Even before the Pebble smartwatch was available to buy, Pebble had caught the imagination of the geekerati with their Kickstarter campaign that raised over ten million dollars. It gave them visibility, but also put the pressure on to deliver a compelling product. Now the Pebble smartwatch is available, has the Palo Alto based start-up trumped the might of larger manufacturers such as Sony (with the SmartWatch 2) and Samsung (with their Galaxy Gear) to deliver a practical smartwatch?
Let's start with the hardware, because the Pebble watch makes a number of different design decisions to the big boys which all have a positive impact on the watch, and none more so than the screen. It's one of the smaller screens on a smartwatch, at just 144x168 pixels. It's also monochrome. Strictly speaking it's a transreflective LCD screen with a backlight, and while many people have labelled it as an e-ink screen (similar to eBook readers such as the Amazon Kindle) it's important to stress that Pebble is marketing the screen as e-paper, not e-ink. It does not suffer the slow response rates or shadowing that you see on eBook readers, and will happily run at 30 fps with no blurring if an application demands it.
The main takeaway is that the screen draws significantly less power than the OLED or Super AMOLED color screens used by the competition.
That contributes to the long battery life of the Pebble. It's quoted as running between five and seven days, although this is naturally dependant on the applications and watch faces that you decide to run. By design, Pebble has tried to stop you watching your charge level by removing the battery indicator from the watch until it becomes low. I've been charging every three to four days, which I put down to heavy use of watch faces that feature a lot of animation and many stopwatch/timer apps while cooking and working around the house.
What's never happened to me is the Pebble watch running out of power. The monochrome screen might lose points for not being colorful, but Pebble earns back far more kudos in battery life than it loses for going monochrome.
The Pebble also forgoes a touchscreen, instead relying on four buttons around the edges of the watch. On the left of the screen is the 'back' button, while the right side has three buttons, a cursor up, cursor down, and a forward/choose button. These all require a positive action press, and I doubt you'll trigger any of them by accident.
The smaller dimensions of the screen also reduce the overall footprint of the watch. While it's impossible to hide the size of the Sony or Samsung smartwatches, the Pebble, while still oversized, is not that much larger than some of the more ambitious fashion watches available. Sporting a regular 22mm sized band, the Pebble hardware does not look 'geeky', although if you've chosen a watch face that's a bit out there you'll probably see people taking a second glance at your wrist.
As well as the Pebble watch, the retail packaging also ships with the USB charging cable. The Pebble does not use microUSB to charge, but a custom magnetic connector with two charging pins. I suspect this approach has been taken partly to reduce the size of the components in the watch, but also to make the waterproofing of the watch an easier task to accomplish. A microUSB port may have required the use of plastic gurney flaps, which is a workable albeit inelegant solution. This way, the Pebble can stay as a sealed unit and not worry about forgetful users washing their hands and breaking the watch.
The USB cable is only for charging, all your communication with the Pebble watch will be over the Bluetooth connection on your smartphone. The Pebble supports Android and iOS devices with Bluetooth 2.1, and can also support the low energy Bluetooth 4.0 profile. The core Pebble app is available in both the Apple iTunes App Store and in Google Play, and will allow you to update the firmware on the watch, as well as provide the ability install watch faces, apps, and send notifications from your smartphone's applications to the Pebble screen.
Pebble's hardware makes some smart decisions in terms of hardware, that much is clear. But the deeper question ('is the Pebble a practical smartwatch?') needs closer examination.
I've had a Pebble smartwatch on my wrist now for four weeks, and in that time I've grown to love the watch. What I find interesting is that much of the value for me has not been in the out of the box experience, but in the third party ecosystem that has sprung up around the watch that has impressed me.
While the Pebble watch does have the ability to run applications, its primary objective is as a notifying application, letting you know what messages and alerts you are receiving from your online services, apps, and notifications on your smartphone. Once they hit your wrist, you can decide if you want to pull out your smartphone and deal with the alert.
Let's take the subject of notifications on Android as one example. The Pebble application will send notifications about incoming calls and texts, calendar reminders, emails (from the default app or from a Gmail account), Google Talk and Hangouts, Google Voice, Facebook, and WhatsApp. That's already a significant number of apps integrated into the handset, and out-notifies the efforts from Sony and Samsung. But pick up one of many third-party notifier applications that can use Pebble's Android app as a gateway to the watch, and you get even more flexibility. If an alert is sent to the notification tray in Android, these can optionally be relayed to the Pebble watch.
Which means that alongside the default notifications, my watch can also flash up the newsflash headlines from the BBC News application, messages arriving to my LinkedIn account, people favoriting pictures on Instagram, comments being posted to my blog, and of course the alert from Candy Crush Saga that I have the full range of five lives again).
The important thing to note here is that none of these apps have anything specific in their code to work with the Pebble software... but work they do. To me that is the key advantage to the Pebble over any other smartwatch I've tested. It uses Android's open nature to best effect, and adds functionality to countless applications without having to go out and ask each developer to put in a hook from the Pebble SDK.
The same is true on iOS devices. Pebble's last major update to their iOS client tied into the Notification Center of iOS 7. If an application sends a notification, Pebble can pick it up and send it to your watch face. Again, there's no requirement for iOS apps to hook into the Pebble system, Pebble uses the information available to create the best experience possible for the users.
Pebble is more than notifications though, you have Pebble applications. These break down into two main categories. The first are the traditional idea of applications, with stopwatches, countdown timers, and the occasional game available to play already available. The second version of the Pebble OS is currently in beta, which allows apps to store data on the watch, access data from the accelerometers, log data for later upload to a handset (useful for fitness apps) and run JavaScript directly on the handset. There's a lot of promise here of more apps and possibilities, but even now small apps are able to enhance the experience.
The second category of apps will be more familiar to smartwatch users, and these are the alternative watch faces. The Pebble has thee watch faces that ship with the watch, including the text based watch face that appears in the majority of the marketing, but the community that has sprung up around the Pebble have been busy. There are over 2,200 different watch faces on the mypebblefaces.com website, while the website that helps users create their own custom watch faces, watchface-generator.de, has seen over 80,000 faces created.
Some of these are little more than a picture with a small digital clock, while others are inventive ways of displaying the time, from binary read outs and clocks with historical designs, to analogue clocks that run backwards and a reproduction of the Star Trek LCARS interface for the Next Generation geeks.
The Pebble reminds me of the early days of the PDA, with many limitations in the hardware and software being overcome by smart hacking. The limitations of size and interface are obvious, while others are down to the hardware design (the Pebble watch currently has space for just eight third party apps, be they watch faces or apps accessed from the Pebble menu). But the small Pebble team are doing their best to harness the community, get them involved, and improve the product through their efforts. That's paying off.
Should you buy the Pebble? If you're in the market for a smartwatch, it certainly has to be one of the watches to consider. Of the current watches on the market, it is the one that I would buy for myself. As for recommending it, anyone looking at the Pebble has to remember that it is on the cutting edge of wearable technology, and it's not going to be perfect. But it's the smartwatch that I feel has the most promise, will have the most development and support, and will never be a chore to charge and wear.
Right now, the Pebble is the only smartwatch that feels like a genuine product, as opposed to being a technology demonstration. It works in the real world, it can have a positive impact on how you interact with your smartphone and the internet at large, and I would find it very hard to look at my wrist and not see a Pebble.
Disclosure: Pebble provided a Pebble Smartwatch loan for review purposes.
