Kudos to Pebble for being the one smartwatch producer who understands their product. A smartwatch is about checking the time, notifications, and other simple information at a glance. It should not require focused attention, it should not require much maintenance (daily charge, anyone?), and it should not be physically obtrusive. It's job is to be a seamless part of the fabric of your daily life.
I loved my pebble, but when it died I decided to try something else, one of the fancier watches. I bought the samsung gear because it has the longest battery life of the non-pebble market (2 days), it's waterproof, and it looks unobtrusive. It's fine, if you disable wifi, turn the screen brightness down, and disable most of the builtins. But then I basically have a pebble with a shitty battery.
My next watch will be a pebble, because they understand the point of a smart watch.
I like that they've staunchly resisted trying to compete with Android Wear / iWatches, but are sticking to their guns, even with their 3rd-gen products (most recent KS). Although a shiny full-colour watch might be an easier sell to the mass market, what Pebble produces is a superior device in almost every way that counts, and most people I know who wear them, myself included, are repeat customers (unlike most wearers of other smartwatches I know of). Long may they continue.
I have a garmin vivoactive smartwatch. It does most of what my pepple could do, but has a lot more. It has built in GPS and an amazing battery life.
I get 1 week with daily runs using the gps. I get 2 weeks when im not running. I actually just broke the screen while replacing the siding on my house. Reason being I wear it all the time. No need to charge it every day or so, so I forget about it.
Also sport watch makers who added notifications (most usage of a smart watch consists of those) to their devices are in this basket, while having a week or more battery life.
I don't need to order pizza from my wrist, despite Google/Apple and their marketing partners want me to.
This. I went from an original Pebble to a Garmin FR 235 and am completely satisfied. All I want is time, GPS, and notifications. Most watch apps are a novelty.
You should try a Garmin. I've got a Fenix 3 and it's got amazing battery life (I think I charge it once every two weeks), best gps on the market, integration with my phone to provide notifications, and it's an excellent fitness tracker to boot.
You forgot: "three times the price of a Pebble". Don't get me wrong, I bought a Fenix this year and I'm tickled as hell with it. But for $600 I damned well better be.
Now, that said, perhaps you just meant Garmins in general. There are a few choices with notifications and apps, IIRC, priced close to the Pebble.
Yeah, I started looking around the market for smart watches recently and a Pebble seemed like the only realistic option. Does the notifications perfectly, uses an eink display so you get maxed out battery life and don't have to do obnoxious things like tap your watch to see the time and the price is very right. Look at the price on most Android Wear watches or an Apple Watch and Pebble seems like a steal, especially when they go on sale for $150 for a Pebble Time. Pretty happy with the purchase so far.
The PTR is a bit of a different beast: they sacrificed battery life and water resistance for styling. The result is (IMHO) the best-looking smartwatch available. I've been drooling over the PTR ever since it came out (I have an OG Steel). When they announced the "limited-edition" polished gold model during their Kickstarter campaign, I jumped at it, even though it will effectively a previous-generation model (I also got a Pebble 2 to use as a "beater" watch).
I think that Pebble understands better than most that, to many people, a watch is a piece of jewelry more than it is a gadget or piece of equipment—hence why very expensive watches often have less functionality and reliability than a $10 quartz Casio. IMHO, the PTR and OG Steel are the only two smartwatches on the market that really appeal to this demographic.
I think that Pebble's challenge is that the traditional watch market seems to be shrinking—most of the people I know that wear an Apple Watch or Android Wear are people that wouldn't otherwise be wearing watches, and are more interested in the gadget aspect. Regardless of hardware, I don't think that Pebble will ever be able to compete in that market; Pebble support will always be an afterthought for app developers, compared to the ease of the native Apple and Android SDKs. In my experience, Pebble is already falling behind here—the quantity and quality of apps isn't that great (though perhaps I'm missing out on some good apps because my Steel is too old?). They do seem to realize this, and seem to be actively trying to build a larger developer community.
