Gadgetory

hey guys it's Neela the verge I'm here with the pebble smartwatch an accessory for your iPhone or Android phone lets you check notifications and control music right from your wrist the pebble started with a massively successful Kickstarter campaign and the final hardware is actually really nice there's a backlit ePaper display up down and select buttons on the right side and a back button on the left just under the back button there's a set of contacts and magnets for the pebbles pretty cool power connector the default watch band here is fine but it's pretty boring so it's a good thing you just swap it out for any standard band that you might want to have as far as the screen itself it's actually kind of hard to see without the backlight on and the backlight makes everything a little bit more blue than I was expecting it's also not the highest resolution screen in the world but overall it's basically just fine it works really nicely but there's obviously room for improved in the next version setting up the pebble is really straightforward you just pair it to your phone over Bluetooth and then watch the pebble app after a little bit of setup that's different on iOS Android you'll immediately start to see notifications pop up on the watch accompanied by a little vibration and the screen lighting up it's super convenient and I really like being able to check incoming Taksin emails without having to pull out my phone you just glance at your wrist it's a dismiss the notification you hit the ok button and you're back to the clock peb will also alert you to incoming calls and let you dismiss or answer them you can also use a public control music apps any app that supports Bluetooth control works on Android and every app I tried just basically worked on the iPhone it works well but I often found it was faster to just pull out my phone and the dig around the menus and open the music controller using the pebble app on your phone you can download and install a new watch faces which is fun pebble says they'll soon expand that functionality to allow entirely new apps to be downloaded on the phone but for right now you can just download a handful of watch faces I actually in the end preferred the basic analog face but there's some cool ones in the mix too but the most important thing to know about pebble is that it's really different experience depending on whether you have an iPhone or an Android phone on the iPhone it pretty much everything is directly controlled by iOS the pebble app has basically no settings outside of helping you connect and downloading watch faces notifications don't appear for every app unless you go into Notification Center preferences and like Rito go the banner individually and your settings go away if the pebble gets disconnected it's annoying and there's really not much proble can do about it because Apple has to fill in the gaps here this is just ralphe foundation of support in iOS because it's supported the system-level pebble basically supports all iOS notifications out-of-the-box now that's really different than Android because on Android everything goes to the pebble app but it also means you have to give the app really broad permissions to watch everything that happens in your phone and you even have to give it your gmail password so it can figure out mail notifications it's an interesting contrast between the platform's the pebble kind of has more potential via killer iPhone accessories if and when Apple builds out the OS support but right now the Android experience is a little bit better even though it feels like kind of more of a hack in the end though the pebble works and it works well it's a huge accomplishment for an indie hardware company funded by a Kickstarter campaign I think it's a little bit expensive at $150 but if you're in the market for a SmartWatch it's much more worth it than any of the other competitors that I've seen if the pebble team can deliver on the promise of apps it will get even more useful in fact the entire time I use the pebble I found myself daydreaming about all the other stuff it could do there's no reason they can't replace like a Fitbit or a Nike FuelBand it would be really cool to send replies to text emails rather than their seeing them and be cool to control any other of the various functions of your phone but in the end it's a great product it's a good story they're off to a great start and now pebble just has to make the rest of my dreams come true