Pebble started as a project on kickstarter with the original Pebble Smartwatch. Their kickstarter campaign got an amazing response putting the watch into production. The Pebble watch turned out to be a huge success because of its 7 day battery life and cross platform support. With competition from other wearables in the market, Pebble set out to make a new smartwatch.
The smartwatch maker has chosen kickstarter again to be the platform to launch the newest watch, the Pebble Time. The Pebble Time is an upgrade over the older Pebble and the Pebble Steel. As predicted earlier, the Pebble Time sports a color e-paper display and is much thinner than the earlier model. The new curved design wraps around the wrist making it comfortable to wear. The E-paper display is always on, keeps all the required information ready at a glance.
The Pebble time has a stainless steel body giving it that premium look just like the Pebble Steel. The device has a microphone on the side to reply to voice commands. Voice replies are restricted to certain apps on the iPhone while on Android devices it can be used by most apps.
Things might change after the launch of the Apple Watch but it is too early to say anything right now.
The device promises 7 days of battery life just like the old one. Its impressive that Pebble could manage the same amount of battery life inspite of a faster processor, colour display and voice recognition. The Pebble is also capable of fitness tracking but there are no heart rate sensors, Pebble have provided ports using which additional functionality can be added by changing bands. It’ll be interesting to see how Pebble go around doing this.
The new device also marks the debut of a new OS which is designed along with webOS developers. The new operating system follows a timeline format where it lists all tasks based on the time and not by the apps triggering it. The three buttons on the right are designed in a manner to adhere to the new OS philosophy. The top button shows past notifications, the middle one shows the present ones while the lower one shows upcoming events.
The kickstarter campaign by Pebble was highly successful with the campaign crossing the $500,000 goal in just 32 minutes. After a day the campaign currently exceeds 10 million dollars, quite an achievement for the Pebble Time. For the early adopters Pebble will be shipping the Time smartwatch in May 2015. It’ll be interesting to see how Time stands up against the competition.
