Gadgetory

the fractal design define our for case gets featured on the when show bill blogs the week section more than any other case click now to learn more about it I've been curious about the pebbles since launch and very recently I bit the bullet I bought one and it arrived in this eco-friendly packaging that is completely recyclable and really doesn't contain a whole lot so once you open it up all you're going to find is the pebble smartwatch and in my case I chose regrettably the orange color so coupled with the sort of cheap feeling rubber strap and the bright color and plastic construction it really does feel kind of like a child's toy as opposed to a serious tool that I spend one hundred and fifty dollars on but don't worry it's available in six different colors of which orange is probably the most ridiculous and then it comes with a magnetic charging cable it does not come with an AC adapter though so you'll have to plug it into one that you already own pick one up at the store or plug it into a computer now the magnetic charging cable I'll show you guys how it works here so it just clips on to the to the SmartWatch like that boom not too strong not too weak is a bit of a double-edged sword so as much as I hate microUSB and it can just go eat a turd because I hate it and it's fragile this is not necessarily optimal either because it comes with one if you ever need a replacement one you're probably going to have to order it online and as we discovered when we tried to do the unboxing the other day if you don't have it you can't just run around and find a replacement one very very easily you have to go and actually find that cable so I recommend not losing it however I to love that it's magnetic and it's not going to break so with that out of the way let's get into the physicality of the pebble so I did mention it's a little bit cheesy don't worry there are things you can do so you could order a different color you can get aftermarket watch faces for it you can get aftermarket watch straps from any store that carries standard replaceable watch straps so you can actually customize it to your heart's content but you don't have to out of the box on the left hand side there is one button this turns the backlight on and also serves as a back button when you're navigating through the menus on the right hand side you've got up and down within the menus as well as confirm these up-and-down ones if you're inside the menus will rotate through your different clock phases that are available it comes with three ones by default but you can totally download all the different clock phases you want and to take advantage of that awesome upgradeable functionality that it has I do want to very briefly show you guys the kinds of options that are in the menu so music control is a big one forward back and play pause this is one that I find myself using a ton because when you have your headphones connected to your phone and it's in your pocket what's more convenient bloop-bloop on your wrist or pulling out your phone and manually selecting a track do it undoing your lock screen absolutely fantastic I'd say it's worth the cost of admission just for that set alarms watches you've got some settings in here Bluetooth display yeah nothing else in here that's really that interesting the music control is awesome however there's a great deal of customized ability and we'll get into that more in just a moment here so the first thing you're going to download when you get a pebble is the pebble app which has one button and one button only so you press connect and as long as bluetooth is enabled on your phone it is going to walk you through a very simple menu it was easy to set up the pebble also offers excellent compatibility so there's a few issues with some Samsung smart phones but unlike the Galaxy gear it is pretty much universally compatible with any Android phone rather than being locked down to a particular vendor aside from Twitter notifications showing up on the SmartWatch I had everything going within about five or ten minutes more on that in a moment you've also got settings up here so this allows you to configure what you want it to notify you about so calls SMS message messages calendar it supports Facebook as well as Google Hangouts the one thing that I'd say oh emails of course the one thing I'd say is really essential and doesn't support is Twitter but don't worry there's a way around that music you can actually tell it which of your music apps you want it to control so you're not just locked into something like a default music app and that is pretty much it guys so that's where we get into other apps so you can get like free caddy which tells you how far away you are from the hole on like thousands of different golf courses RunKeeper which keeps track of your runs no not in your pants like out on the street you go for runs and tells you like how fast you went and cool stuff like that and then pebble notifier this is an essential app so what you can do is you can tell it okay exclude the selected ones only the selected ones and this is how I was able to get Twitter working and there's a bunch of settings in there for that as well it's really well-documented not only pebbles own software but also the third-party stuff that's available so kudos to them for making that happen so let's get into my actual experience with the SmartWatch first of all charge is supposed to last anywhere from five to seven days by torture testing it and using it a ton I was able to wear it down in two days which is still better than the day that Samsung estimates for something like the Galaxy gear the Galaxy gear doesn't even have its display on most of the time because it's no LED display and that is a huge advantage of pebbles implementation of an e-ink display because that means even if you don't go through the complicated gesture of going exactly like this to check the time you'll be able to check the time from any angle and from any place as long as you can see physically your wrist next up is the backlight the way that that's implemented is actually really smart you can either press the backlight button here the ergonomics of which are terrible because there's a bunch of buttons over here so it's hard to brace yourself or you can just give a little flick of your wrist and the backlight is illuminated allowing you to easily see the display in the dark it only stays on for about a second though now let's talk about the time savings because you know what it's not that much on an individual by individual basis so I just sent myself a text message and let's wait for that to come through and basically what it does is it doesn't so much um you know save me ten minutes every time I get a text but it allows me to read this message in Co okay well Brandon's just like sending me random text messages I can scroll through it and then I can just decide no I'm not going to deal with that now I can deal with it in a batch later I find it makes me get disrupted and distracted less more than anything else so I'm not constantly bringing out my phone to check things which can burn time I can bring it out once in a while do everything and then put it away it's also great for when you don't have access to your phone like when you're at work for example you could leave it in your pants pocket if you change into a lab coat or something and then you could know if there's something urgent that you have to go deal with without carrying your phone around if your work has a policy against it or when you're playing sports or whatever else so I was on a badminton court my parents called to say that they didn't have the car we had to come get the baby before he went to bed I would not have gotten that message in time if I hadn't been wearing the pebble so I do find it enhances my life it does make it better is it a hundred and fifty dollars worth I guess it's entirely up to you the functionality and it isn't perfect like it doesn't have as much functionality as the gear for example once these notifications go away they're they're gone they're just gone longer messages you can't scroll through them all you can't scroll through them all the way like emails will get will get cut off whereas text messages and tweets are generally speaking okay you obviously can't reply in any way whereas galaxy gear you can use s voice to do a reply if you really want to but of course galaxy gear costs more than twice as much at least here in Canada so in conclusion guys I am a wif Kane from tech syndicate who is the one who convinced me to pick up a pebble is it worth 150 dollars for me I would say so yes it enhances my life it makes it better in a way that quite frankly a phone upgrade probably wouldn't even do because we're actually adding functionality instead of just making it a little bit faster or a little bit higher resolution or whatever the case may be is the pebble the best implementation ever up until now probably not in the future definitely not there will be better stuff but for now I really like it you're probably going to see this living on my wrist for the next little while leave a like on this video if you guys liked it leave a dislike if you disliked it leave a comment if your feelings lie somewhere in between liking and disliking it as always don't forget to subscribe and if you have any comments on the video of course not a bad idea head on over to the Linus tech tips comm forum and sign up over there and join the discussion