Gadgetory

I'm Scott Stein and this is the Pebble watch ever since last year where was a big success on Kickstarter this dream of a SmartWatch with apps has been kicking ran and finally is being released to early adopters except now we're surrounded by smartwatches seemingly everywhere there are a lot of these little devices that are all promising the dream of living this futuristic interconnected life with something wearable on your wrist or maybe later this year on your glasses kind of cool accept it all boils down to what does it do and what makes it worth the money that you're paying the pebble is $150 and if you look at the website you see what it's promising it suggests a plethora of features notifications health apps an open SDK that allows a whole bunch of applications to be developed in the future and of course very cool retro watch faces some of those are available now others aren't what you get right off the bat that does work is you get the interchangeable watch faces which are cool but are a lot like kind of like we got with the iPod Nano if you ever wore that and slapped a wristband around it which I did and love doing the pebble watch also connects via bluetooth to get a bunch of notifications post it up to your watch turning it to a kind of like a pager you get your SMS your texts your eye messages you get your phone calls coming in you can screen them on the watch if you've been dreaming of doing that what's the point I mean why don't you just pull out your phone well if you're busy if you're in a loud noisy place if you've got a really important phone call at home it's kind of fun to be able to screen that call and make sure you don't miss it there's also an additional feature of music playing now what that means here is really showing you a display of what's being played on your app on your phone and allows you to skip and pause the track and not change the volume it does work on iOS with not just the music player but with Spotify any radio app anything that's Bluetooth hooked now as far as the health tracking stuff well that is not here yet when it does arrive I think a lot of people will be interested the pebble does have an accelerometer built-in and it has magnetometer so there's no reason why it can't be perfectly capable of doing that type of activity there's just no app that takes it of it yet there is a pebble app that you can download on iOS or Android that is currently available and works pretty easily for pairing and for removing and adding apps which right now amount to watch faces it's cool though how easily you can remove and add those apps via bluetooth it will be interesting to see one more of those become available and if pebble will be allowed to charge within that app or not on Android you do get a few more third-party apps that are floating around out there that are interesting there's a there's a couple of random title chart apps and other things like that the style here is definitely more Casio geek tech than the retro Dick Tracy on the Martian watch that I reviewed before $150 the Pebble watch is half the price of the Martian watch but it also has much more of a plasticy geek look which may not be for everybody the monochrome ePaper display is not a Inc but it's a black-and-white LCD that's highly reflective and also as an anti-glare coating you can see it has a decent resolution for playing games like the built-in apps snake but don't expect it to be anything very advanced battery life is one of the limitations to and it's a problem across smartwatches 2 to 7 days I found it was a little more like 2 it does come with a USB charge cable that magnetically connects easily just be careful not to lose it because there aren't any other cables I know of that connect like that another really nice thing about the pebble it is 5 ATM resistant to water so they suggest you can swim with it you can take a shower with it that's up to you if you're feeling that bold but you certainly could wear it while washing your hands the pebble SDK should provide a lot more life for this device we're gonna have to see what apps come out for it and where it's going to hold its place and the SmartWatch wars whether it'll be something that people will remember or whether it's gonna be a blip on the radar I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at the Pebble watch