Pebble
When Pebble first shipped, it wasn’t just a smartwatch, it was the smartwatch— major tech players had only just begun dabbling in wrist computers. Today, Pebble has sold over 1 million of its smartphone-connected watches and the company is ready to move onto version 2.0.
The new watch is called Pebble Time. It has a newly developed 64-color e-paper screen and a more refined user interface that’s simpler to navigate. The $200 watch will go on sale in May.
The smartwatch space now is completely different than it was three years ago, when Pebble emerged out of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign. Now, there are scores of unique connected wrist products to choose from, from Android Wear devices like the Moto 360, to fitness-focused watches like the Fitbit Surge, to the upcoming juggernaut of the Apple Watch. Pebble has studied its competitors and listened to its vocal user base in order to create a new watch that addresses common issues and improves the utility of the device.
Pebble Time is 20 percent thinner than the original Pebble, with a Gorilla Glass face flanked by a stainless steel bezel. The display builds on the Pebble’s black and white e-paper screen with a 64-color version that offers good visibility in sunlight, without compromising on the device’s 7-day battery life. The company also added a waterproof microphone to the watch specifically for dictating messages—the device will translate your spoken words into text you can send, or you can just send the audio recording it makes over email or Facebook Messenger.
Like the original, it has a power button on one side, and three buttons on the opposite side for navigating up, down, and making selections. Its underside, like a growing number of wearables, is curved ergonomically to fit your wrist more naturally. Available in three colors, white, black, and red, it fits a standard 22mm watch strap, but has a quick-release mechanism so you can easily swap straps.
Compared to something like the aforementioned Moto 360, it doesn’t make a very striking impression. It’s nondescript, like a little TV strapped to your wrist (an old CRT, not one of those curved, bezel-less wonders we saw at CES this year). Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky seems aware of that, but he’s unfettered.
“The conversation around smartwatches is way too focused on the hardware,” Migicovsky told WIRED. “Not enough people are talking about what you actually do, can do, or should do with your watch.”
Migicovsky is perhaps most notably referring to the Apple Watch, for whom Apple has hired a growing team of fashion and fitness experts to guide its looks. Arriving in April, just prior to the Pebble Time’s shipping date of May, Apple’s wearable comes in a number of different watch and face combinations, including 18k gold models that could run upwards of $20,000. Pebble Time costs $200.
The Pebble team instead thinks that the software experience is where its latest watch will outshine the competition. Right now, Pebble’s digital interface is organized in terms of notifications, apps, and watch faces. It’s simple, but can get bogged down once you start accumulating numerous options for each interface category through Pebble’s internal app store. The new interface breaks down those virtual dividers and instead presents information based on a timeline of your day. Information that’s relevant to you—culled from the traffic, weather, sports, and movie apps you have installed on your watch—is displayed in the context of being in the past, present or future. You use the up and down buttons to browse the timeline.
“Once we thought of this, everything clicked,” Migicovsky said. “We could understand how you could do more and accomplish more with your watch without it becoming a complex, compound juggernaut.”
So if you’re scrolling into the past, you can see things like your step count, an email you missed, and the score from last night’s baseball game. In the present, you can see weather and traffic conditions, stats on current sports games, and call and message notifications. And in the future, you can see upcoming calendar events and information relating to them. Everything is laid out chronologically over a timeline of your day.
This idea is certainly interesting. Other smartwatches, like Android Wear, base the experience on a dumbed-down version of a smartphone, with apps and app icons that you tap through. Pebble, rather, is trying to do away with that type of navigation and instead surface the information gathered by those apps in a way that’s easy to tap through on your wrist. Notably, Pebble isn’t trying to roll in more advanced Fitbit-type fitness-tracking features. While it can track steps and runs, Pebble Time seems far more focused on information organization.
Instead of running a pre-order campaign on its website, Pebble is launching a Kickstarter for orders of its Time smartwatch. The decision isn’t funding-based—the company is profitable, and production of the watches is well underway. Rather, it’s a hat tip towards the community that gave the company its start in the first place, and a way to get the new product in front of Pebble’s core audience of early adopters, tinkerers, and technophiles.
The $200 Pebble Time will arrive this May.
No comments:
Post a Comment