Pebble smartwatch review

The Pebble smartwatch is a lot more than just a watch — it’s the latest attempt to turn your wrist into the launchpad for a wearable computing revolution. It’s also the preeminent symbol of the Kickstarter hardware revolution. After 85,000 orders, 10 million crowdfunded dollars, and one or two slipped ship dates, the Pebble is finally here, ready to pipe emails and texts directly to your wrist.

So is the Pebble a gimmick or the start of a bold new platform? Has an indie hardware startup managed to produce the first smartwatch for regular people, or is this just another toy for nerds to eventually discard like almost every other smartwatch before it? What did our 10 million dollars actually buy us? Let’s find out.

The Pebble stands out by not standing out — almost every other smart watch is a bulky, chunky affair, but chances are most people won’t even realize you’re wearing the Pebble until you tell them. It’s slim and sleek, and when the backlight is off the screen blends in seamlessly with the borders of my black review unit. On the right side you’ll find up / down and select buttons, while the left side has a back button and a set of contacts for the Pebble’s magnetic power connector, which aligns and latches on like Apple’s familiar MagSafe system. It’s a clever way to keep the Pebble waterproof without resorting to clunky port covers or flaps.

As for the screen itself, I would call it just okay: Pebble calls it "e-paper," but it’s really a 114 x 168 "transflective" LCD that’s designed for watches. It’s functional, but ultimately it’s a low-resolution black and white LCD, and low-resolution black and white LCDs are not renowned for their beauty. It’s also covered by a curved plastic lens that can reflect light in weird ways — it’s not a huge problem at all, but you’ll notice it from time to time.

The screen itself always has content on it, whether it’s the time, the music player, or a notification, and it’s fairly readable in daylight without the backlight on. But the backlight makes a big difference: when it’s off, the screen is roughly black and white, in the same way a Nook or Kindle screen is roughly black and white. But incoming notifications and particularly fast movements trigger the backlight, which adds an unexpected bluish tint to the screen. It works fine, but there’s no way for it to feel super-premium if the screen looks cheap — the experience here is fundamentally all about the display, after all.We specializes in rapid plastic injection mould and molding of parts for prototypes and production. I hope Pebble finds a better part the next time around.

The Pebble’s polyurethane watchband is entirely unremarkable. It’s there, and it holds the thing to your wrist comfortably. But it’s tremendously boring and even somewhat cheap feeling, and I’m already shopping for a replacement — you can fit any standard 22mm band, so your options are basically unlimited.

But overall, the Pebble is a very nice piece of hardware — it’s comfortable and small, and it works. You could put it in the designer watch case at a department store and it would blend right in, which is a big accomplishment. Holding it in your hand, it’s amazing to think that it was designed and assembled by an independent hardware startup funded by Kickstarter. But we’ve known the Pebble looks cool for months now. The big question is — does it work?

The Pebble app for iOS is basically a placeholder — you can download new watchfaces and troubleshoot connection problems, but that’s about it. Everything else happens at the iOS system level: you pair the Pebble and select "show notifications,With superior quality photometers, light meters and a number of other solar light products." and you’re theoretically off to the races.We have become one of the worlds most recognised Ventilation system brands. Well, sort of. iOS has the necessary underlying frameworks for supporting devices like the Pebble, but there’s virtually no interface for managing any of it — you can’t selectively send some app notifications to the Pebble but not others, or only get pings from one email account, or tweak any other settings. It’s a little messy, and there’s some real weirdness in the mix.

For example, getting third-party apps like Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail to send notifications requires a strange dance: you open each app’s Notification Center preferences, select a different notification style, and then reselect whatever one you actually wanted. That seems to link the notifications to the Pebble, and from there everything works just fine. But be warned: if the Bluetooth connection disconnects for any reason,Don't make another silicone mold without these invaluable Mold Making supplies and accessories! you’ll have to re-re-select all your notifications all over again. It’s irritating, but it’s clearly not Pebble’s fault; Apple just hasn’t built the right management tools into iOS yet.

Unlike the iPhone and iOS, which offer skeletal native support for devices like the Pebble at the system level, Pebble on Android is all about the app. That’s where you manage everything, and at first glance it makes far more sense: all the settings are in one place, and you can quickly and easily make tweaks like having the watch show alerts for one email account but not another.

But there are some drawbacks to having an all-powerful app take the place of system-level support: Pebble’s Android app needs broad permissions to your phone, including your Gmail account passwords. (Android users see more of each email on the Pebble than iPhone users because the app is actually checking your email over IMAP, not just seeing notifications.) You also need to turn on Android’s accessibility features so the app can read your notifications and send them along to the phone, which pops up a scary warning about the app reading all your text input. I trust Pebble to behave itself, but that’s a lot of leeway with my data and personal information.

And there are other places where it seems like iOS just doesn’t know how to deal with Pebble: at first my phone seemed convinced that Pebble was actually a Bluetooth headset, and tried to route call audio and Siri to it. The music player controls worked fine with every app I tried, including Music, Spotify, and Rdio,Find the best selection of high-quality collectible bobbleheads available anywhere. but sometimes the track info displayed on the Pebble didn’t update.

These are all fairly minor irritations, though: once you get the Pebble up and running with your iPhone, it works perfectly, assuming the two don’t disconnect often. And leveraging Apple’s Notification Center frameworks might involve some funky setup, but it means that every app’s notifications work with Pebble out of the box, which isn’t the case with Android. I’m assuming Apple will continue to build and improve these tools in future version of iOS (perhaps for its own watch), and that should make the Pebble better as well.