My Pebble Review

[Guest]

Preamble-

This review is mainly copied and pasted from my personal blog. If you want to read the review with pictures, proper formatting, and side-text, then feel free to visit the review here. This is not advertising! I don't make money off my stie, but I do like to hear feedback from readers.

 

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It's About Time We Had a Real Smartwatch...

Smartwatches have been a bit of a wash lately. We've had the Galaxy Gear lineup, which are good enough, but they only work with Samsung devices! Not even just Android in general. The newer Android Wear watches (such as the Galaxy Gear Live and Fit, or the LG G Watch) are nice, and the upcoming Moto 360 looks gorgeous. With Apple's fall event now announced as September 9th, we may just see the iWatch soon as well. But there is one smartwatch, the one that proved that they are possible to make at a reasonable price, and, in fact, can be more than a party trick. That smartwatch happens to be the Pebble. The best things about the Pebble are what it isn't, and not what it is. It's not a replacement for your phone- it's a supplemental device that works with it. It doesn't have a color display- it has an e-paper LCD display, which allows for viewing in the bright sun, and much better battery life (not to be confused with e-ink, which requires flashing between screen updates, like on a Kindle). It doesn't have a touchscreen- it has four buttons, three on the right and one on the left. It is waterproof (unlike most other smarwatches), and the software is open and frequently updated- the Pebble Appstore allows for custom apps and watch faces to be downloaded through your phone, and loaded onto the Pebble. But how useful is it? What the hell does a 1.3" display do for you? Read on, dear inquisitor...

 

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Hardware

The Pebble is appropriately simple- a plastic hunk that sits on your wrist. The back cover is a textured plastic, the kind you know won't scratch or chip. The front, on the other hand, is a missed opportunity. The plastic is pretty tough, but the glossy finish, while nice, allows for scratches more easily than other materials. The Pebble Steel uses Gorilla Glass, but for $100 more, that's the stuff you'd expect. On the right sits three buttons, two longer and one smaller, centered one. Center is select, and the top and bottom ones are used as navigation up and down lists, or to change your watch face with one click while out of the menu. On the right is one more button, which acts as a back key. Also on the left is the Pebble's one flaw- a proprietary charger. It's a wonderful design that uses magnets with just enough power to keep the charger connected, but giving you only one cable, and not selling replacements in stores (that I have seen) means waiting a week plus if you ever loose it. And that's if you have $20 laying around. But the cable is nice, and much better than something fragile like Micro-USB. The watchband is a soft-touch silicon, black on all models but the white and Fresh, Hot, Fly additions released earlier this summer- those all have color-matching bands. My Pebble is black, the least offensive color, but white also looks pretty nice. Grey serves no real purpose, as it's not quite the right color, and doesn't blend into the strap as with white to black- the orange and red models have black straps and backplates, but the watch-face is colored. In fact, every model has a black backplate, and buttons. When it comes to wearing it, the ergonomics are great. It's curved just a bit, so it fits on your wrist nicely, and the strap is soft and comfortable. For a plastic device, it looks and feels premium, clocking in well over $100 less than most other smartwatches (not including its bigger brother, the Pebble Steel). The Pebble's one big fault is in the coating of the display- in bright, natural light, the plastic gives the monochrome LCD display a gasoline-in-water look, with rainbow patches around the screen. Not noticeable in any other light, or moderate to low natural lighting conditions. But in bright light, it makes it seem like there's something wrong- I reached out to Pebble via Twitter, and they confirmed it's a side effect of the scratch-resistant coating they apply to the front plastic, not a defect.

 

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Software

Pebble OS is great. It takes four buttons, and makes them feel like more than enough. I was worried about having to constantly scroll through tons of stuff to get to what I want, but no such case. The hands-down best feature is probably the most mundane- when you go to an app, it won't go back to the main watch face after a few seconds, or even minutes. If I open the Music app to control my iPhone, it'll stay there as long as I want, until I hit the back button. And since it's an e-paper display, unless the backlight is on (either by flicking your wrist, or hitting a button when it's dark), it uses pretty much no battery. So the screen can be on for a long time, but of course the backlight and constant Bluetooth connection to your phone are the biggest battery suckers. From the Pebble Appstore, I quickly downloaded my most anticipated apps. a big one being PebbleBucks- with your watch, you can bring up your Starbucks card, and pay four your coffee from your wrist! What is this, 2030?! I can check the weather, buy movie tickets, even read (or compose, but with three buttons, it's a joke) my tweets, all from my wrist. I've also gotten back into using Foursquare, as now in 10 seconds I can load up the app on my Pebble, and it'll automatically show the closest business- or I can flick between them to find what I want, and check in. Yelp is also on Pebble, so it'll look around for highly-rated businesses, and give me way more info than you'd think you could get from a screen well below 2". Speaking of the screen, it's high-res enough that even the tiny clock info at the top while in an app is clearly legible with letters being just fractions of centimeters big. Clock faces are also highly customizable, but I found myself sticking with the stock one that has the hour in bold text, and the minutes in a thinner font below. It's modern, and a cool take on the typical digital numbers of watches. For those old-fashioned people wanting the latest tech, there are a ton of analogue faces, and the stock one even has a second hand that ticks along. It's great. For what's considered a niche product, the Pebble has tons of apps, and with an open SDK, any programmer can develop a rough outline in a matter of hours. Because the Pebble relays everything from your phone, and opening most apps has it using your phone's data connection, it has fewer sensors, and better battery life. And using Bluetooth 4 LE (Low-Energy), it can keep connected without wasting nearly as much of your phone's battery life either, as 3.1 would have. However, Bluetooth has limitations- after around ~100 feet, the signal becomes unreliable, and without your phone, the Pebble becomes... well, a normal watch. No internet means no apps, though a few can be used offline. So plan on keeping your phones on you pretty much all the time (if you don't already), though at home, the signal is strong enough to keep my Pebble connected even if it's three rooms away. But, for example, leaving it in the car, and going into a store is too far for the connection to keep stable.

 

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The Good

-Monochrome LCD display is sharp and easy to read in bright sun, or even in the dark thanks to the backlight
-Nice looks, not too geeky or blocky.
-Band is soft and comfortable even after hours of use.
-Waterproof up to 5ATM (~160 ft.)
-Magnetic charger is sturdy and secure
-5-7 day battery life
-Can replace band with any standard watchband
-Nice color selection

 

The Bad

-Coating gives an oily look to the screen in direct sunlight
-Proprietary charger
-Pretty much useless without connection to phone
-No mic or speaker, so no Siri/Google Now relay- a huge missed opportunity
-Basically impossible to repair yourself, figured out by the wizards at iFixit.

 

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Overall- 9000/10000 Lumens

[Guest]

-RESERVED-

[Jaybird]

excellent review. please clarify whether it is the plastic model of the steel model. As someone who uses the steel model, there is no oily look to the screen. 

[Guest]

excellent review

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Thanks man!

 

EDIT- ahh, yes. However, I did state numerous times that the plastic covering is what my Pebble had. However, I will clarify.

[dizmo]

Great review!
Not a watch I'd be at all interested in, but very well written.

It should be noted that the watch is water resistant, not water proof. Massive difference. Water resistant devices, regardless of their ATM rating, should not be submersed. It basically means that they're fine when splashed with water, to an atmospheric pressure equivalent to that depth of water.

[PhantomChevron]

Cool, I had a pebbles owner kind of thread, thought we had actually very little people who owned them, but anyway, awesome review, well written