The main value prop over the Apple Watch and current Android wear appears to be the battery life. They're advertising over 7 days on a charge, which is certainly better than whatever the Apple Watch will be in terms of battery life. I just worry about the market for apps after the introduction of apple's watch around the same time.
> Being able to sleep with your watch on most nights of the week is a bigger deal than a lot of people realize.
This is huge for me and why I wear my FitBit instead of my Moto 360 most of the time. If I can wear it while I sleep I can set multiple alarms to wake me up that do not wake up the spouse or kids and it's less annoying than trying to turn a very loud beeping off.
There's still the drag of having to remember to recharge it every night, even if you're taking it off.
I experience this now that I've gone from the XBox 360 to the PS4. The XBox 360 battery lasted what seemed like forever. I would go a week or two without even thinking of plugging it in to charge. The PS4 controller battery life is so bad you have to plug it back in every time you're done playing.
I've had many people say "what's the big deal, just plug it in, are you lazy or what", but it is noticeably irritating.
There is literally no way they could say "at least" with any number that would mean anything to anyone. Even if they did a range between worst case scenario (app refreshing as often as possible and running the CPU and Bluetooth radios 100%) to best case scenario (watch face that updates once per hour), would you really want to see a number that says "Between 5 minutes and 7 days of battery life!"?
You can't really even have a "under normal use" battery life claim. My Pebble lasts between 4-5 days depending on app usage. Other have theirs lasting 2-3 days. My personal iPhone sometimes needs to be recharged in the middle of the day. My work iPhone gets charged once every three days.
"Up to 7 days" is the most meaningful number they could put there, because it shows you what to expect while using it as a watch. Everything else is up to you.
Which translates into about 4 days of heavy use, and over 12 days of no use. I once misplaced my Pebble, and found it 12 days later, and it was still running.
ePaper is very different than the displays that are in the Apple Watch and various Wear devices. You can see it in bright sunlight. It can be a big drawback, particularly for a fitness device, to need to shade your display to read it.
Which is probably why they're de-emphasizing apps (which I agree with from a UX standpoint) and emphasizing ease of developing from the web. If you hone your use cases, developing for Pebble doesn't have to be as complicated as apps. It amounts to rich push notifications, or perhaps Twitter Cards.
It's interesting that they've chosen to launch the product on Kickstarter. They don't appear to need the funding structure; they're simply using it as a shop.
Right. As a Marketing guy myself (6 years in Procter & Gamble), I'm always baffled when people in HN don't get obvious marketing moves, but in the other hand, I'm always learning so much about tech stuff that my colleagues would never get in a decade. This community is awesome.
I'm pretty sure they "get it", but agreeing with this practice is different thing. Sure, KS is as happy as everyone else, but that's not what they used to present themselves as.
Marketing as mentioned is one thing, but the other thing is that by having the community fund it before they invest in developing it, they don't run much financial risks themselves - a lot of products are developed where a company, or its employees, invest their own money, often having to do stuff like forfeit income. Having this kind of money beforehand prevents this.
They'll be shipping in 3 months, so components for the first run have been bought, tooling has been made, all the developer salaries have been spent on the new UI and firmware. Not much risk is being alleviated here.
Are you really willing to bet that they'll be shipping in three months? On what basis? Because it says so on the kickstarter page? Kickstarter never miss their targets, right?
This is way more common than you think. The most successful kickstarter campaigns usually have their demand already assessed (the number I've heard is usually 25%) before launching.
Kickstarter seems to be considered mostly as a marketing tool by startups nowadays. My friend and his hardware company is in the middle of a campaign right now and he told me that they aren't really hoping for much more than breaking even - they're doing it just for marketing and thus increasing the amount of money they can raise from investors.
For independent comics creators, drawing the book then going to Kickstarter to handle pre-orders is a great thing. I've done it twice and will be doing it again soon; it's a great model that lets you generate some excitement around a book release, and maybe get some new fans as well. If you go to a comics convention, I can bet that a lot of the books you'll find being hawked by their creators were funded via Kickstarter, with roughly that model. You can only say "here is a pitch, give me lots of $$$ to spend a couple years making it" if you have one hell of a track record, and a huge fan base.
I'm guessing they have a understanding with Kickstarter. Pebble is guaranteed to break some records with Kickstarter and it will get great press. With competitors like GoFundMe and Indiegogo I'm sure that Kickstarter welcomed Pebble back with open arms. Good for them!
Does it matter? That's just how Kickstarter makes money. The idea that they wouldn't welcome Pebble because it's low-risk and somehow makes them appear more "store-like" is unrealistic.
I'm quite surprised at the number of people who have just said "marketing". I don't doubt that's part of it but even without it I think it's a fairly solid idea.
Kickstarter have all the right tools for selling and a proven capacity to scale well. They've sold over 4 million dollars worth to over 20 thousand people in three hours without any hassle. They're handling all the user management, accounts, live updating figures, "stock" and payments.
How much would it have cost them if right at the peak their site went down for 2 hours? Or people weren't sure if their order was accepted? Could it cost them 5% of their orders minus the amount it would have cost them to build on their own? How long would it take to have built and tested their own site to handle the load of orders (and given that they only see this peak for a short period after launch).
Plus of course marketing and the fact that a lot of people already have a kickstarter account (reducing even more the barrier between "oh cool" and clicking buy).
I am studying at Waterloo, I love Pebble and while this is exciting news, I wish they had made the screen's margins thiner. The watch looks like a toy and is certainly not on par (design-wise) with other watches on the market. I hope it will work well for them though!
It's a bland gadget. I'm really not sure about that approach. It's so cheap and uninspired. Whatever you think about the overall shape of the Apple Watch, at least it's not a bland gadget. It seems to pay meticulous attention to all the micro details that make jewelry jewlery and not a bland tech toy. (Seems to because obviously no one has looked at it in detail. But first indications are good.) This one does not.
I'm really not sure why more smart watches don't try to be actual worthy jewlery. Pebble has this really cool and really functional tech, why not pack it into something worthy of being called a watch?
They seem to care about the technology side more. Plus, once you get this right, you can work on your casings to sell it to people that do care about it more.
Also, this is what they've done with the first Pebble - first the initial, plastic one, and only after - Pebble steel.
Exactly, a tick/tock product cycle. Apple does the flip of this - using the same case for two models, with different internals. Though they start with the high-end model. Are there as many examples of working your way upmarket?
I think it may also be due to costs. The color e-paper screen obviously costs more, and perhaps a full Steel model would teeter within range of the fashion smart watches (including Apple Watch Sport), where the comparison would be less flattering.
I don't think any smart watch == jewellery argument works, because jewellery doesn't require software updates. There is nothing timeless about modern electronics that need battery replacements.
I think that for any mass-market adoption (arguably not what the Pebble Time is aimed at), any smart watch will have to bridge that divide. Most people buy a watch as a fashion piece, not as a practical tool.
For some people they are... and maybe in the future they can be both (hence Apple making a smart watch with gold). It will probably segment, but the average non-techie probably wants fashion over practical.
Fine watches are only limitedly used as status symbol. Look at forums.watchuseek.com for afficionados who prefer keeping their watch for them - collecting them for example. Also note that, if you are unfamiliar with watches, you might not spot people wearing expensive watches if those are no Rolex.
You say bland, I say functional. Since my Casio data bank watch in the 90s I didn't wear a watch until I got my Pebble.
To me a watch is a tool, not a fashion accessory. I understand not everyone looks at it that way, but really I don't think there's any smartwatch that looks like an elegant timepiece anyway.
I think that's a totally fair point. I mean, I was once obsessed with those Casio G-Shock watches (when I was a child until maybe a couple years into being a teenager), so I know people want watches like that. I'm mostly coming at this from my own biased perspective, I guess (and I somehow assume that's the more universally shared perspective with the bigger potential market without actually knowing that's the case), and for me this won't do.
If a watch can convince me at all that's it's worth wearing it I need it to not look functional and techie and my guess is that would be a more widely appealing approach to these watches. Maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe there is just no market at all there and this is just a momentary fad. This will be interesting to watch.
Yeah, contrary to their "No Compromises" promise, this does seem significantly inferior to the Apple Watch (resolution doesn't look nearly as good, no touch screen, polish and finish, etc).
With the price at nearly half ($199) of what the low-end of the Apple Watch price range is expected to be ($349), however, this does open the smart watch option up to more people that don't have that sort of cash to spend on wearables.
Actually, it would be nice to have a smartphone equivalent of a Toughbook. Very difficult to crush, e-paper display and large battery so it can run for a few weeks on a charge. There are mission critical industries that would like a phone that just works for a very long time.
I question your taste. This Pebble looks better than the Apple Watch to me, certainly better than the Apple Watch Sport version which is made of similar materials. Just because there is an Apple watch cast in gold doesn't mean it's better designed.
I highly question yours... you sound crazy calling this better. The Apple Watch isn't the most beautiful designed gadget but you are making a really silly statement. It's honestly blowing my mind how you think this.
It depends what "smart" actually means. Something like the Withings Activité [1] can afford to be a well-designed piece of jewellery because there is no expectation (or possibility) of software updates. This isn't true of Android Wear or the Apple Watch; models sold this year will become obsolete within a timeframe that is much shorter than one would want for high-end jewellery.
It would be a mistake to try and out-compete Apple on the exact same turf because they'll always be out-spent by a comical margin. Much better to maintain their current aesthetic and brand (and price point!).
Hm, I think you might be completely right. I mean, it seems like there are more than enough people who want this and that you can turn this into a decent and very cool business. They don’t have to compete on the turf Apple is competing and can still do tons of cool stuff (and they do and, hey, I genuinely think their software here looks really, really cool). And that thing with me not liking the physical design is then just a subjective taste thing, nothing more.
Also, we don’t even know if a watch that is visibly not a tech gadget (like the Apple Watch aspires to be) will even be successful. In a very real sense the Pebble is more proven as a product than what Apple is doing.
(Also, on a personal level: Yeah, I don’t like the look of this Pebble, sure, but I currently don’t even wear a watch at all and currently I am not even convinced I will ever get an Apple Watch. That’s not at all a promising case study for Pebble to really put resources into making this a non-gadget watch.)
Oh, who are we kidding? Of course it's a pre-order. Are you claiming that if Pebble didn't meet their funding goal, the Time will never ship? That there's the possibility that I'll never see my Pebble Time after pledging? Pebble is now an established company in the wearables market, the Time is shipping regardless of KS. Pebble doesn't need the money, it's marketing.
... how the hell is this not a pre-order? Are the rewards just going to up and disappear after the campaign is over? Not from an established group like this.
> EARLY BIRD: Your choice of one Pebble Time watch in any of the three colors. Regular retail price will be $199.
Estimated delivery: May 2015
Ships anywhere in the world
If you want jewelry, buy a necklace. Or maybe an Apple Watch. Yeah, yeah, I get it. But I want a functional device as I'm one of those "a Rolex doesn't tell better time than a Casio" types. What's next, artisanally-crafted pocket knives? I'll stick my bland yet functional Victrinox or Case.
To each their own, and may both markets be well-served. For those that would rather pay for function, there's the Pebble that doesn't look all that bad to me. We'll see how well Apple serves the high end.