Also problematic for attracting developers: the Pebble app store has no built-in payment facilities, and developers must resort to clunky third-party solutions (such as KiezelPay) to sell paid apps and watch faces. This might not be Pebble's fault, though—I'm guessing that they're restricted by the requirements placed on them by Apple (and perhaps Google) to be in their stores.
One buys the PTR mostly for the looks since it lacks the battery life and water-proofing of its siblings. A good reason to buy a watch for and it looks mighty fine! [1]
Still, a daily charge is too often. I charge mine every other day. Do you have a watchface showing the seconds ticking by?
I had a Pebble Steel (the original Steel) and it was great for a while. But when they introduced version 3.0 (I think?), which brought on the new interface I pretty much stopped wearing it. I'm not a heavy calendar user, except when it comes to work. The 3.0 update was based on the idea that users love using the calendar to schedule their days.
That one primary change took away from the simplistic interface that the earlier versions had and made the Pebble more of a chore to keep up with. I didn't want to be bombarded with notifications about tasks/meetings at work, and I certainly didn't want them showing up in the main day view. But then that single today view was mostly unused and empty.
It's pretty unfortunate, IMO. I enjoyed using it up till then. I guess I could give it another chance but at this point the Original Steel has likely reached its end of life, at least with respect to new updates.
It's funny -- I was the exact opposite. I got the original Pebble Kickstarter Edition, and couldn't really find much of a use for it. Having notifications on my wrist was OK, but not mindblowing.
The addition of the timeline made _so much_ sense for me. I've barely taken the watch off since (except to upgrade to a Time Steel). It's extremely handy being able to just tap a button on my wrist in order to figure out if I need to be somewhere else. In fact, the biggest frustration has been that I need to press a button; I'd love it if a watch-face permanently showed me my next appointment.
As it turns out, this new update does just that, so, awesome.
Different strokes for different folks I guess :). I'm sorry that UX change hasn't been as good for you as it has been for me.
I don't mind 3.0 (although the timeline doesn't really do anything for me), I just hate the way their "privacy" policy makes something that should be personal and trustworthy (a wrist watch) into a Trojan horse to vacuum every scrap of personal information for them to later sell on.
Basically their privacy policy has some very disingenuous wording which makes it sound like they are respecting your privacy, while retaining the right to sell it to third parties.
The information they collect is listed quite openly in the first few sections of their privacy policy (link: https://www.pebble.com/legal/privacy ). It's pretty reasonable that the app needs local access to some of this information, less defensible that it accesses other information (geolocation information, unique device ID numbers, time spent in other apps on your phone?!) and not defensible IMO that they need to hoover it up off your phone. At least they're open about it.
Note that they "maintain log files in identifiable form for a period of time for troubleshooting and other purposes" - this is stored in identifiable form indefinitely.
The kicker is under "3. Information sharing and disclosure."
> As we continue to develop our business, we may sell, buy, merge or partner with other companies or businesses, or sell some or all of our assets. In such transactions, user information may be among the transferred assets.
Emphasis mine. Note the way this starts as if it's talking about mergers or acquisitions, then sneaks in "or we might just sell your information to anyone". This bullet point completely negates any restrictions on what they do with your data.
(Throughout an 8-email exchange with one of their lawyers, they managed to completely avoid commenting on any issue I raised, despite ample opportunity to set me straight if I was simply misinterpreting the policy. I'm left with no choice but to assume my interpretation is correct and they have no respect whatsoever for their customers' privacy.)
I was pissed enough about it to write my own Android app for it (I'd been meaning to play with Android dev for a while). It covers the basics (notifications, music player control, install/uninstall apps and watchfaces) but I never got around to more advanced stuff (Phone app integration, phone-side JS, interpreting the streaming data etc.) and they stopped documenting new features sometime around the release of 3.0 so no health integration.
I've been meaning to tidy it up and post it somewhere, maybe this will give me some motivation.
