Smartwatch maker Pebble introduced its first model with a color display recently. The Pebble Time won’t hit the streets until May, but tens of thousands of folks have pre-ordered models of the plastic watch with a color display through a Kickstarter campaign.
Now there’s another option: Pebble had just added a stainless steel version of the watch to Kickstarter. You can reserve a Pebble Time Steel for a pledge of $250 or more. The retail prices is expected to be $299 when the watch launches in July.
The Pebble Time Steel has the same software as the plastic Pebble Time smartwatch. But it has a stainless steel case, leather and stainless steel straps, and a bigger battery for up to 10 days of run time between charges.
Pebble will offer three models at launch:
- Silver case with a stone leather band
- Gunmetal black case with a black leather band
- Gold colored case with a red leather band
Each model will come with both a metal and a leather wrist strap.
Existing backers of the Pebble Time crowdfunding campaign can put down more money if they want to switch to the Pebble Time Steel.
Both the Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel smartwatches also have another nifty new feature: support for Pebble smartstraps. These are wristbands which you can connect to the watch to add new features such as a heart rate monitor, GPS, NFC, or even an extra battery for longer battery life.
yeah.. ok
they had success with that first kickstarter-thing. Good for them.
Then they sold many devices (and behaved like crapp for german customers)
Now Pebble is a company with at least a hundred employees and has a near-finished follow-up-product. So they made another kickstarter-campaign. Why? Because they could and because it’s near to free promotion to them.
…and now, they do it again because they will produce that product in 2 different shells.
big news.
btw: pebble steel still costs about $250 in germany. i don’t even want to know how much that new one will be.
This is one of the best marketing releases I’ve seen in a long while. It’s done an incredible job of keeping people interested and talking. Though the Pebble steel prices (and sales) will probably drop because of it. Overall having four products for $100, $150, $200, and $300 is a good line of prices.
I don’t think the Kickstarter is anywhere near free for them – Kickstarter itself takes a percentage of the money coming in, and at $12M and counting, that’s a chunk of change that Pebble could have kept themselves if they’d decided to do preorders through their own website.
I own a Kickstarted original Pebble and lived through the delays in delivery on the first iteration, so I understand what a pain Kickstarter can be, but I really think Eric M. and the crew at Pebble simply wanted to make a splash with the new watch and do some of the things with the campaign that the Kickstarter platform allows (like not losing your place in line when you change backing tiers). I get why people are annoyed – Kickstarter wasn’t really intended for companies with a ready-to-ship product), but given Pebble’s history, it does make a lot of sense for them to go back to the place that launched them in the beginning.
yes, “not free” beeing roughly 8-9% per pledge (so that’s currently ~$120K)
But with getting that money early (as in months before they have to provide hardware), overpricing on kickstarter (yes, they do. yes i know that there’s a “regular retail price” that seems to be higher) AND selling a huge load of stuff…
That’s a pretty good deal for pebble alone for the sold watches (spending 10% on getting your product into shops “worldwide” isn’t really expensive).
But i don’t think that those <100K sold devices were the reason they did this again.
…or as @boltforge put it: