Gadgetory

hey this is dieter boner for The Verge and you are looking at the Pebble watch a really big success story from Kickstarter we'll find out that it is ready to ship it's going to begin shipping to the people who backed the project all 85,000 of them on January 23rd although it's going to go through batches and take some while to get through mass production they do about 15,000 a week and if you're not familiar with it it's actually pretty cool it is an e-ink watch and it's a smart watch that hooks up to your iPhone or your Android phone and as you can see it's actually relatively small it just has a few buttons you've got an up/down and a select button and then over on the side you have a back button and a little charger port there and that's actually a magnetic charger kind of like a palm beer if you remember that it just clicks on there and begins charging it and it's an e-ink screen so it's reflective but it does also have a back light so you can light it up so you can make sure that you see it and the interface is actually really really simple you just go back and then you can go up and down to select your apps and amongst those apps are just a bunch of different watch face options so there's a text watch face option or fuzzy time bunch of different watch faces and they've got an SDK out for developers that they're working on so developers can create their own watch faces so for example here's a binary clock if you're into binary clocks I can't read this and it has a few other features in terms of being a SmartWatch the first of which is you can directly control your music it just does this right over Bluetooth and you can just hit that and it'll start playing your music and you can maybe hear that the background you can go to the next song just like any standard a Bluetooth headset that's how that works and you can also set alarm directly on the watch if if you'd like to do that or you can also just jump into settings here look up your Bluetooth and a couple of those settings change the size of the fonts and whatnot but the real action is with notifications so the whole point of a SmartWatch is that it's connected to your smart phone and when you get notifications or text message alerts it shows up on your watch you can read them quickly and more to the point you can feel them so this watch vibrates and when something comes in you more likely to gonna feed on your wrist than you would in your pocket so text message comes in you can look at it really quick it'll dismiss on its own automatically or you can back out of it and then the next one will come in and you know same deal and it has buttons over here and you can actually scroll through to read the whole iam home or at least some of the text to see what you've got here and then you can scroll back and actually speaking of that the interface is actually pretty neat pebble tells us that it's kind of inspired by the original Mac that had a black and white screen and you can see the way that they've got sort of little dot matrix gradient here and just you know some pretty good-looking icons so in terms of basic specs it has a 144 by 168 screen and it has a battery that should be good for around seven days of battery life and then you can attach a little magnetic charger and it should charge itself back up in a you know one or two hours or so of course it uses bluetooth 4 to connect with your iPhone or your Android phone and it also can do over the year ROM updates over Bluetooth and so Ron update gets pushed to the app on your phone and then that can get pushed over to the watch and pebble is actually promising to release updates as often as two or three weeks which is a pretty cool so we should see some more features coming relatively soon we know that they had a partnership with RunKeeper so we would expect that there'll be some fitness apps here that'll be integrated in and presumably an expanding ecosystem as they go along actually one feature that they just added to it which is pretty neat is a feature where you can just tap it to turn on the back later even shake your wrist so you can flick your wrist for just tap the bottom of the watch and it'll turn on the backlight which is a little bit difficult to see on that dark watch but if we go to something a little bit brighter like that and then we let it timeout flick my wrist turned on the backlight so there you go that is a Pebble watch a huge Kickstarter success story and it is shipping to the backers on January 23rd it's going through that batch and then presumably it'll be in wider retail not too long after that you