Gadgetory

it's official it's been announced the pebble is properly dead and we have word from the company as to what's going on for all of us folks who have pre-orders that have still yet to ship on devices like the pebble time - in the core for fans of this brand it is a sad sad turn of events after about a week of speculation pebble finally posted on their official blog that the company is being bought out by Fitbit and that the DNA of the pebble brand is going to live on in servicing the future Fitbit products and that blog post answered two critical questions what's going to happen with the pebbles that have just recently shipped and what's going to happen with the pebbles that have yet to ship the company is being dismantled so quickly that if you recently acquired a pebble you might not be able to get it properly refunded according to pebbles blog post only refunds processed before December 7th are really going to be eligible for that full refund we don't have proper confirmation yet on anyone who might be looking to return their pebble past that date and if you have a Kickstarter or a pre-order that is yet to ship all refunds should start being processed by December 16th of this year always super Exim that they can take money from my credit card nearly instantaneously but processing a refund can take up to ten business days and for those of us who are still using pebble hardware functionality should be maintained for the immediate future though they say at some future point the features that are more server side on your pebble will probably start to go away they are looking at ways to maintain some of that functionality maybe localizing it more to your phone or to the watch itself but they don't have any hard confirmation on what's going to keep working and what's going to get the ax and lastly as the final twist of the knife there's no more warranty support sure if you're having an issue you can go to some help forums and some third-party companies have been stocking pebble replacement parts but for the most part if your pebble goes Bork you're pretty much done I've been a big fan of pebble smartwatches I routinely Rock my pebble time in a lot of our videos this is the worst possible way for this company to be acquired by another entity and then being dismantled right in front of our eyes personally this move is aggravating it completely leaves me in the lurch I really don't what to do have this pretty bad habit of picking losers products that I get really passionate about case in point the quad come talk I was a huge fan of this watch but I had to properly retire this year as it was becoming more and more evident that Qualcomm was not going to continue supporting this device not providing it with new features and support for other apps was becoming woefully slim never could get it to properly work with Google Hangouts not that that'll matter in the future with Google trying to devalue hangouts now this watch properly started me off on a conversation about outdoor viewable displays and really long battery life even near the end of its run on my wrist I could still count on a solid four to five days on a single charge and living in an area of the country which gets a lot of sunshine having a display which is easy to read in bright light with that super long battery life is a huge benefit the pebble has always been a part of my device strategy for similar reasons but it wasn't until the pebble time and the colored display technology that's on this watch that I really felt I could properly let go of my Qualcomm talk and this is what totally sucks about finding solutions for your own personal use and then watching the rest of the tech industry sort of overlook things that are important to you it's not that I haven't tried other smartwatches I've been in the game since the very beginning I've got a Martian around here somewhere but I've got a Huawei watch I've got my first generation asu's n watch I've got numerous gears including the gear s2 I may took the gear s3 I've played with numerous fitness trackers like fitbit's and Microsoft bands and I'm wearing a misfit but nothing is really tapped into the feature set that I enjoy from my pebble in trying to anticipate consumer responses we start taking some things for granted and then act like that some kind of objective truth or that we shouldn't ever have to accept any kind of compromise even though every single gadget we pick up is a series of benefits and compromises and for every time I see an editorial or someone writing a review about the pebble time and oh the washed out colors on the screen you should use an LCD or AMOLED display the pebble became the perfect complement to my phone my phone looks amazing indoors I don't need two screens that look awesome inside but I drive around a lot in California and so while an ePaper e-ink I can never remember or what type of display the original pebble had in black and white is useful and it's really easy and clear and high contrast to read outdoors when I'm driving it's nice to be able to just see a little blue pop from my watch for an alert a little red pop for an alert from my watch a little green pop those little green pops are text messages maybe those are more important than the little blue pops or the little red pops I was more aware of what was happening in my digital sphere of influence because of the color display on the pebble without it distracting overly from the task at hand namely operating a motor vehicle I was happy to accept the compromise of a watch face which just looked okay indoors for something that looked incredible in direct sunlight and provided multiple days of battery life on a single charge without ever having to play that trick of turning the watch screen offer dimming it to a point that I couldn't read what was on the display I'm just really disappointed in pebble IP going to Fitbit just not as interested in a Fitbit fitness tracker and I'm hoping that what we'll see is a proper Fitbit watch I totally be willing to give Fitbit a shot there and and I hope we do see some cool hardware but in the meantime I'm proper stock I'm not really quite sure where to turn to next years ago before I was a member of this PocketNow team I tried an experiment where I completely muted my phone and I relied on a Martian to give me all of my notifications and alerts from that first experience with the Martian I have never turned the volume or ringer back up on my phone because of smartwatches my phone will never interrupt a conversation and I refuse to look at my phone unless I know I'm looking at it for a purpose if it buzzes or beeps I'm not going to sit there and obsessively check notifications until I know there's something worthy of my attention in my notification tray and that really seems to bother a number of people who watch our reviews because I'm not often clearing out my notifications especially while I'm shooting those reviews man seeing all those little tiny icons are really seems to piss some people off I still like my qua way watch this will probably be what I turn to for my Android wear experience until at least some newer Android wear devices come along I've never been the biggest fan of Samsung gears I totally understand why some people like that smart phone on a wrist experience but for me I like a watch to be serving me little pieces of at-a-glance information that then I can choose to delve into further the more I feel like I'm navigating screens and swiping and dialing and stuff more I feel I should really just be doing this interaction from a proper phone I'll personally be looking to explore this topic more over the next year is I just try to figure out what my own Smart Watch strategy is going to be and I know there are some couple fans in our audience we're probably in the same boat what are you guys thinking right now pebble is dead are you going to move to Android where are you looking at an Apple watch you're looking at some sort of third party or hybrid solution like what Scoggin and the fossil group are doing with purely analog notification systems drop us a comment down below this video I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on the matter because it'll probably help point me in the right direction for what I'm going to do as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more rambling vloggy videos like these and help us out some sharing on your favorite social networks for PocketNow i'm juan carlos Bagnall some gadget guy on Twitter and Instagram and I will catch you all on the next video as a quick tangent you guys in the comments are always talking about how critical I am of different technologies but if you want to see true tech optimism this is Mike welcome talk charger and you can see I still have the inserts from when Qualcomm was talking about their truly wireless earbud technology that would charge in the same cradle as the talk but ultimately proved to be vaporware I still believed I still held on to it I wanted it to be real