Shameless plug: on android you can use gadgetbridge ( https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge ). Supports pebble (and miband) and is a complete replacement of the official app (you can setup the pebble after unboxing, upgrade firmwares, install apps and language packs).
Functionalities are only limited by the lack of the internet access permission - it was left out on purpose - so things like voice dictation and some apps/watchfaces that need network access do not work.
It is available on fdroid if you don't want to build it yourself!
<insert thoughts about the GPL being the best fit for truly free/open source projects, left out because it would have probably started an off-topic flamewar/>
Just for your information: our code implements the pebble protocol over BT classic, that is not allowed to run in background on iOS. The new devices (pebble 2 and pebble time 2) will use the same BLE/GATT protocol on android and iOS though: we will have to implement that too (uff ;-) ) but it will ease the life of a dev willing to port it to iOS.
Not sure what taneq was referring to - but I was very unpleasantly surprised the first time I got the "Pebble Health This Week" email showing me my sleep and step tracking for the last week from their cloud service.
That's 100% not something I'd ever intentionally sign up to "share" - which means they either opted me in without consent, or used a dark pattern to trick me into consenting to something I wouldn't have if it'd been clear it meant my watch/app was going to send all my activity/movement data to "someone" with no way for me to know what they were gonna use it for or who they were gonna share it with.
I didn't cancel my Kickstarter pledge (my third, I've got the original and the Time) - but I _very_ seriously considered it (and still might just flip it on eBay when it arrives)...
1) They accept your order without even a mention of the T&C, EULA or privacy policy (at least as far as the checkout, I'm not putting my card number in to check for a popup during the payment process).
2) When you receive the product and go to install the app, in tiny print below the signup form they declare that by signing up, you accept the T&C. (This text is visible here: https://youtu.be/GAYL034-j0I?t=1m19s)
3) By accepting the T&C, you agree to the privacy policy linked from within the T&C.
Pebble health data can be synced by gadgetbridge (see my other comment), but we have to adapt to every fw version that changes the message format. This has not yet happened for firmware 4 as we get it when it's publicly available like everybody else.
The data synced by gadgetbridge never leaves your device (unless you export it, that is :-) )
I don't wear my Pebble much, but your comment has reminded me that the app has read/write access to all the health data on my iPhone. It could have been secretly siphoning that data and uploading it for months without me knowing.
I'm not much of a timeline user but the old design of using the up/down buttons to switch watch faces was obviously not the best use of the primary interface. I'm surprised that is what you enjoyed best about it.
It's hard to be disappointed with Pebble on the software side -- they've continued to make smart solid improvements with each release and backport as much as possible to the older devices. There have been a few missteps but nothing too ridiculous.
Oh, I didn't enjoy using the buttons to swap watchfaces. I typically used a single one throughout the day and occasionally would switch to an app, like the MLB app/watchface, as needed (very rarely).
I enjoyed the simplistic interface where I could see current time/day/temp/weather and get notifications as they came up. It was nearly perfect for my usecase except that for iOS they never implemented app filtering (for deciding which of my phone apps' notifications would come through the watch).
I guess I don't understand. OS 3.0 didn't change that functionality of the watch in any way. You still have a watch face and notifications as they come up. That's primarily how I use it as well. What changed for you?
> I had a Pebble Steel (the original Steel) and it was great for a while. But when they introduced version 3.0 (I think?), which brought on the new interface I pretty much stopped wearing it. I'm not a heavy calendar user, except when it comes to work. The 3.0 update was based on the idea that users love using the calendar to schedule their days.
The reason I stopped using the original Pebble Steel was due to "screen tearing" issue. It happened on my watch before the warranty expired but I had no knowledge it was a hardware issue a few months after the warranty expired. Pebble refused to replace it and rather offered me a discount on their new products.
I feel it is completely disingenuous as they want to be put in more money into Pebble for something that is inherently a hardware issue. I am quite disappointed at Pebble. The worst part was that I had a sentiment value attached to the watch. It was a gift by my dissertation supervisor on my Ph.D.