The appeal of mechanical watches is the idea that there's this beautiful mechanical machine inside (often visible through a transparent crystal back) which is powering the watch, either through a hand-wound mechanism or by converting the kinetic energy of your wrist's movement into potential energy stored in a spring. Mechanical watches are jewelry, and they're designed to appeal not just to the eyes but also to the mind.
This Pebble is 100% function over form. It's far more useful than a $2k Nomos, but also far less beautiful. It's not something I would ever cherish, or keep for decades, or pass down to grandchildren. I would never look at it and marvel at how it manages to work. I would never love it. But it would be useful.
The Apple Watch is likely something of a middle ground. It's prettier on the outside, but there's nothing interesting about the inside. The Moto 360 sits in this same category as well.
Like I said, I get it. The very reasons you've listed are why I've been tempted by such devices in the past. But when it comes time to shell out the cash, I buy function. Neither right or wrong, it's just why I paid for what is now my second Pebble and why (I take it) you likely won't be buying one at all.
I pulled up an images search of the apple watch and the white watch looks almost identical to the new pebble, to the point of "oh oh someone's gonna get sued".
I claim that a dude on the street at a glance is not going to be able to tell the difference between an iWatch and the pebble. Maybe with a couple minutes of study or if they have a watch hobby / fetish they'll notice quicker...
So is the trash talking about the pebble's style simply astroturfing or are there specific complaints that can be addressed (I'd respect someone who said it needs a Disney Frozen sticker or My Little Pony branding. I'd disagree, but I'd respect it a lot more than providing no specific data other than the mfgr label defining what makes it cool)
It's a shame. I think the navigation paradigm is really neat, the screen looks great, and 7 hours of battery life is right on. But those buttons look kinda clumsy and cheap to me. There's a lot to like, but the form factor isn't very enticing.
I was just thinking the same thing, I locked in at the early bird price but couldn't understand why people would volunteer to pay more for the same product...
Nope.. Adding up all the tiers up totals a maximum of $9,550,000, for a total of 56k watches.
Interesting that they didn't design this to break their 10.2M record of the first campaign. I'd bet they are going to increase the slots or or announce addons for the pledges to go for it. At this rate they are going to be sold out in a couple hours, if that.
They should be able to do that themselves (I've seen a lot of projects adding tiers in the middle of campaigns, you can't remove/change existing tiers).
Kickstarter shouldn't be able to add new tiers by themselves, as they have no say what the price/rewards should be. The current tiers are likely (hopefully) carefully planned based on their manufacturing plans and how many watches they can fulfill in the schedule given.
They posted an update saying they're bumping the 2nd single-watch tier by 10k, and will add a new single-watch tier with a later ship date when that sells out.
Pebble has never used E-ink, despite all the confusion in the media (not that Pebble was in a hurry to rectify it, since it played to its advantage). The color one doesn't look like E-ink now either. They used some transflective PixelQi-like displays in the past, but not sure if they're using an upgraded version of that now (with color!) or something like Mirasol, and they are just naming it the same.
Ahh, and I was most excited about the new E-Ink tech I thought they were showing off in those GIFs. Hopefully something like it can come to the Kindle eventually. Would be great for comic reading (and the animations are so smooth!).
Damn, that's really misleading. I've always thought E-ink would be good for smart watches, because it shows text well, has great daytime visibility, and is power-efficient.
Nope, the refresh rate is clearly too high.
Compare with amazon's newest Kindle e-ink, quick animations are not possible with ink yet, and there is ghosting.
Also, deducing from the battery life of 7 days ONLY, this doesn't look like eInk, which would last for weeks or longer, since it does not require power at all to keep contents on the screen.
However, I have to admit that their display is the most interesting part of the watch.
well the thing is this thing has to stay connected to bluetooth the entire time, so that's part of the battery. The animations are also 3 frames or so... so maybe it's fine.
I think the ghosting comes from not explicitly setting bits. with the color e-ink screen you're probably resetting a lot of things, so even if ghosting is present, it's not very visible (especially after a lot of changes)
Looking at this closely though this _does_ remind me of something like the GBC screen. This might just be LCD.
I sure hope the previous model told time as well ... but they seem to really be pushing the angle this time 'round. What with literally calling it Time.
Oh come on Swizec ;). You have to give them credit, they're apparently the only smartwatch brand that doesn't suck. I like that there is at least one company that, as opposed to Apple, seems to care about providing a useful tool instead of a fashion piece.
I hope they've managed to improve the color and sharpness on color e-paper displays. The ones I've seen over the years have been rather less than vivid.
If it's anything like the old Pebble display, it's not e-ink like we would see in a Kindle. They call it e-paper, but it's really a low-power LCD with no backlight. There's no problem making an LCD full color.
Sharpness was never really an issue with e-Paper displays, as they have long been able to display at more than 150ppi. However, refresh speed and ghosting are the real issues. In order to speed up drawing and quickly wipe the screen, developers will prefer 1-bit access modes over slow/ghosty 8-bit drawing modes, so text will indeed look sharp.. And aliased.
I'm extremely torn. On one hand (or rather, on one wrist) I have the pebble steel and I LOVE it, couldn't imagine going back. But on the other wrist I have an iPhone and the pebble works better with Android ATM so the Apple Watch looks attractive. Back to the first wrist, the pebble has much better battery life and is cheaper than the even the lowest priced Apple Watch...
Edit: Ok, I pulled the trigger, I can always get a refund or just resell it if the Apple Watch blows it away or something like that.
Agreed and if the rumors on iPhone battery life are true [0] (which they probably are) then you're right, I'll need something for when my Apple Watch is charging lol.
