Gadgetory

well I'm Neela with a verge and this is the pebble steel the steel is the newest version of the pebble smartwatch last year's Kickstarter darling the original pebble was the first SmartWatch worth buying mainly because it didn't try to do too much it sent notifications to your wrist and let you control music playback on your phone and that was about it for a hundred fifty bucks the only real problem with it is that it's you know kind of Li you chase a band but it's still was chunky plastic watch the steel changes all that at least on the outside for an extra hundred bucks the $250 steel takes those same pebble internals and dresses them up in a tighter smaller metal case with your choice of leather metal bands it's still not perfectly beautiful but it's far more attractive and virtually indistinguishable from regular watch at first glance especially if you prefer larger funkier timepieces like I do here's an Oktay oh I bought in Paris last year and then pebbles a little smaller and it's Nixon of mine is a little smaller than the pebble but it has a much thicker band and while the steel is heavier than the original pebble it's lighter than this psychokinetic all in all the steel is a perfectly wearable watch that draws a very little attention to itself a big victory for a device you're supposed to wear all the time pebble did make two changes the case that aren't great the power connector has been revised so you can't use the one from the original pebble and the band is now proprietary you can't just use any old watch band like the original that's a big drawback but at least design is open source so replacements should appear soon in addition to the new case pebble is also completely updated the watches software and the Android and iOS apps that make it all work there's now a proper App Store to download and manage apps and watch faces and pebbles working with some big names like ESPN Yelp and Foursquare I tried all these out and the results are a little mixed well everything works well I wanted these apps be more front center kind of like the watch faces for example while checking in on Foursquare for my wrist is awesome diving eight button presses into the menus to access the check in screen is a little more cumbersome than just pulling at my phone these are just the first set of apps though and the potential is so obviously there that it's hard to knock them too much I want to do all these things for my wrist I just want to do them a little bit more simply and with the new software and the App Store coming to the original pebble as well there's going to be a lot of incentive to iterate and get some of these ideas right where the pebble continues to shine though is the basics any notification that hits your lock screen appears like magic on the Steel's display and that's still so fundamentally great that it's hard to complain about these big ambitions I wish there was a better way to manage which notifications get sent to the pebble from iOS right now it's just kind of everything and there's no way to deal with the notification if you're on iOS I'd love to send a quick reply to an iMessage to my wrist or just dismiss the notification entirely but that just can't happen in Apple's platform the situation is far more customizable in Android where pebble has a rich ecosystem of apps but the updated Android software wasn't ready in time for this review that's really the whole story of the pebble steel it's definitely the SmartWatch for Android users but it still feels kind of incomplete on iOS a one-way receiver of information instead of a true extension of your phone that's the dream the question is whether Apple ever let it come true the pebble steel is far and away the SmartWatch you should buy if you're in the market it's much more focused and useful than competitors like the Samsung Galaxy gear the meta watch and actually exists unlike the rumored products from Apple and Google that's important it's fun and useful and you'll probably like it and that's important too