I recently got a Pebble Time Round and love it. Never wanted a watch before.
Few watches provide vibrating alarms, but Pebble's helps keep me on track during the day without disturbing everyone around me with beeps. I wrote a tiny app to vibrate at different points of a meeting so I know how much time is left without boorishly checking a clock, and the development experience was smooth.
With the Android Light Flow app, I can control which contacts for which apps can send notifications, which helps keep me aware of things I need to be aware of without being a firehose of alerts.
Starting with the firmware released in July it caused my iphone to lock up for seconds at a time in any other application. It took me a long time to narrow it down to the pebble app, but that was definitely the culprit.
Before I figured out that it was the pebble, I thought it was bluetooth itself - because when I turned off the bluetooth, the phone acted normally. Which sucked because I use about 6 bluetooth devices with my phone. Two cars, headphones, and indoor/outdoor home entertainment systems.
6+ with always the latest iOS if any of you pebble people are reading this. It's been a nightmare for the past two months, what was otherwise an absolute brilliant experience up until that point. This is a pebble time kickstarter edition.
The bluetooth stack on iOS isn't terribly stable. I used to blame the Pebble for it's disconnects until I discovered that it corresponds with the whole stack going out.
I've never had a problem with my phone locking up and neither has my wife but some people seem to have constant problems and some none at all. Bluetooth has never struck me as a particularly stable technology in general.
Pebble has been working on going full Bluetooth LE and dropping the regular Bluetooth connection. I'm not sure what the progress is on this (or if they abandoned it) but it would probably improve stability and battery life.
I loved my Pebble, but Android Wear offers such a superior experience when it comes to notification management. The only thing I use my watch for is processing incoming notifications (such as liking a tweet, archiving an email, replying to a Slack message, etc.) The 4.0 release notes hint at the power of the Android notification system, and it baffles me that Pebble still doesnt fully integrate with it.
I'm afraid that Android Wear watches will improve on the battery life and outdoor visibility front faster than Pebble will improve on the software front.
Have you given "Notification Center for Pebble" a try? It bypasses Pebble's native notification system by using a custom watchapp and a phone companion app. Compared to Pebble's native notification system, Notification Centre has a ton of different customisation settings globally and/or per app (e.g. font, text size, vibration patterns) and also supports Android Wear actions on notifications.
I'd still prefer an Android Wear watch so I can do this natively, but until one comes out with a decent battery life and at a reasonable price point, this works for now.
They can increase battery life by making the watch bigger and heavier. Don't laugh -- okay, do laugh, but it's surprising what people will put up with. We used to think that 6" phones were ridiculous.
Yeah, on the Pebble Time Steel it lasts me 7-8 days. Before I activated health activity tracking, I'd get to the order of 9-10 days on average. I find this highly impressive.
Pebble can do all the notification actions (replying to slack, archiving an email, etc) that you mentioned! Any action that shows up in the notification shade on Android gets sent to Pebble. Using canned messages or the microphone to respond. We added support for all 'Wear' type actions late in 2015. Are there specific actions that you feel are missing on Android?
I somehow think that Pebble is underutilized because of a bad price-performance point, which they are attempting to make up for by positioning it as a high-end watch, not a modern smartwatch.
Related to this, are there any other low-end (in terms of hardware; I'm thinking something cheap and Chinese) smart watches, which allow uploading custom apps to the watch itself?
I think this is a very interesting idea since now some of the heavy users really want to keep their data to themselves. There might be a market for these
Just downloaded the update. It managed to crash the first time round (also really first time Pebble watch crashing on me). I'm guessing the watchface wasn't updated to work properly with the new timeline preview ("Glances") - I'll debug it if it crashes again.
So far I'm very happy they've updated the Pebble Health watchapp - it's finally usable now (and quite nice), as it display daily stats for last week in nice bar graphs. Also I have an impression that Timeline is a bit more responsive/faster now.