Apple isn’t competing with Pebble; it’s odd that people don’t get this. It’s like saying Porsche is competing with Kia. They both make cars but they’re targeting two very different markets with very little overlap.
We shouldn’t confuse consumer choice with competition. I know several Pebble owners who wouldn’t buy an Apple Watch even if it cost the same as a Pebble because they don’t like what they believe Apple represents.
The embargo might have ended, but perhaps all of the details are not yet in place to make it practical. Customs forms need to be reprinted (whether paper or electronic). Are UPS and other carriers ready to go? And so on. An entire generation of US businesses and people have never done business with Cuba, that isn't going to change overnight...or even in a few months.
Or maybe the Pebble founders just don't like Fidel.
I got the Pebble for Christmas and wondered if I needed it, but it does a really good job on a few simple things. It tells you whether that buzz you just felt on your phone was a text or important email or just a Snapchat. A few other features, but that simple thing is by far the best part about it.
Looks like this will finally get me to jump on the smartwatch bandwagon; the original Pebble didn't really do it for me. The new interface is looking great and the week worth of battery is nice, especially since most LCD smart watches need to be charged every night.
Same. At roughly £100 for the earlybird with shipping to the UK it's just about cheap enough that I can buy it, play with it for a bit and give it away to someone else, if I'm not happy with it when it arrives.
It looks good enough that it will probably find a place to stay in my life anyway...
I have to admit they did a good job with the new watch, adding color is great and still having the week of battery is huge.
I was one of the early supporter for the first Pebble and have zero regret. It did convinced me of how useful a smart watch can be. I will be a little bit sad when replacing it with the Apple Watch when it comes out: I decided to change ship, but the Pebble will always have a special spot.
It's great to see they have a strong supporter base, and that will force Apple and others to stay active and compete.
I will for sure miss the long lasting battery of my Pebble!
You talk good about the Pebble Watch but still you want to replace it with an Apple Watch. Are there any interesting reasons for this decision you might want to share?
This type of display is definitely a must. The size and build seem to be quite nice as well. Only (from a first glance) dealbreaker for me is the price. I'd guess half from what it is. Sure they have to pay a lot of R&D not relevant to producing a single unit, but with a run of 40k JUST for this KS campaign? It's just too much.
edit: Now it seems that the stock will run out by the end of the day :)
What I think is good about this is that they are thinking of a new paradigm for UI on a wearable. For Android Wear devices it feels like Google just decided that voice was going to take care of UI, and no decisions about physical controls needed to be made. But there are two problems: voice isn't that reliable, and more importantly, there are a lot of situations where you want to use your watch but not talk to it.
Maybe it's because I'm from Minnesota and sound like Don LaFontaine, but Google's voice recognition is easily 95% or better for me. Probably closer to 98%, even on spoken sentences for sending emails or texts. When I'm navigating, or trying to call someone, it's closer to 99%.
Voice recognition has improved tremendously for me as well. But what I can't seem to get over is that it's almost always slower than using my thumbs. Talking is slower than typing, plus the process time needed to interpret the voice commands. -- from a keyboard shortcut junkie
Your post has 47 words. A 95% success rate means 1 in 20 failure, so you're going to have to stop, swear, fix it, and restart dictation about two or three times in your post. Even the somewhat optimistic 99% still gives only a systemic fifty fity odds of your post being error free.
Its just too annoying for most people to use.
What voice recognition reminds me of, is a disobedient / distracted little kid, the kind you have to tell everything twice.
But the correction is simpler and less distracting. I can backspace the word I misspelled and fix it without breaking my thought flow, whereas when I try that with dictation... well, it doesn't work that way. Especially that the whole point of dictation should be that you're not actually looking at the screen and double-checking if what's recognized is what you said.
"Especially that the whole point of dictation should be that you're not actually looking at the screen"
I've noticed UIs always get "needier" over time. Call it VLM's Law. In the old days a dumbphone could be operated tactile in total darkness without looking at it at all. Then smartphones came along which needed occasional glances at the screen to verify the screen and touch screen position/orientation (portrait vs auto-rotated landscape). Now you need to stare continuously at the screen to watch mistakes in the speech to text dictation system as you slowly, tediously, agonizingly argue with a machine.
How clumsy of a UI, like going thru life wearing oven mitts. And VLMs Law is it always gets worse over time. It'll take a lot of work, but we'll find a way to make UIs even more painful.
Yeah. What I loved about dumbphones and feature phones was not just keys - it was that they had firmware instead of a full-blown OS, and thus predictable timing. I could operate my K800i in total darkness without looking at it, because I knew that, say, "joy-click, wait for around half a second, left, joy-click, down, joy-click" would take me to my messages. If I tried something like that with my S4, I'd end up pretty much wherever, because the UI likes to hang for half a sec every now and then.
That is near the success rate I have as well. And when I dictate a text on my phone voice works great because I can retype the one in twenty words it gets wrong. There's no keyboard on a watch. Worse, when you are misunderstood Wear is likely to launch the wrong app or pull up the wrong information. So you have the problem of canceling one thing and trying, awkardly, to get to what voice didn't understand.
If you look on the wear store, apps that create rows of icons on your watch face are very popular. I think that shows that this is a common concern.
I feel the exact opposite as far as controls go. Android Wear decided voice and touch would take care of the UI whereas Pebble has gone completely with buttons (4 of them!) and as an owner of the previous generation of Pebble I always found them very awkward to use especially if I was doing anything except maybe standing still.
I also own a Moto 360 which is okay but honestly I'm not as big of a fan as I thought I would be. If they made Pebble Time have touch controls to get rid of the big buttons I would buy this thing in a heart beat.
