Gadgetory

it comes delivered in packaging that says it's time meet pebble and even has a cutie little hello in a speech bubble it sounds more like a friend of the family than a wristwatch I'm Joe Levi for pocket now and you might not believe it but the pebble isn't perfect this is my pebble smartwatch let's take a look at five things that the pebble well is either missing or missing the mark pocket now is michael fisher back to the kickstarter project for pebble when it was just $99 i got in a little bit later when it was 115 today if you want to preorder at your own pebble in addition to waiting quite a while it's gonna cost you 150 bucks what you're met with first is this nice packaging which holds everything in shape the way it's supposed to and is pretty durable it's got a USB cord for charging and the watch and that's it there's not even any instruction book just this little image to show you go online if you want to know how to set it up and how to use it which of course most of us won't when you look at it the watch itself is only this big the strap however is much larger and what's with that strap i mean looking at it yeah it's durable it's flexible it's black it's rubbery and it doesn't feel all that bad but it doesn't really conform to your wrist all that much when you wear it it feels like a rubber wrist strap not something that you'd expect to come on a 150 dollar watch a hundred and fifty dollar watch demands a certain level of build quality and workmanship and the watch itself certainly does the strap however I'm a little disappointed that part of the watch that you're going to be looking at is the display and it might be a little bit interesting to know that this display isn't quite as high definition or even higher resolution as you might think it's not surprising it's a watch that's not bad when you're looking at it down here when you're looking at it up close if we can get this to focus for you it's just not as nice as you might think email notifications for example look just fine when they're down here but to read them you may have to bring it up a little bit closer when you do that focus notwithstanding you see pixels we're used to not seeing pixels we have Retina displays we have high PPI stuff but there are pixels if you can't see them in the text that's okay look at the funny little shadow down at the bottom and up here at the top as I scroll you can see this faux shadow to let me know that there's either more stuff to scroll to or that I'm all done and it's pixelated and it just doesn't look as pretty as it should you might not be able to tell here but this display is not e-ink I thought it would be a display like well the Kindle or the Nook that would be perfectly readable and use little teeny microscopic drops of ink that are turned over to display black or white just like the eBook readers are but it's not this is a liquid crystal display now that means that it's going to use a little bit more power than an e-ink display would it's probably not going to be as sharp or as legible in bright sunlight but as long as you're looking at it with a lot of black and not very much white it does pretty well they do still call it E paper but not e ink which is a little bit confusing don't be confused this is LCD not e ink being able to control your music from your wrist is well just D key to get to it you just have to hit your left button go down to music select it you're told who the artist is and what the song name is the album all that fun stuff that you can play and pause right there and go to the next track you can go back and all kinds of stuff that's where things get weird if you want to control another media player that's not a problem just open your pebble app go into settings and you can come down here to your preferred music app any app that you have installed that plugs into your pebble will work with this so you can see I've got Pandora and I've got pocket cast my podcast player in here let's say I want to control pocket cast from my wrist so I can play and pause we'll go ahead and do that and there I am on the pocket now pocket Cassie but as you can tell this is not various artists this is not anyway you on it from Rock of Ages it doesn't update this information with well pocket now and who was on it or even the episode number or name why I don't know it doesn't even do that with Pandora so although you can control it the information about what's playing isn't really what's playing which is really odd and somewhat confusing on pebble everything is an app to get into it you tap your left button and you can choose from all of these watch faces well that's fine but music isn't a watch face set alarm not a watch face settings not a watch face and then all of a sudden we have more watch faces now everything above settings is what came pre-installed on the watch and everything below it is what you added on through the pebble app from your smartphone but it's not organized I don't necessarily want my set alarm to be in the same list as my watch faces and eventually when we do get more apps like a bike odometer or a jogging pedometer or whatever app that we have I don't want that all right in here I want to have them separated into watch faces apps settings is that too hard you wouldn't think so but this isn't even organized alphabetically and until you realize that on pebble everything is an app and it's just thrown here together kind of chronologically in the order that you added it to your pebble smartwatch takes a little bit of getting used to speaking of apps where are they the pebble website shows off some cool features of their watch bicycling app one for jogging and even a rangefinder for golf unfortunately they're not on the watch nor are they available to download to the watch not yet anyway all we have now is in all honesty a pretty limited selection of watch faces and no other apps let alone third-party apps of course this is a new product and it's a classic chicken and egg problem which comes first but I'd hoped to have at least the features that they showed off and are still showing off on their website available on my watch at least by the time I got it and if not a little bit after patience I suppose is a virtue the pebble is a great product despite some of its shortcomings that I'm sure they're going to improve over time luckily they can do that because that's the way that it's built if you liked what you saw here why not give the video a thumbs up share it with your friends on Twitter Facebook and Google+ go over there and say hi to us head back to the article at pocketnow.com and leave a comment with your thoughts for pluggin now my devil I'm Jolie like