I'm pretty happy with what Pebble is doing (though Health interface on the mobile app could use some further rework to provide more/better information). Can't wait for the Time 2 watches to start shipping!
Yeah, mine crashes when I press down. After three crashes it seems to have gotten into "factory mode"?
Doesn't seem like they put much fault tolerance in.
EDIT: Tried the Enigma watchface that came by default, it doesn't crash. I'll use this for now, but that was still quite disappointing. Contacted the developer.
I had the same issue and rebooting my watch (not hard reset, just reboot [press and hold the back and select (middle button)] for 10 seconds until the pebble logo shows) fixed the problem. Just in case anyone else has this.
I really hope Pebble is able to stick around for a while. I got an original Pebble and stopped wearing it after a couple of months, but picked up a Pebble Time Round on a whim and have been wearing it solidly.
I know it doesn't have all the features of an Android Wear or Apple Watch, but it does most of what I need (notifications and music control) and looks absolutely fantastic - I receive compliments on the watch even before people find out it's a smartwatch, and they're usually blown away when they find out what it can do.
The recent health additions make sense - while they don't blow me away, getting a step tracker for free is no bad thing.
With regards to smartwatches , the Chinese have done a great job at reducing the prices(as always).
But the software isn't great(unless it's wear). So I'm curious - why does nobody release a decent smartwatch is , that supports apps, and can run well on a cheap($50) watch ?
At that price point, many new users might be interested.
The problem with smartwatches today is it's still unclear what type of apps they should run. So you might be able to create super smartwatch that's just as powerful as a smartphone but is that what people want?
Besides fitness tracking, what's the benefit you find for wearing a watch inn the pool? I used to wear my polar in the pool with my strap, but when I got a Garmin a few years ago it couldn't reliably track my heart rate anyway, and the GPS went wacky from being on the end of my arm when I was out on ocean swims.
Stroke count, pool lap times, if devices has indoor swimming support. Of course this is moot for casual swimmers.
Regarding outdoor swimming support, the device has to support openwater swimming, because then it contains algorithms to smooth out the GPS signal (it goes off when arm goes inside water). Other option is putting the device below the swimming cap, or a swimming bouy that you drag with you.
Heart rate is a different beast. Your Polar worked below water because it used their own proprietary signal that can be recorded under water. Garmin uses ANT+ which doesn't work there.
They do have a special HR belt called HR Swim (and HR TRI for outside swimming), that pairs to device, then records HR on its own while swimming. After workout it uploads the recording to the watch which combines both data together. Only top triathlon devices support those.
I'm a competitive (masters) swimmer and I've always thought it would be nice to track average lap times etc., but then realised that without this being correlated to the set being done would actually be a total gimmick as you couldn't derive anything useful from it.
I just wanted basic fitness tracking (heart rate, active/rest periods, estimated calories burned) that I could use both on traditional workouts like running/walking/biking and swimming. So one platform instead of land-based workouts being tracked and swimming going into a blackhole.
I don't do it competitively, just basic maintenance and general wellbeing.
Finally, it being a watch is a bonus since I will not have to remember to put it on before starting.
Meh, no API for direct access to Bluetooth (they promised for the end of last year on the Pebble Time Kickstarter).
I still use a lot my Pebble because, unlike almost everything else, you can swim and sleep with it (because has enough battery life). But the Samsung Gear Fit 2 does look tempting and is the only non-Pebble that can also do both.
There's libpebble2 which pretty comprehensively covers the basic features if you want to talk to the watch yourself (https://github.com/pebble/libpebble2/) - or is that not what you meant?
I loved my pebble, but when it died I decided to try something else, one of the fancier watches. I bought the samsung gear because it has the longest battery life of the non-pebble market (2 days), it's waterproof, and it looks unobtrusive. It's fine, if you disable wifi, turn the screen brightness down, and disable most of the builtins. But then I basically have a pebble with a shitty battery.
My next watch will be a pebble, because they understand the point of a smart watch.