I disagree with you in parts. I've a pebble while my wife has an android watch. The killer feature on the android phone is voice commands. I agree that when in public it's a privacy concern to use voice commands hence an alternative is necessary. But its incredibly convenient and useful to control your phone and watch say when you are driving or at home. It's incredibly useful to set reminders just by saying "Ok Google, Set reminder for..." etc. Btw, our native language is not english and have bit of accent although that hasn't caused any issues. The second great feature on android watch is gestures. Just swiping and tapping to control is useful than having to fiddle with 4 buttons.
However the best thing I find on the pebble is
- Battery Life,
- Readability in daylight,
- Slim and light weight.
Smart Watches are quite nascent tech and if we get to where we get ones that are amalgamation of all these features, I'll be a content man.
Because at home I don't carry it around. Outside, I would have to get it out of my pockets to be able to access it. Also in inclement weather a cheap/water proof watch is less of a risk.
We have not tested it in the open. Inside home it stays connected when I'm in kitchen and the phone is in bedroom. It has also stayed connected when I went out to my car which was across my patio.
Basically the only things I use voice commands for is "set a timer for..." while cooking or "remind me at noon to..." when I need a time alert.
Oh, and saying "What's my name" and having Siri respond "Your name is <name>, but since we're friends I get to call you Captain James T Kirk". But that's just personal amusement.
I'm not sure if it works with Siri, but my favorite google voice command is "remind me to {do something} when I'm at {some place}"
I use it for stuff I forget to buy when I'm shopping, mostly. The stuff you don't buy often, like "remind me to get deodorant when I'm at Kroger."
Also the timer-type reminders/alarms are great.
I really wish it was easier to compose notes and the like. I finally found how to reliably get a newline with the voice keyboard (by saying "period newline"...the period is required).
"Her" was pretty inspiring for all of the voice-related stuff. But I'm still weird about using voice commands in public. If everyone was, I'd get over it.
I agree that voice commands are sometimes useful, but they also sometimes aren't. One problem is that voice is more reliable when it has context, like a complete sentence. That doesn't always fit the use case of openign an oddly named app.
Another problem is typified by a commmon Android Wear app which allows you to request a fake phone call on your phone. This example shows one of the use cases for a wearable: its a device you can look at when its socially or physically awkward to pull out a phone. You don't want to say, "Google, this meeting is boring!" But you might want a button that lets you do something about it.
voice is more reliable when it has context, like a complete sentence. That doesn't always fit the use case of opening an oddly named app.
One could get around most of that by being able to set aliases for often used apps, like, "quick open 1." If it's hard to open a seldom used app, it's not that big a deal.
As I said earlier, I agree that in certain circumstances voice commands are not adequate. But in cases where they are, they are extremely efficient, handy or safe. Hence I believe selection of user interface be at user's discretion.
The screen interface is more accessible than the buttons. With buttons I've to feel my way around since there are three on the right side. Also I've to support the watch from the side opposite to the one where the button is being pressed. Also with gloves, jackets etc I've to wiggle my way to be able to press buttons also sensing which button I'm pressing is not easy.
For me, being able to operate the buttons by feel is a key feature, and I find it pretty easy to do on my original Pebble. It's useful for controlling music playback or dismissing alarms without having to look at the watch.
I agree that there are disadvantages too. One of my jackets does make it harder to access all the buttons. And scrolling through a list one item at a time can be more annoying than just swiping and tapping on the item you want.
I agree. Voice control in the Apple/Android paradigm is... weird. Talking to the phone, requiring Internet connection, unusable on a busy street. Take out the phone, unlock it, move it in front of your face (now I can't see a thing and start bumping into people), "ok Google", say it again, wait for the S4 to react, say something, see it's interpreted wrong...
I very much prefer to type, it's faster even on a touch screen.
So here I am, waiting for a subvocal recognition system and the comeback of off-line speech processing.
Voice in my case is super reliable. I'm always a little surprised at all the things it gets right. I think the work google has been doing on context aware speech to text is paying off. I've had edge cases where it couldn't get things right, but just making an effort to speak slower and more deliberate solves that. Thankfully I don't need to do that often.
Meh, most of the time I can just whisper something ambigious if I'm concerned about privacy, or just pull out my big ass phone and type on it, which is what I would have done if I didn't own a moto 360.
I tried one of those keyboards for the watch, and its really a non-starter. Wearables only make sense as voice devices. Even the large moto 360 can't support an on-screen keyboard and I imagine future smartwatches will be smaller, especially one's marketed at women and children.
Touch screens are not the solution for every problem.
I just saw a TV show the other day where the bomb squad was driving a robot with an iPad. Yes, all driving input and finite movement of the robot arms was done on a touch screen.
God why is this thing so fugly. I thought with the advent of the Moto 360, smartwatches would become at least what watches were before: jewelry, sadly the pebble time even lags behind the pebble steel
Pretty sneaky to advertise $159 and not mention the $10 shipping which makes it $169, and KS doesn't even advertise that until you've already clicked through to the 'pledge' (aka purchase, what happened to "Kickstarter is not a store"?) page.
And now that the 'early tier' is gone (great UX on that, they took me to the credit card page, I entered my info, then they reloaded it and went "oops, that tier's full now tee-hee!"), why would you save $10 to pay them for a product that might ship 2 months later if they get around to releasing it? So, no Kickstarter for me, it's actually plus because I'll get to see real reviews and not hype.
Unless you can lock in the early bird, I don't believe there's any point in pledging. I just about scraped through and pledged $179 + $10, which puts me about $20 ahead of the final cost (assuming shipping will stay the same).
