Pebble Review

In April of 2012, a Kickstarter project was launched by a company aiming to create an electronic watch that served as a companion to your smartphone. A month later, the project exceeded it’s funding goal by over 100%, closing at over $10 million in pledges. Happily, I was one of the over 68,000 people that pledged. I received my Pebble about a month ago or so and I’ve been wearing it ever since.

The watch itself is fairly simple, a rectangular unit with an e-ink display, four buttons, and a rubberized plastic strap. The screen resolution is 144×168, plenty of pixels for some fairly impressive detail. The watch communicates with your mobile phone (Android or iPhone only) via a bluetooth connection. All software updates and app installation occurs over the bluetooth connection. There is a 3-axis accelerometer as well a a pretty standard vibrating motor for silent alerts.

According to the official Pebble FAQ, battery life is 7+ days on a single charge, but this depends on your overall use of the device. The more alerts your receive, the more the backlight comes on, and the more apps you use on the device, the shorter your battery life.

Pebble is still in the process of building the initial run of watches for backers. Black watches, being the majority of the orders, were built first. Other colors are coming online in more recent weeks. Pebble has a website where interested parties can track how many pebbles have been built and shipped.

I’ve been pretty impressed with the watch thus far. Pebble has been fairly responsive to inquiries I’ve made, and they seem dedicated to making sure they have a top quality product. Of course, as is typical on the Internet, not everyone is happy. There seem to be a lot of complaints about communication, how long it’s taking to get watches, and about the features themselves.

It’s hard to say whether these complaints have any merit, though. For starters, I can’t imagine it’s a simple task to design and build 68,000 watches in a short period of time. And to complicate matters further, it seems that many backers of Kickstarter projects don’t understand the difference between being a backer and being a customer.

When you back a Kickstarter project, you’re pledging money to help start the project. As a “reward” for contributing, if the project is successful, you are entitled to whatever the project owners have designated for your level of contribution. The key part of this being, if the project is successful. Some projects take longer than others, and times often slip. That said, I’ve only been part of one Kickstarter that has failed, and even that one is being resurrected by other interested parties.

But there are some legitimate complaints, some that can be addressed, and others that likely won’t. For instance, I’ve noticed that with recent firmware releases, the battery life on my watch had dropped considerably. Based on communication with the developers, they are aware of this and are actively working to resolve it. I’m not sure what the problem is, exactly, but I’m confident they’ll have it fixed in the next firmware update.

The battery indicator is a source of frequent discussion. Right now, there’s no indicator of battery life until the battery is running low. And that indicator doesn’t show on the watchface, it only shows when you are in other menus. This, in my opinion, is a poor UI choice. I’d much rather see a battery indicator option available for the watchface itself.

Menu layout was also a frequent source of frustration for users. In previous firmware releases, you had to actively go to the watchface you wanted. Recent releases changed this so that the watch was the default view and other screens were chosen as needed. The behavior of the navigation buttons on the watch were also updated to reflect this new choice.

So Pebble continues to improve over time. It’s an iterative process that will take some time to get right. I’m eager to see what future releases will bring. Next week, Pebble is scheduled to release the watch SDK, allowing users, for the first time, to start adding their own customizations to the watch.

The Pebble watch has a lot of potential. As the platform matures, I’m hoping to see a number of features I’m interested in come to fruition. Interaction between Pebble and other apps on iPhone devices would be a welcome addition. I would love to see an actigraphy app that uses the Pebble for sleep monitoring. From what I’ve read, sleep monitoring is even more accurate when the monitor is placed on the sleeper’s wrist. Seems like a perfect use for the Pebble.

I’d also like to see more of an open SDK, allowing users such as myself to write code for the Pebble. While I’m aware of the closed nature of the iPhone platform itself, it is still possible to add applications to the Pebble itself. I can’t wait to see what others build for this platform. Given a bit of time, I think this can grow into something even more amazing.

iPhone… A revolution?

So the cat’s out of the bag. Apple is already in the computer business, the music business, the video/TV business, and now they’re joining the cell phone business. Wow, they’ve come pretty far in the last 7 years alone.

So what is this iPhone thing anyway? Steve says it’s going to revolutionize phones, and that it’s 5 years ahead of the current generation. So does it really stack up? Well, since it’s only a prototype at this point, that’s a little hard to say. The feature set is impressive, as was the demonstration given at Macworld. Most of the reviews I’ve read have been pretty positive too.

So let’s break this down a little bit and see what we have. The most noticeable difference is the complete and total lack of a keypad/keyboard. In fact, there are a grant total of four buttons on this thing, five if you count up/down volume as two. And only one of them is on the actual face of the device. This may seem odd at first, but the beauty here is that any application developed for the iPhone can arbitrarily create their own buttons. How? Why?

Well, the entire face of the phone is one giant touchscreen. In fact, it’s a multi-touch screen meaning that you can touch multiple points on the screen at the same time for some special effects such as zooming in on a picture. This means that developers are not tied to a pre-defined keypad and can create what they need as the application is run. So, for instance, the phone itself has a large keypad for dialing a telephone number. In SMS and email mode, the keypad is shrunk slightly and becomes a full keyboard.

As Steve pointed out in his keynote, this is very similar to what happens on a PC today. A PC application can display buttons and controls in any configuration it needs, allowing the user to interact with it through use of a mouse. Now imagine the iPhone taking the place of the PC and your finger taking the place of the mouse. Your finger is a superb pointing device and it’s pretty handy too.

The iPhone runs an embedded version of OSX, allowing it access to a full array of rich applications. It should also allow developers a access to a familiar API for programming. While no mention of third-party development has been made yet, you can bet that Apple will release some sort of SDK. The full touchscreen capabilities of this device will definitely make for some innovative applications.

It supports WiFi, EDGE, and Bluetooth 2.0 in addition to Quad-Band GSM for telephony. WiFi access is touted as “automatic” and requires no user intervention. While this is likely true in situations where there is no WiFi security in place, the experience when in a secure environment is unknown. More details will likely be released over the coming months.

Cingular is the provider of choice right now. Apple signed an exclusivity contract with Cingular, so you’re tied to their network for the time being. Being a Cingular customer myself, this isn’t such a bad thing. I like Cingular’s network as I’ve had better luck with it than the other networks I’ve been on.

In addition to phone capabilities, the iPhone is a fully functional iPod. It syncs with iTunes as you would expect, has an iPod docking connector, and supports audio and video playback. One of the cooler features is the ability to tip the iPhone on it’s side to enable landscape mode. The iPhone automatically switches to landscape mode when it detects the change in pitch. Video must be viewed in landscape mode.

So it looks like the iPhone has all of the current smartphone capabilities and then some. But how will it do in the market? The two models announced at Macworld are priced pretty high. The 4 Gig model will run you $499 for the 4 Gig model, and $599 for the 8 Gig. This makes the iPhone one of the more expensive phones on the market. However, it seems that Apple is betting that a unified device, phone/iPod/camera/Internet, will be worth the premium price. They may be right, but only time will tell.

UPDATE : According to an article in the New York Times, Jobs is looking to restrict third-party applications on the iPhone. From the article :

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

So it sounds like Apple is interested in third-party apps, but in a controlled manner. This means extra hoops that third-party developers need to jump through. This may also entail additional costs for the official Apple stamp of approval, meaning that smaller developers may be locked out of the system. Given the price point of the phone, I hope Apple realizes the importance of third-party apps and the impact they have. Without additional applications, Apple just has a fancy phone with little or no draw.