Pebble Time Review

amintha1992 · July 14, 2015

Pebble Time Review

Couple of weeks ago I received my Pebble time. While the shipping process was relatively painless it how ever was not cheap. To give context this is my first smartwatch that I have ever used. None of the other smartwatches in the market didn't really excite me because all of them lacked in one major aspect. either its the battery life or performance or design. For me the most important thing a smartwatch should excel at is delivering the notifications and messages from my phone to my wrist. And just like the original pebble and the pebble steel, pebble time does this extraordinarily. Just having the option to glance at a notification and deciding to dismiss it or react to it on the watch itself or to pull out the phone is such a paradigm shift that I never thought I would enjoy that much.

Speaking of watches, how good is it at showing the time?. If you never connected the pebble time to a phone and just have it on your wrist it would function admirably as a regular watch. With the pebble times color E-paper display you can always see the time without having to do any flicking motion or pressing buttons. Where most other smartwatch screens fail when there is an abundance of ambient light, Pebble time screen shines during the day time. Literally. The light reflects off of the E-paper display and shows you the information. but not to worry there is a backlight that comes on when you press any button that can also be set to turn on with motion. although I have that feature turned off.

While the screen is very good at displaying what ever its supposed to, How good it looks is somewhat debatable. Here is what i think.because of its low contrast and probably low refresh rate it's not good for displaying pictures or watching videos. That is certain. But for what the color e-paper display is used, I think it's perfect for this use case. Where most people would knock some points off for a lackluster display I applaude Pebble for making a conscious decision to go with a E-paper display rather than a OLED hence not compromising on one of the best things about this smart watch. its battery life.

Since I have been using the Pebble time I have realised that it has been designed from the ground up to be the best in class when it comes to its fuel economy. Technical specs aside Pebble Time lasts for just over seven days for me. I’m not the person that gets hundreds of notifications a day, but from my experiance with it I can tell that it should last for at least four days for the most heavy user. That is double the time that you can get from a android wear smartwatch at best. That’s impressive.

So what can you do with seven days for battery life on the Pebble time? Time smartwatch sports the latest operating system that uses the all new “Timeline UI”. Essentially it will show you agenda in three categories namely Past activities, Present, and Future. Using the Up and Down you can see the past and Future respectively. For me calendar appointments showed up on the timeline and that was all I needed. Im sure there are many more apps you can get that hooks in to this function. When a notification or a text message is received to the pebble time, you are greeted with the usual set of options to interact with it. For example it gives you the option to reply to a text message with a preset message or with voice. which i will talk about soon. For IMs like Facebook messenger you also get to “LIKE” that message. Oh and it can also reply with emojis as well. This also brings up a gripe that i have with the notification system on both the pebble side and android in general. there is no way to get back to notifications that you have dismissed. Also once a notification is dismissed on the phone the pebble time has no way of knowing that it has happened so it continues to display it and gives the user to interact with it that eventually leads to a fail. I wish someone would find the solution for this already.

As I mentioned earlier pebble time has a built in mic that allows you to dictate replies for text and IMs. If you have ever used s-voice and thought that it's worse that crap, fear not its actually good. while i'm not sure what kind of a back end service it uses to do the voice recognition I know that it works surprisingly good. It was able to consistently and accurately pickup my words even in a noisy environment. I think it speaks to the quality of the mic and the voice recognition service that pebble is using. Though keep in mind that just like Google now Voice will not work without a live internet connection to your phone.

All is well up till now, but there are some shortcomings to this well rounded smartwatch that I have to talk about. For starters the built quality is between the original pebble and the pebble steel. which is to say that it was a lot better than i thought it would be knowing that it was not a steel version. But the buttons was a big disappointment for me. Button placement did bother me at all. It was the tactile response or the lack thereof. the only worse buttons that I have used is on my nexus 7 2013 tablet. Also I wish there was a way to feel which button I was about to press with a small bump on the middle button. I can't believe they missed that.

This pissed me off a lot. The plastic/rubber coating on the metal bezel seems to easily scratched off. I had a huge gash at the end of the first day. and after that I gave up hope on trying to keep it unscratched. But there are some good news. The Glass screen is holding up very well despite me bumping it on to metal surfaces quite a few time.

Since I have been using this product I have been asking myself “who is this for?’. Well I think there are two types of people that will be satisfied with this. People that want something that will last for days on battery and deliver notifications to their wrist without looking too bad. And then there's the iPhone users that don't want pay a the price of a decent Android phone to get a Apple Watch. I you are in one or both of those categories then the Pebble TIme is for you.