News - The Pebble smartwatch for Android and iOS

[HEXUS]

Crowdsourced project to be kickstarted with $£$ millions.

Read more.

[cheesemp]

Well its got to be better than the LiveView which I picked up for £18 (Its been £15 on play recently). Even with a Sony X10 (which it should have been reliable with being the same manufacture) it was almost unusable - It kept disconnecting randomly and wouldn't reconnect. Its now stuck in a draw somewhere.

It looks like this is a far better device though - with longer battery thanks to the eink display and it doesn't look like its dependant on the phone to work so hopefully it'll be more resilient to connection issues than the live view was.

[Noxvayl]

Very interesting device, if I had a smartphone I'd consider getting one because I do take my phone out of my pocket very often. The battery life is a bit low for me though, I'd prefer a simple device like that to provide more than 1 weeks worth of battery life.

Hopefully the next version has much better battery life with a lower cost, they are currently more expensive than my phone.

[BEANFro Elite]

Could THIS finally be the watch that my wrist has been waiting for?

The specs are very impressive, except for maybe the battery life, as has already been mentioned, but alas, its already miles ahead of the LiveView which I came so very close to getting a couple of times desite the torrents of bad reviews it received.

It stands to be seen how the software holds up, as well as how much battery it munches from your phone when connected.

Will be keeping my eye on this one

[Biscuit]

Now that i have an HTC one X, its pretty big and unwieldy, something like this might actually work for me...

Only problem is that bluetooth can be a bit of a battery drain. Especially when other radios are on at the same time.

[Funkstar]

I'd really like one of these. I'm glad people have said the Sony one is crap, I would have been tempted to get one (though I did read that the software has been updated to work better with other handsets).

I've wanted something like this for quite some time, and I think it's only now that the hardware is really capable of realising peoples ideas. E-ink displays, new lower power Bluetooth protocols and chipsets, low power processors, all make these things far more practical.

[burble]

I'm curious about these so I've donated $115 to get myself one.

I don't normally like digital type or plastic watches so I may not get on with it, but I guess time will tell.

[Whiternoise]

I emailed them about it:

Pebble Technology says:

Hi,

The quoted battery life of ~7 days is with bluetooth turned on!

Thanks for your interest,
Adam

That's very impressive, actually. Most GPS sports watches have a lifetime of a couple of weeks with everything turned off.

[phili_c51]

Will be curious to see how this device will affect battery life of a smartphone having bluetooth on continuously

[Whiternoise]

On their FAQ they say 5-10%. Probably less than the watch, transmission is always less power hungry than reception which is by necessity always on.

Ultimately you'll still need to charge your phone every night with reasonable usage, but I just have the charger next to my bed and on it goes.

[Spud1]

Very very tempting..I always wanted one of those sony watches, but bad reviews aside, I don't own an Android phone and am very unlikely to in the near future, so it just wasn't an option.

If this one does indeed support iOS however and works reliably then i'll be more than happy to invest in one. I'm switching away from windows phone to either iOS or the Blackberry London (if it's as good as the playbook) later this year, so timing should be perfect

[HSK]

I read about this a little while ago, was tempted!

[Whiternoise]

Very very tempting..I always wanted one of those sony watches, but bad reviews aside, I don't own an Android phone and am very unlikely to in the near future, so it just wasn't an option.

If this one does indeed support iOS however and works reliably then i'll be more than happy to invest in one. I'm switching away from windows phone to either iOS or the Blackberry London (if it's as good as the playbook) later this year, so timing should be perfect

Any reason for the move away from Windows? I was thinking of getting a Lumia 900, not so fussed about the lack of applications, but the core looks a lot more polished than Android.

[burble]

Blimey, these guys have got over $5.5m of funding now!

[Hicks12]

It is an extremely interesting idea and is something i really want but im put off by the fact that international people dont get a good deal, being hit with import fees (RM £8 and import VAT as its over £20) will make it ~ $186, which really is insane as they say it will sell for over $150 they could mean $155 which we all know amazon will end up having this and it could well be cheaper to just buy it at retail!.

If they addressed that it would be excellent, dont mind paying $130 its an excellent price i can justify but not $186 .