The Pebble smartwatch has an ePaper display, support for Android and iOS notifications, and a third-party app store. But if you’ve been unimpressed with the color options available so far, Pebble’s now offering three bright new colors.
The new “Fresh” green, “Hot” pink and “Fly” blue smartwatches are limited edition models which are available exclusively from the Pebble store. They sell for the same $150 price as the original Pebble smartwatch (which is still available in black, grey, white, orange, or red).
Pebble may not offer some of the fancy new features available from Samsung’s Tizen-based watches or new smartwatches running Google’s Android Wear software. There’s no baked-in support for voice search or commands, for instance, and you can’t install apps simply by installing an app on your Android phone.
On the other hand, you don’t have to press a button to turn on the display. Pebble watches use low-power E InkePaper displays which are always visible and sunlight-viewable. The watch also gets from 5-7 days of battery life, vibrating alarms, and support for over a thousand third-party apps including watch faces.
via The Verge
They missed the Flintstones Fruity Pebbles tie-in oportunity here.
Pebble doesn’t use e-ink for their displays. They call it “e-paper,” but it’s just an LCD with persistence, meaning almost no power is used between updates.
The advantage to this approach is no ghosting, but I would prefer e-ink.
Why are these things not using color e-ink? The display could stay on all the time and still have good battery life.
AFAIK, color e-ink still isn’t quite there yet. They’ve been working on it for a while but it hasn’t been brought to market by any major players because it’s not of the quality that they’d want to sell to their customers. There are some color e-ink ereaders on the market, but the reviews I’ve read say that the colors look really washed out and are almost invisible in direct sunlight. However, the Pebble uses e-paper (in this case a specially designed LCD display) which is different from e-ink (which in its grayscale form uses electrophoresis to physically pull white titanium dioxide particles through a black fluid to the screen). The only direct-sunlight readable color displays that I have seen are in things like kiosks and military technology such as the control stations for aerial drones, and all of those work by using extremely bright backlighting which would eat the battery in a watch faster than you can say “10000 nits”.
I returned my original Pebble. So much about it screamed beta product. These colors clearly aren’t for folks of my age. You know, the gadget lovers with disposable income who might actually buy a smartwatch.
Pretty sure every single smartwatch available screams beta product at this point. They’re impulse buys for folks who have $150 – $300 to spend on a device which doesn’t do much that they couldn’t do 1-2 seconds slower by pulling out a phone.
Eventually someone will come up with a killer feature for smartwatches… or they won’t and they’ll move onto some other device category.
I spent about 3 days figuring out if my Pebble was worth buying, so it wasn’t an impulse buy. It does scream “beta product”, but for that matter so did the first generation iPhone (no background wallpaper on the homescreen, anyone?). Smartwatches have a killer feature already (although it’s social rather than technological): people I’ve been around are much less perturbed if I glance at my watch in between topics in a conversation than if I pull my phone out.
EDIT: It also helps when driving. Cell phone ringing is extremely distracting while I am driving but with my Pebble I can make it stop by hitting a button without even having to look at it.
I have a Pebble Steel which I wear as my daily watch. As a medical professional, I appreciate that it is discreet, looks mostly like a normal watch, and is able to silently deliver pages and texts to my wrist.
That said, it is absolutely an ALPHA product from the point of view of an Android user. Pebble can’t get their act together and deliver an Android experience consistent with Google notification guidelines and user interface standards. The app is buggy, prone to failure, slow, and has a clunky, non-standard UX. Few Pebble apps have emerged that stand out as adding much value. Now that Google Wear has entered the scene, I wouldn’t recommend Pebble to anyone, really. This is a shame, given how much excitement Pebble generated in the early days.
Having to press a button to turn on a display sounds well annoying! I liked those colours mixed up like in the photo. Really nice.