Reasons why I love the Pebble watch!

Wanted to write this review of my new watch, the pebble, now that I've had it for about 2 months.


For those of who are uninitiated, it all started on Kickstarter.  Kickstarter is a website where if a specific project can't get enough investors to do it, they'll put it on the website, and if enough people agree to fund it, then the project will get made.  Projects can be as varied as a movie or video game or art installation to watches or other consumer products.

Many successful projects have been launched off of Kickstarter. A recent notable one was the Veronica Mars movie.They asked for $2 million, and raised $5.7 million.

Now, there has been a lot of other types of watches that try to take you to a whole other level. Many people have improvised the ipod nano into a watch, which has since been discontinued by Apple.

However, there are rumors of the iWatch coming out this year by Apple, but nothing has been confirmed yet.

In the void, came the pebble.  Last year in April, they were unable to convince VC's to fund the company so that they could develop this watch, so they posted it on Kickstarter. It became a sensation. They were looking for $100,000.  They had 45 days to get that much to be funded.  They raised that in TWO hours! They raised $1 million in 28 hours after Engadget wrote a story about it. They ended up raising a total of $10.7 million from 69,000 backers and had to close the project early. I funded on April 18th.  They initially said we'd have them by the summer.  They were way off, about 7 months off.

I finally got mine in late March. My wife made the mistake of ordering white - while I got black. I don't think they're even shipping white just yet, so she changed it to a black and received hers a month ago.

Now, here's my review after having it for a couple of months.

1.  It allows me to leave my phone in my pocket longer and I'm not constantly checking it every time I feel it vibrate to see what the deal is. It pushes some notifications that show up on your lock screen to the watch.  So if you get a text message, then it'll vibrate your Pebble and you can look and see what it is and deem if its important to reply or just to leave it.  If you have the iPhone, then it only allows you to do email and text messages, and a handful of other apps, on the watch via bluetooth. My phone is jailbroken, so there's a special app called BTNotifier which is unbelievable for this.  It pushes ALL notifications that show up on your lock screen to your watch.  This can vary from a notification of rain from the Dark Sky app to an alert from the ESPN app of a game score to twitter/hootsuite/facebook notifications to anything else you have your phone set to.

I ended up turning off the email notifications because it would drain my battery significantly.  It took a couple weeks of tinkering with the notifications to get it right.  They say 7 days, but I've never seen that.  With me, depending on how active my notifications are on a given week, can be 3-4 days.  With email on, it'll be 1 day.

Funny story about facebook. I posted about it on facebook. Here's her reply. I took a picture of it and posted it on facebook in response.  BOOM!  She was blown away.

It comes in 5 colors, black, white, red, orange and grey.  But you can get a GadgetWrap for it for dozens of other colors for a few dollars.

The watch does feel a bit flimsy, however its held up well so far. Its somewhat waterproof enough to wash my kids in the bathtub, but not to go down 100 feet scuba diving.  However I did hear about someone who did do exactly that (by accident) and it worked just fine. Not sure I'd test it that way yet though, but its intriguing.

The best thing about the watch is that you can install different watch faces. There are currently more than 900 available on My Pebble Faces.  There are even some that are modeled after games, like tetris or caterpillar or others.  Some are unbelievable.

Here are a few just to show the capabilities of it.

This is my personal favorite - it shows it using the Star Trek motif. Really cool!

This on the right isn't quite enabled, but eventually will be - which can show the current weather if you program it right, and the time.




This watch gets a HUGE recommend from me for anybody with the iOS or Android platforms.  You have to download a free app from both to enable the watch and I hear on the Android side its even better.