(If I downvoted you, sorry. Stupid tiny arrows on mobile, and no undo or even a way to see which way I voted.)
Meh, you get it a few months early, and they're not shipping retail until the Kickstarters are released. That, and as an original KS backer I get a special engraving I'll never, ever see. :-)
I'm glad that they finally broke out shipping from the pledge itself. A lot of smaller Kickstarter projects have been caught off-guard and hammered by the high costs of international shipping.
I'll get one if the $159 pledge becomes available again, but I'm really looking forward to the "Steel" version of this watch. This is one aspect of the watch that Apple is getting right from the very first iteration. It needs to look sexy and make you want to wear even when the battery is dead.
I don't think it's fair to consider this campaign as any sort of 'record'. Pebble is an already successful company with a history of success using Kickstarter as a store. If Apple decided to release the iPhone 7 on Kickstarter it would also break a ridiculous amount of records, but it's still not really 'fair'.
I'm glad they're continuing to iterate on their product. This is certainly a nice improvement. Though I don't really understand the insistence of putting buttons on a watch that are used to interact with the thing. Pressing buttons, on the side of a watch and on your wrist while doing anything but standing still is always really awkward.
I was really hoping their v2 would have axed the buttons. I would be very tempted to pick one up if they did but oh well.
I can change the current song or take a call while on the bike without taking the of the road, just because I know where the press. This would not be possible with a touch screen. If I want to do stuff where a touch screen would come in handy I take out my phone anyway.
Whenever I went for a walk or run and tried to use the buttons it always felt awkward and cumbersome. I'd rather have buttons on my headphones or something that's really easy and obvious to hit (such at tapping the screen or something).
I mean the Android Wear watches can do this (so it's possible) but it's not always the most intuitive either.
I think that in terms of what I was expecting out of Pebbles second iteration, this was not it. I like how they did away with the mobile thinking of apps because that was simply trying to conform a watch to a mobile phones way of thinking. Even sticking to e-paper for long battery life was a good design decision but beyond that there really isn't much in innovation. The design doesn't really wow or anything same with the UI. I know some comments really liked the UI and I guess with developers updating their apps and looks to match the new watch that may improve things as well.
I've owned an original pebble for a couple weeks now, but I'm still skeptical on their usefulness. I save maybe 5-10 minutes of time per week by being able to check the weather forecast or dismiss non-urgent emails and texts using my watch instead of having to pull my phone out of my pocket, but that's about the only benefit I'm seeing so far.
Maybe a smartwatch would be more useful to me if I was more popular and had calendar events to keep track of or more friends who contacted me regularly, but as your typical socially-isolated introvert software engineer, this thing seems to have limited utility.
I've had my Pebble Steel for just at a year now and I have the opposite experience. I consider it to be as important as having my phone on me at this point. Part of this is no doubt due to never wearing a watch (for more than a day or two) prior to owning the Pebble so I love having the time/weather on my wrist at all times. I love having texts, calls, emails on my wrist and I've started using Pushover (Push notification API with app) more and more since I don't have to dig my phone out of my pocket to read push notifications any more.
Consider looking at the Glance app. I enjoyed my Pebble to start with, but it became far more useful with Glance. I can now reply to text messages from a list of options I created on my phone. I filled the list with the messages I send the most: "ok", "yes", "no", "on my way".
I really like deciding if messages are worth my time without having to dig out my phone and I really like being able to send quick messages without fiddling about with unlocking and on-screen keyboards.
For me its not necessarily a raw measure of just time saved.
I realized that the physical habit that we've all developed of pulling our phones, unlocking , checking time or messages etc is a really really annoying physical habit.
It's disruptive and awkward to do, interrupts conversations or basic interactions with things in your environment.
A two handed fumbling time check/message check becomes a no handed operation with a smart watch.
I don't actually check my messages any more often, in fact less, since the notification is actually much more obvious then phones chirping in a pocket and my decision about whether to handle the information now or later is just much more quick and fluent.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadBeing able to sleep with your watch on most nights of the week is a bigger deal than a lot of people realize.
This is huge for me and why I wear my FitBit instead of my Moto 360 most of the time. If I can wear it while I sleep I can set multiple alarms to wake me up that do not wake up the spouse or kids and it's less annoying than trying to turn a very loud beeping off.
I experience this now that I've gone from the XBox 360 to the PS4. The XBox 360 battery lasted what seemed like forever. I would go a week or two without even thinking of plugging it in to charge. The PS4 controller battery life is so bad you have to plug it back in every time you're done playing.
I've had many people say "what's the big deal, just plug it in, are you lazy or what", but it is noticeably irritating.
But it glows!
You can't really even have a "under normal use" battery life claim. My Pebble lasts between 4-5 days depending on app usage. Other have theirs lasting 2-3 days. My personal iPhone sometimes needs to be recharged in the middle of the day. My work iPhone gets charged once every three days.
"Up to 7 days" is the most meaningful number they could put there, because it shows you what to expect while using it as a watch. Everything else is up to you.
So if they can increase that to 7 days and I can charge once per week then I'll be even happier. But largely I like the idea of a colour one.
That's very sad.
They get a kickstart by having successful brands use their platform. You could could call it sad and unfortunate but it is inevitable.
For independent comics creators, drawing the book then going to Kickstarter to handle pre-orders is a great thing. I've done it twice and will be doing it again soon; it's a great model that lets you generate some excitement around a book release, and maybe get some new fans as well. If you go to a comics convention, I can bet that a lot of the books you'll find being hawked by their creators were funded via Kickstarter, with roughly that model. You can only say "here is a pitch, give me lots of $$$ to spend a couple years making it" if you have one hell of a track record, and a huge fan base.
