Gadgetory

my Kickstarter my name is Eric this is my smart ball and this is my pebble back in the spring of 2012 a small company called pebble launched a project on Kickstarter promising a new take on smartwatches the project proved wildly successful both legitimising Kickstarter as a platform and establishing the modern SmartWatch market three years later pebble is going head to head with the tech industry's biggest players CEO Eric midget Koski doesn't seem particularly worried though 2014 was a massive year for us we grew our developer base from just a few thousand developers to over 26,000 developers by the end of the year we launched an app store going from zero apps to over 6500 apps now and we sold our millionth unit following the original pebble smartwatch and the pebble steel that came in 2014 the company is now launching its newest product pebble time pebble time has a color ePaper screen it's still always on that means you don't have to tap a button or flick your wrist just to see what time it is the battery life is still up to seven days and it's daylight readable that's that's really important to us like we're taking the spot of the watch on your wrist and so one of the primary functions that pebble always has to do is be a really damn good watch when we started this project one of the issues we wanted to address was are we a SmartWatch are we a phone on our wrist or are we our to watch there's all this talk about fashion or technology and I don't believe pebble is either and so we try to avoid one of the other yet strike our own path the new watch is a logical progression of the pebble design it's slimmer lighter and slightly more attractive than pebbles earlier models but it's not likely to be mistaken for an Apple watch or Samsung gear it almost looks like a tamagotchi on your wrist and it has a playfulness that makes it closer to the original pebble than the pebble steel there's a slight curve and it sits on your wrist nicer than pebbles previous designs but perhaps the biggest change pebble made to this watch was a switch to a color ePaper display it's not nearly the same kind of display as Android wear watches or will find on the Apple watch but it lets pebble developers work with 64 colors instead of just two it's more like the screen on a gameboy color than a modern color smartphone display there's also a new microphone which lets you dictate quick replies incoming messages and create voice notes the markets expanded there's a bunch more people making smart watches would be crazy to say that we don't try every single one of them and and see what works you know works well in particular you know we've tried before some other smart watches the best feature that we found was responding to notifications the issue with a lot of other products is that it doesn't usually work we wanted to make sure that we would be able to build a system that works we did that by constraining it down to something that we know we can deliver but the time is just one component of Pebbles broader ambitions the company is also launching an entirely new software platform that throws out all of its old paradigms and incorporates a new structure based on an idea of a running timeline there's this urge to do more with your watch to control things in your life to perceive information but the structure that we've put together for pebbles operating system didn't really enable them and so we constructed a completely new operating system around the concept of your own personal timeline I'm here on my watch place it can be our watch face or any of the watch faces you love and I want to see what's coming up next so I just clicked down in 10 meeting minutes I have a meeting cool sunny reminder to pick up the kids there's a movie today so I can click and see that we know that a lot of people not only care about what's coming up next but you're out of a meeting you want to see if you missed something so I can just click up Oh super-important email or a game that was interested in or I just know didn't my eight thousand steps they're all here now how do existing apps watch faces integrate with this new timeline so it's still the same way you click in and you can see what we call app phases so this is the music player you can see the stocks app and whatever apps you've installed there will be here we have no limit right now in apps so you can stall how many ever apps you want and over here pal says that all the thousands of existing watch faces and apps that developers have already created will be able to integrate with this new timeline but developers won't even have to go far is building out specifically for the pebble a new web interface will let them inject data right into the pebbles timeline and let the watch display in the most logical way it can all of this makes pebble less of a specific SmartWatch maker and more of a wearable platform provider along with this refocus on pebble as a platform has come a new focus on whimsical and informative design it's a stark departure from the utilitarian look of pebbles older software it looks like from what we've seen in this new platform that pebble is introducing the design is a much bigger focus than it was before why is that well the main reason for that is actually I think the screen and it has it brings with it a lot of character of its own even without design you have this things that looks look a little bit like you know e paper glitches you know and little it stretches a little bit so we took that and actually work with it a little you know push it a little further another thing was orientation when you look at the actual transitions they are morphing instead of like taking you from one place to another place which is a lot of I think mental burden when you start looking at this and it's a very very small port for the company is actually going back in time for the launch of the new watch it's making it available via Kickstarter beginning today the time will be available to early backers for discounted price of one hundred and fifty nine dollars and it will cost one hundred and ninety nine dollars when it hits proper retail channels in May the importance of this launch for pebble can't be understated it's coming amid an entry by Apple into the wearables world last year's launch of Android wear failed to make its biggest flash as many we're expecting but there's no doubt that Google is working hard to change that do you think that there is room for a third SmartWatch player one zap and Google hit their stride I think the answer is 100% yes I think it would be a disservice to the world to say that there's only going to be two smartphone operating systems and by definition those are the two SmartWatch operating systems as well when we look at the problem of how do you build software for the for the watch we're not thinking exclusively of how it works with Android or how it works with iOS we don't have a legacy of developers and thousands and millions of apps that we have to support out of the box we can think about what deserves to be on the wrist we're still in the very early days of smartwatches and wearables much like the pre iPhone smartphone world pebble is hoping to use its early mover status to its advantage and establish itself as a major player before the market really matures the time and its new software lean into pebbles established strength long battery life always on display cross-platform compatibility and rapid software iteration whether those strengths are enough to hold pebble up in the battle to come remains to be seen but major Kowski is more confident than ever that pebbles approach is the right one you know trying to put yourself back in the 2007 you know smartphone era you try to ask 2007 Eric what features he'd be using on his smartphone in 2015 and I would probably get a lot of them wrong we're probably in the 2007 days of smartwatches but when you think about it there's years and years ahead of us and improving the technology and building new functionality and building new you know ways that we can interface between your SmartWatch and the rest of your life and that's why we're here we were a bit surprised that it took some people two years to actually get into the game after we published the entire project on Kickstarter back in 2012 but sure enough and other people have arrived and we take it as a continuing challenge this is what we do you