Gadgetory

I'm Scott Steinem just about a year ago smartwatch emerged which a lot of people were talking about the Pebble watch and it was interesting because hey this is a watch that ran apps and attempted to be a little smarter and was the first of its kind that was really defining a landscape that's pretty well known as wearable tech wearable tech is not really something that you necessarily want to buy into well now all of a sudden babble has a new watch the pebble steel here it is on this wrist and it's available now now what does this bring to the table you saw it at CES and I've been using it for the past few days and it's not a revolution in wearable tech but it does two things really well it redesigns the watch and it also finally creates an app store and a way to manage those apps that before you'd have to hunt around for now does that add up to something that's a revolution on your wrist well it depends on what you're looking for it's not something futuristic in that next-gen type feeling compared to what we saw last year but if you're looking for a watch that's smarter and a watch that's better design the pebble steel is about as good as it gets right now and it's probably the first SmartWatch you'd actually want to buy you are gonna pay an extra hundred dollars for the steel however if you like this design it's pretty snazzy it's all metal well then it's worth it but you know $150 does get you the original pebble that's still out there and both of them run the new app and the new app store and run new sdk 2.0 created apps which were more advanced that came before I'll get to that in a second the design you know it again it's all about style it's shaved down there's a gorilla glass screen which creates less glare on the watch face and makes the the watch in the numbers pop more in daylight you can still wear the pebble steel in the shower it's five atm water-resistant just like the previous model it also comes with the leather wristband in the box now that's not water resistant you can swap them out and pick which one you want kind of justifies the price a little bit more it comes in glossy metal or it comes in this matte black design and there are no other new real features in this other than a little glowing LED light so when you plug it in in charge you now know when it's done charging and that could be used for other apps and notifications it still vibrates it's got the same button layout three buttons here one button here and it feels smaller although the screen is exactly the same size as before it's the body that's different now what else is new the apps the apps are all completely new but that's available to you if you get the steal or you get the original pebble we've heard about these apps for a while there are now partner apps like Yelp ESPN some big name quantities Foursquare are available now what they do well you know don't get your hopes up too much because what this is still is a black and white display not a touchscreen and there were three buttons over here they handle all of your interactivity Foursquare allows you to check-in anywhere you want the Yelp app actually allows you to browse restaurants that are nearby ESPN shows you sports scores but not detailed stats yet so it's helpful and it's fun but it almost feels more like the idea of the Palm Pilot years ago if you were to take Palm apps shrink them down onto a watch and make them connected with your data connection and your phone in your pocket that's cool but it's just not going to be something that's going to go into the next gen and allow you full touch of interactivity right now there are some other fitness apps and some games there are a bunch of things already on the pre-release version that I looked at of the pebble app store and they were all free although a lot of them invited you to download a necessary partner app that was available on the actual Apple App Store that cost a couple of dollars so some of them had some strings attached but a lot of them the watch faces and some of these other apps you do get all right out of the box which is a nice plus the other positive thing about the pebble in 2014 as compared to last year is that the experience on iOS and Android feels very much the same a lot of the apps work perfectly interchangeably across both platforms there are some apps that only work in Android though that I found but a lot of them work on both iOS and Android and you can get now finally the same types of notifications you can tie-in anything from Twitter Facebook anything gets a notifications on your phone pops up here that was available before but now you've got these apps that not only can mirror what's on your phone but allow you to interact a little more at the buttons maybe to check in maybe to scroll or tap through into certain elements that tie in here but it doesn't get its own internet connection obviously it still pairs with your phone but the amount of fun that it supports this is probably one of the best supportive watches out there if you want a smart watch iOS Android and the number of Android phones it supports is a lot better than some of the more restrictive ones that we've seen certainly like the Samsung Galaxy gear but even some other ones that needed Bluetooth 4.0 to connect this is not that you can connect with a variety of other phones to the App Store also has some nice features in it that allow you to finally manage the apps on your pebble you can pull them off and put them on but there are only eight memory slots in the pebble steel just like the original pebble that means eight apps or app or watch faces anything you put on here only eight that's pretty limiting you will find you'll run out of that really fast you can easily swap them out from your phone wherever you are at a bus stop or wherever you might be so it doesn't take a long time but put aside your dreams of any sort of apps on here that's gonna collect a lot of data over time because you're gonna be deleting and reinstalling those apps does it only takes a few seconds but I would have liked a little more storage on this one how do I feel about the pebble steel I like it a lot I'd want to buy one it doesn't mean this era that you'd want to buy one but this is a watch that is smarter just like the nest is a thermostat that's smarter and maybe that's the best approach to take in smartwatches versus something weird and futuristic that flies off your wrist pebble steel is probably the best SmartWatch that I've seen I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at the new pebble steel