By Eugene Kim After a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign that raised over $10 million, and nearly a year spent working out the kinks of a grass-roots effort to bring a consumer product to market, the Pebble Smartwatch ($150 direct) finally arrived earlier this year. We had some reservations at first, but nearly half a year later, with a number of updates under its belt, we've decided to revisit the Pebble and see how far it's come.
The physical design remains identical, while the primary features are largely unchanged. But what's new and most exciting is the burgeoning developer community surrounding the Pebble platform. It's still not the most consumer friendly device out there. But for those who are willing to tinker, the Pebble is now the most well-rounded smartwatch available, and it's good enough to be our first-ever Editors' Choice for this kind of product.
Physical Design
There's a certain elegance to the Pebble's simple and understated design. I think it's far better looking than, say, the squat and thick Martian Passport smartwatch. The plastic casing feels hollow, though, and the buttons along both sides of the watch face feel a bit mushy, preventing the watch from having a rock-solid feel. The included polyurethane band is decidedly understated, but you can swap in any standard 22mm watchband.
The Pebble is available in black, white, red, orange, or gray. On the left side is a single button that brings you to the Menu page, while the right side houses Up, Down, and Select buttons for navigation. Tapping any of the buttons activates the Pebble's backlight, and quick flicks of your wrist also light up the display, which is a nice touch. The watch face is customizable, and at the time of testing there were nine choices that ranged from a standard analog look to a futuristic dot matrix.
The 1.26-inch 144-by-168-pixel e-paper display isn't the clearest or sharpest, but it gets the job done. The e-paper should not be confused with E Ink displays you'll find on ebook readers like the Kindle Paperwhite. It doesn't have the same printed look as E Ink displays; instead it's more of a monochrome LCD. As such, viewing angle isn't a full 180 degrees and it becomes hard to read the watch when you look from an angle. The screen is also pretty reflective, and even with the backlight on it can be hard to read in bright outdoor light, unlike E Ink.
On the left side are three contact points that connect to the included charging cable magnetically. It's reminiscent of Apple's MagSafe connector, but the magnetic hold is a bit weaker—I could detach it simply by picking the watch up.
The Pebble has a waterproof rating of 5 ATM, which means it can be submerged up to 165 feet and has been tested in both fresh and salt water, so you can shower or swim with the watch. The battery is rated for more than seven days of use, and in my several days of testing, the battery never ran out, despite only charging once for about an hour. You can plug the included USB cable into a computer or a wall charger from a smartphone. The only things included in the box are the watch itself and the charging cable.
Android and iOS Experience
The primary purpose of the Pebble is to make push notifications accessible on your wrist, and the watch is compatible with both Android and iOS devices. You get the same basic functions on both platforms, but setup, notification settings, and features like music playback work differently on Android and iOS. For my tests, I used an Apple iPhone 5 and an Android-based HTC One X+.
When we first tested the Pebble, notifications were hit or miss on both platforms, especially if you rely on third-party apps. Now, thanks to enthusiastic third-party development, there are apps that work with your Pebble to push virtually any notification you can think of to your wrist. On top of that, third-party apps enable features like weather updates or sending canned text message replies right from your Pebble.
For both platforms, you must first download the Pebble app and pair your phone to the Pebble using Bluetooth. From there, however, the experiences diverge. On initial setup with Android, you need to enable Accessibility Services on your phone to get notifications pushed to the Pebble. During this process, you'll see a somewhat disconcerting message that reads: "Pebble can collect all of the text you type, except passwords. This includes personal data such as credit card numbers. It can also collect data about your interactions with the phone."
On Android the Pebble app now supports a wider array of third-party apps, but not all of them work right out of the box. For example, GoSMS Pro disables the default text messaging app's notifications to eliminate redundant notifications, and its own notifications are not supported in the Pebble app. Luckily, thanks to third-party developers, an app like Pebble Notifier can forward pretty much any notification to the smartwatch. Then there are third-party apps like Glance for Pebble, which can push weather updates to your wrist and allow you to send pre-set text replies to your most recent contacts. And for Tasker fans out there, there's even a PebbleTasker app that lets the Pebble trigger automated tasks on your smartphone.
On iOS, all Pebble notifications are set up through the system notification menu, not the Pebble app. That means, in theory, Pebble supports all apps that can push notifications. In the Notification area of iOS, you have to enable the Show Preview option and also set alert styles to Alerts, and not Banners. This must be done for every app you want notifications from. Much like on Android, there are now third-party apps that let you do more with your Pebble than simply push notifications.
In my tests, notifications were nearly instantaneous on both platforms and trigger a visual alert and a vibration on the watch itself. Pressing the middle button clears the notification, while the top and bottom buttons scroll through the notification. Call notifications show contact information, text messages show contact information and a preview of the message, and emails show sender, subject, and the first few lines of the body. The Martian Passport, to compare, only shows basic caller ID notifications on its tiny OLED screen. On the Pebble, though, there's no way to look back at a notification once you clear it from the watch face, and you can't control the length of time the message remains displayed.
Many of the bugs we encountered in our original review have been ironed out. Music control works far more smoothly now, and notifications are speedy and reliable. It's still not entirely perfect, though, and you'll have to be willing to deal with lost connections, crashing apps, and trial and error to really eke the most out of the Pebble.
Conclusion
As a category, the smartwatch is still in its infancy and despite its many improvements, the Pebble is still more for the avid geek than for the everyday consumer. The growing collection of third-party apps separates the Pebble from its smartwatch competitors and proves that the developer backing is there. Smartwatches can be useful for some, but they aren't for everyone—at least not yet. For now, though, if you're set on hopping on the smartwatch bandwagon, the Pebble is your best bet for its simplicity and growing feature set.
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