Gadgetory

hey everyone Lauren good reporting for The Verge I'm at pebbles offices in Redwood City in Silicon Valley and today we're taking a hands-on look at the first update to the original pebble from 2013 this is the pebble to and the biggest difference is that it has optical heart rate sensors let's take a look so one of the first things you'll notice about the new pebble too is that this right here is Corning Gorilla Glass the original pebble had a plastic coating over it it's also thinner and it's definitely lighter than the original pebble but the big news here is the addition of the optical heart rate sensors pebble recently got into health tracking with its watches and it uses a variety of different sensors and algorithms to determine what kind of activity are doing but with the addition of optical heart rate sensors company says it will be able to better track things like when you're sleeping or what your heart rate is when you're actually exercising the watch has the same silicone straps as previous pebble watches and if you have straps from another model you'll be able to swap them in and out it has the same three physical buttons on this side physical button over here it's not a touchscreen SmartWatch unlike most other smartwatches out there so the way you kind of navigate through the interface is by pressing various buttons Pebble today is also announcing an update to its pebble time series previously you could buy a pebble time and a pebble time steel but now they've combined the two and you'll notice that the bezel is much smaller than the bezel on previous models you can see up to 50% more of the display and one of the software features that's new with pebble is called actions this means that if you press this button up here you have easy access to core functions of certain apps that you can program in the main pebble app so for example here the weather just see the weather right away you can send text to someone you designate to be the person you want to send texts to you can just automatically tell at your current location pressin uber with just a couple of presses in the button the idea here is that the interaction is supposed to be pretty shallow you don't have to go through multiple screens or press multiple buttons in order to do that one thing you want to do with an app pebble says it has sold 1.8 smartwatches to date and that they're pretty happy with that but that's not nearly as much as something like the Apple watch or even Fitbit sales pebble says that it sees itself as sort of the swatch of the SmartWatch world it's meant to be fun accessible and relatively inexpensive the pebble too goes on sale today on Kickstarter for $99 and the company says it expects it to ship in September the pebble time to goes on sale on Kickstarter as well for 169 dollars and that will ship in November