I want to make calls, check the weather forecast, or interface with other devices, I have a phone in my pocket. (which also does a lot of these functions, and is needed to make the pebble useful anyway).
Why buy a pebble when I have a rock in my pants.
I already did with point C - you are at this point mis-directing
No, you didn't, you said "the future will prove me right". That's a misdirection, if there ever was one. ;)
But not coal, which was your presumption.
Nope, my presumption was contribution to global warming and pollution, to which your Pebble contributes, and my 1910 Omega doesn't. Check your reading comprehension, you seemed so proud of it, and yet you need to work on it badly. ;)
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.
'nuff said.
>>Waiting for a 2+ year battery life which is what I expect of my watches. I> assume you are joking? A "dumb" watch battery life can't be compared to a smart watch. It appearently can, this one claims 8 months: http://www.withings.com/us/wit...
A dumb watch has a hardware logic circuit to drive a segmented display. A smart watch has a general purpose CPU that has to render the time using a supplied font to the pixels of the display. This might be just a blit from a pre-rendered buffer, so long as the fonts align to the pixel grid. But even with a "paper" screen, the CPU is *always* going to be an order of magnitude more power hungry than a hardware implementation.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
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...
Passive NFC powered devices already exist, for example.
Radio transmissions obey the inverse square law, so the amount of energy you receive rapidly decreases as distance increases. That's why RFID devices only work at extremely short range, typically less than 2cm. If you wanted to keep your phone in your pocket it would either need to send out extremely powerful transmissions or the watch would need an extremely large antenna to receive enough energy to do anything useful.
Can't change the laws of physics, captain.
A pacemaker can run 5-10 years on a battery. A wristwatch that mechanically moves hands and dials runs for years on a single battery.
You make a very common mistake which is to vastly underestimate the amount of energy required to do those things. Pacemakers and watches only need very, very small amounts of energy to operate, several orders of magnitude lower than is required for Bluetooth or the processing required to generate graphics for a low power display.
The only way smart watches will ever last for years on a charge is if we develop some currently unimaginably efficient energy storage device. It would have to be based on some pretty exotic physics because nothing we can image as being practical for now could do it. Either that or we discover a way to send subspace messages instead of using radios and it happens to require almost zero energy.
A few weeks, a month maybe, but not years.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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...
So what you're saying is one of the world's most successful smart watch manufacturers, with a healthy cash flow and established production and retail channels shouldn't be using kickstarter to launch their third generation device?
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
But not a $179 upgrade.
You can't bend reality to meet your perceptions.
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.
That is not a real smart watch. There is no matrix display, no text, graphics, no apps. I wouldn't be able to see my appointments, no notifications, no weather info, no Email, no voice response, no wikipedia lookup, just time.
Yes, an individual render operation is always going to be more expensive. But it's not necessary to always update the screen - given that watches are usually held in a specific orientation when being read, you could easily reduce power consumption by an order of magnitude if you only rendered the time when it was actually being read. There's also the possibility of drawing power from the wearer's movement, similar to an automatic.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.