To say the Pebble smartwatch is a Kickstarter success story would be an understatement almost as big as the disparity between the amount of money the company was trying to raise ($100,000) and the amount of money the company actually raised ($10,266,845). The $150 watch connects to a smartphone via Bluetooth to display and control incoming calls, text messages, e-mail, and music playback. Developers will be able to create apps and custom watch faces that can be loaded onto the Pebble as well, and it’ll feature integration with task automation website IFTTT. While Pebble isn’t the first connected smartwatch by any stretch, its use of a low-power, monochrome e-paper screen means it’ll be able to run for around seven days before needing to be recharged. Smartwatches with commonly-used color LCD screens need to be charged more frequently. At first glance, Pebble’s screen appears similar to the screens found in e-book readers such as Amazon‘s Kindle, which sacrifice fluidity and complex animation for weeks and weeks of battery life. But at a press conference during the Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday, Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky told a group of reporters, “This display is not actually e-ink. It’s an LCD variant, which means that it still has an amazing refresh rate of 30 frames per second, so we can drive cool animations and user interface elements onto the display.” Other hardware features include a water-resistant design with a magnetic charging cable that does away with exposed ports, an ambient light sensor, a magnetometer, a vibrating motor and an accelerometer. Pebble’s relatively robust integration with Android and Apple devices is another selling point. The watch works with Android version 2.3.3 and above, and Apple handsets from the iPhone 3GS to current models. While deep Android integration is more straightforward for connected devices such as the Pebble, doing the same with Apple devices is more challenging. Migicovsky indicated that Pebble would be able to hook more deeply into iOS, but wouldn’t elaborate, saying, “We’ve been sort of dipping and ducking some of the different![]()
