Pebble Smartwatch: Early Impressions (Week 1)

In case you guys are unfamiliar with the crowd source project funding website called kickstarter, you guys should check out the website. Kickstarter is described as

"a funding platform for creative projects. Everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of ambitious, innovative, and imaginative projects that are brought to life through the direct support of others."

I kickstarted the project on April 18th, 2012. After a long wait and 30 something kickstarer project updates later...it's finally here! I got my Pebble last Monday and thought I'd share some of my first thought impressions about the device. First of all, this is coming from a person that almost never wears watches. Last time I put on a watch was probably 3 or 4 years ago. I've just never found the appeal to them when I have a smartphone to tell time as well. With that being said let's delve into the details of the device first.

First off for kickstarter backers the device could have been yours for a pledge of $99 (black watch) for early pledgers, $115 for a black watch, $125 for a watch of your choice from their color selection and then the Pebble smartwatch will be available to those that didn't kickstart it for $150. It's not too late to pick up this device!


Specs: 

• 1.26-inch 144 × 168 pixel black and white ePaper-display with backlight
• Vibrating motor
• Magnetometer
• Bluetooth 4 (currently not active yet)
• Three-axis accelerometer
• Water resistant to 5 ATM
• And must of all, watch faces!

The device can pair with your Android or iOS powered smartphone and get notifications of incoming: texts, calls, emails, facebook notifications, and more! It can even control your music that is playing on your phone, which is one of the things I found most useful. The ability to go bike riding or jogging and change songs without having to fumble through your phone is great.

Packaging: 

 

The packaging is quite nice and reminds me of the kindle packaging. A very easy to open, eco-friendly container that houses the watch and the usb charging cable. The packaging is super easy to open, just tear this flap all the way down and you're into the heart of it all.










Now I wasn't sure if I was suppose to charge it all the way or not, but I just got right into turning the device on and using it. Even without charging it it still lasted me about 2 days of use. Even while paired with my phone. Since then I've only charged it once completely. 










Initial Thoughts:

After about a week I'm really impressed by the watch. Now not everything is all good. For example, they still need to improve the software on the device and the corresponding smartphone apps. The watch needs a notification center or some way of looking at past notifications and the apps need to improve how apps that you can download are sorted. There also is a weird bug that I'm not sure why it's being caused by sometimes it just stops communicating with my device and I have to hold both the back and select button to reboot the device and repair the device. I'm sure the kinks are being worked on.  

 Despite those few quirks that the device seems to have I highly recommend this device if you're looking for a better way to listen to music while exercising or if you're like me and you work at a place where you can't be pulling out your phone all the time to be checking who just texted you. With the Pebble, a quick glance at the watch to see who the text is from and you can quickly decide if it's something important that needs to be attended to or not. I just ordered a black stainless steel watch band for it too (any 22 mm watch band should work for the watch). So I'm waiting for that to arrive. More pictures will be available as soon as I get the watch band!