Kickstarter have all the right tools for selling and a proven capacity to scale well. They've sold over 4 million dollars worth to over 20 thousand people in three hours without any hassle. They're handling all the user management, accounts, live updating figures, "stock" and payments.
How much would it have cost them if right at the peak their site went down for 2 hours? Or people weren't sure if their order was accepted? Could it cost them 5% of their orders minus the amount it would have cost them to build on their own? How long would it take to have built and tested their own site to handle the load of orders (and given that they only see this peak for a short period after launch).
Plus of course marketing and the fact that a lot of people already have a kickstarter account (reducing even more the barrier between "oh cool" and clicking buy).
I'm really not sure why more smart watches don't try to be actual worthy jewlery. Pebble has this really cool and really functional tech, why not pack it into something worthy of being called a watch?
Also, this is what they've done with the first Pebble - first the initial, plastic one, and only after - Pebble steel.
I think it may also be due to costs. The color e-paper screen obviously costs more, and perhaps a full Steel model would teeter within range of the fashion smart watches (including Apple Watch Sport), where the comparison would be less flattering.
I'm ok with pebble not trying to be jewelery.
To me a watch is a tool, not a fashion accessory. I understand not everyone looks at it that way, but really I don't think there's any smartwatch that looks like an elegant timepiece anyway.
If a watch can convince me at all that's it's worth wearing it I need it to not look functional and techie and my guess is that would be a more widely appealing approach to these watches. Maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe there is just no market at all there and this is just a momentary fad. This will be interesting to watch.
The screen is Gorilla Glass and the bezel is stainless steel!
Anyway, Apple is using sapphire for everything except the low end: https://www.apple.com/watch/gallery/
With the price at nearly half ($199) of what the low-end of the Apple Watch price range is expected to be ($349), however, this does open the smart watch option up to more people that don't have that sort of cash to spend on wearables.
If you think it's bland, it's obviously not for you, but going by the rate at which dollars are pouring in, enough people seem to think otherwise.
[1] http://www.withings.com/us/withings-activite.html
Also, we don’t even know if a watch that is visibly not a tech gadget (like the Apple Watch aspires to be) will even be successful. In a very real sense the Pebble is more proven as a product than what Apple is doing.
(Also, on a personal level: Yeah, I don’t like the look of this Pebble, sure, but I currently don’t even wear a watch at all and currently I am not even convinced I will ever get an Apple Watch. That’s not at all a promising case study for Pebble to really put resources into making this a non-gadget watch.)
> EARLY BIRD: Your choice of one Pebble Time watch in any of the three colors. Regular retail price will be $199. Estimated delivery: May 2015 Ships anywhere in the world
To each their own, and may both markets be well-served. For those that would rather pay for function, there's the Pebble that doesn't look all that bad to me. We'll see how well Apple serves the high end.
You can spend a pretty penny on pocket knives.
This Pebble is 100% function over form. It's far more useful than a $2k Nomos, but also far less beautiful. It's not something I would ever cherish, or keep for decades, or pass down to grandchildren. I would never look at it and marvel at how it manages to work. I would never love it. But it would be useful.
The Apple Watch is likely something of a middle ground. It's prettier on the outside, but there's nothing interesting about the inside. The Moto 360 sits in this same category as well.
I pulled up an images search of the apple watch and the white watch looks almost identical to the new pebble, to the point of "oh oh someone's gonna get sued".
I claim that a dude on the street at a glance is not going to be able to tell the difference between an iWatch and the pebble. Maybe with a couple minutes of study or if they have a watch hobby / fetish they'll notice quicker...
So is the trash talking about the pebble's style simply astroturfing or are there specific complaints that can be addressed (I'd respect someone who said it needs a Disney Frozen sticker or My Little Pony branding. I'd disagree, but I'd respect it a lot more than providing no specific data other than the mfgr label defining what makes it cool)
Edit: To clarify, it was already at $775k at 16:27 CET.
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/597507018/pebble-time-aweso...
Interesting that they didn't design this to break their 10.2M record of the first campaign. I'd bet they are going to increase the slots or or announce addons for the pledges to go for it. At this rate they are going to be sold out in a couple hours, if that.
Kickstarter shouldn't be able to add new tiers by themselves, as they have no say what the price/rewards should be. The current tiers are likely (hopefully) carefully planned based on their manufacturing plans and how many watches they can fulfill in the schedule given.
I think the ghosting comes from not explicitly setting bits. with the color e-ink screen you're probably resetting a lot of things, so even if ghosting is present, it's not very visible (especially after a lot of changes)
Looking at this closely though this _does_ remind me of something like the GBC screen. This might just be LCD.
I sure hope the previous model told time as well ... but they seem to really be pushing the angle this time 'round. What with literally calling it Time.
The future is now.
Edit: Ok, I pulled the trigger, I can always get a refund or just resell it if the Apple Watch blows it away or something like that.
Anyway, you'll need to wear something while your Apple Watch is charging. :-)
[0] http://9to5mac.com/2015/01/22/apple-targets-for-apple-watch-...
We shouldn’t confuse consumer choice with competition. I know several Pebble owners who wouldn’t buy an Apple Watch even if it cost the same as a Pebble because they don’t like what they believe Apple represents.
Russia?
I find Cuba to be interesting. I thought we ended that embargo in December.
Or maybe the Pebble founders just don't like Fidel.
It looks good enough that it will probably find a place to stay in my life anyway...
It's great to see they have a strong supporter base, and that will force Apple and others to stay active and compete.
