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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
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.
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.
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.
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...
If you are an American, I can understand this sentiment completely. Given the lack of affordable health care, especially psychiatric care (do you have "Poor Impulse Control" tattooed on your forehead?), the penal system is perhaps the best option for getting the help that you clearly need.
USA! USA!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!