I will for sure miss the long lasting battery of my Pebble!
edit: Now it seems that the stock will run out by the end of the day :)
Maybe it's because I'm from Minnesota and sound like Don LaFontaine, but Google's voice recognition is easily 95% or better for me. Probably closer to 98%, even on spoken sentences for sending emails or texts. When I'm navigating, or trying to call someone, it's closer to 99%.
Its just too annoying for most people to use.
What voice recognition reminds me of, is a disobedient / distracted little kid, the kind you have to tell everything twice.
I'm not sure my success rate is any better than that typing on my iPhone.
I've noticed UIs always get "needier" over time. Call it VLM's Law. In the old days a dumbphone could be operated tactile in total darkness without looking at it at all. Then smartphones came along which needed occasional glances at the screen to verify the screen and touch screen position/orientation (portrait vs auto-rotated landscape). Now you need to stare continuously at the screen to watch mistakes in the speech to text dictation system as you slowly, tediously, agonizingly argue with a machine.
How clumsy of a UI, like going thru life wearing oven mitts. And VLMs Law is it always gets worse over time. It'll take a lot of work, but we'll find a way to make UIs even more painful.
#nostalgia
If you look on the wear store, apps that create rows of icons on your watch face are very popular. I think that shows that this is a common concern.
I also own a Moto 360 which is okay but honestly I'm not as big of a fan as I thought I would be. If they made Pebble Time have touch controls to get rid of the big buttons I would buy this thing in a heart beat.
However the best thing I find on the pebble is - Battery Life, - Readability in daylight, - Slim and light weight.
Smart Watches are quite nascent tech and if we get to where we get ones that are amalgamation of all these features, I'll be a content man.
Oh, and saying "What's my name" and having Siri respond "Your name is <name>, but since we're friends I get to call you Captain James T Kirk". But that's just personal amusement.
Seems a lot more suspicious of me for some reason..
I use it for stuff I forget to buy when I'm shopping, mostly. The stuff you don't buy often, like "remind me to get deodorant when I'm at Kroger."
Also the timer-type reminders/alarms are great.
I really wish it was easier to compose notes and the like. I finally found how to reliably get a newline with the voice keyboard (by saying "period newline"...the period is required).
"Her" was pretty inspiring for all of the voice-related stuff. But I'm still weird about using voice commands in public. If everyone was, I'd get over it.
Another problem is typified by a commmon Android Wear app which allows you to request a fake phone call on your phone. This example shows one of the use cases for a wearable: its a device you can look at when its socially or physically awkward to pull out a phone. You don't want to say, "Google, this meeting is boring!" But you might want a button that lets you do something about it.
One could get around most of that by being able to set aliases for often used apps, like, "quick open 1." If it's hard to open a seldom used app, it's not that big a deal.
What's fiddly about buttons? It's much faster than swiping a couple of times to get to the option you want.
I agree that there are disadvantages too. One of my jackets does make it harder to access all the buttons. And scrolling through a list one item at a time can be more annoying than just swiping and tapping on the item you want.
I very much prefer to type, it's faster even on a touch screen.
So here I am, waiting for a subvocal recognition system and the comeback of off-line speech processing.
I'm not sure if it'll use it anytime there's a data connection, though.
I've also noticed it has a couple of flaws, like you can't use "newline" with it.
Meh, most of the time I can just whisper something ambigious if I'm concerned about privacy, or just pull out my big ass phone and type on it, which is what I would have done if I didn't own a moto 360.
I tried one of those keyboards for the watch, and its really a non-starter. Wearables only make sense as voice devices. Even the large moto 360 can't support an on-screen keyboard and I imagine future smartwatches will be smaller, especially one's marketed at women and children.
I just saw a TV show the other day where the bomb squad was driving a robot with an iPad. Yes, all driving input and finite movement of the robot arms was done on a touch screen.
Terrible idea; nobody would do that in real life.
I guess i'll stick to a real watch.
And now that the 'early tier' is gone (great UX on that, they took me to the credit card page, I entered my info, then they reloaded it and went "oops, that tier's full now tee-hee!"), why would you save $10 to pay them for a product that might ship 2 months later if they get around to releasing it? So, no Kickstarter for me, it's actually plus because I'll get to see real reviews and not hype.
Meh, you get it a few months early, and they're not shipping retail until the Kickstarters are released. That, and as an original KS backer I get a special engraving I'll never, ever see. :-)
Is that a record?
(What else has sold anywhere near this fast?)
I was really hoping their v2 would have axed the buttons. I would be very tempted to pick one up if they did but oh well.
I can change the current song or take a call while on the bike without taking the of the road, just because I know where the press. This would not be possible with a touch screen. If I want to do stuff where a touch screen would come in handy I take out my phone anyway.
I mean the Android Wear watches can do this (so it's possible) but it's not always the most intuitive either.
* Original Pebble used greyscale version of same tech from Sharp.
* Available in 1 inch size.
* In production spring 2015.
They have a great product, but not 13K / 60 min great
I still find it hard to believe this numbers, but I might be wrong...
hth, adric
Maybe a smartwatch would be more useful to me if I was more popular and had calendar events to keep track of or more friends who contacted me regularly, but as your typical socially-isolated introvert software engineer, this thing seems to have limited utility.
I really like deciding if messages are worth my time without having to dig out my phone and I really like being able to send quick messages without fiddling about with unlocking and on-screen keyboards.
I realized that the physical habit that we've all developed of pulling our phones, unlocking , checking time or messages etc is a really really annoying physical habit.
It's disruptive and awkward to do, interrupts conversations or basic interactions with things in your environment.
A two handed fumbling time check/message check becomes a no handed operation with a smart watch.
I don't actually check my messages any more often, in fact less, since the notification is actually much more obvious then phones chirping in a pocket and my decision about whether to handle the information now or later is just much more quick and fluent.