Pebble Smartwatch | Fone Arena

Pebble Smartwatch Review: Tip of the iceberg

From Kickstarter project to an actual company, it must have been a roller coaster ride for Pebble, the smartwatch, and the company behind the product, making it one of the first wearable gadgets to work in tandem with the smartphone platforms of our time. It is still one of the most well-funded Kickstarter projects of all time, having served as a clear indicator for the birth of a whole new market. Several months after the funding was completed, it shipped its product to its backers and now, it is shipping globally with two models, the original and a more premium Pebble Steel.

Since then, competitors have scrambled to make a mark on this new market, but none have succeeded so far. With Android Wear on the horizon and supported devices coming out in a few weeks or months, the landscape is set to change, but we don’t know how yet. Assuming you, the readers, are in the market for a smartwatch now, will the Pebble still be worth it, even after the onslaught of Android wear powered devices? Let’s find that out in our review.

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Pebble’s app store lands on iOS with over 1000 apps, Android gets a developer beta

Pebble, the company responsible for the uber popular Smartwatch that goes by the same name, recently unveiled its new hardware, the Pebble Steel Smartwatch and along with it came the announcement of the first ever app store for Smartwatches. Yes, Pebble has its own app store now, consisting of a whole lot of Watchfaces and native apps that work standalone, like mini games or work with the phone over Bluetooth and can even access the internet now. One of the many changes that Pebble did with its ecosystem was opening a mature version of its SDK to many developers, making it easier to program for the Smartwatch. We think the app store is a natural progression of that announcement. The store resides inside Pebble’s own smartwatch app in iOS as well as Android, but the latter is only available for developers and is in beta, with consumer availability stated as coming soon.

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Pebble Smartwatch goes premium with Pebble Steel, it’s thin and comes in two colour variants

Exactly one year back, the Pebble was showcased to the public for the first time. It was truly one of the first “Smart”watches at that point in time but now we are in the middle of a revolution, where suddenly everyone wants to make one before giants like Apple make a splash into the hot wearables market. But Pebble has been playing it cool. With a comfortable lead in mind share, the company started to expand from its Kickstarter roots and then updated its smartwatch’s software with a new SDK, support for iOS 7 notifications and more. Initially introduced as a sporty colourful watch, one of the major complaints from many users(including us) was that it looked like a toy and the build quality was rather cheap.

Well, Pebble has a solution for it this year at CES 2014, in the form of the all new Pebble Steel, their new stainless steel chassis for the same good old innards. It has the same e-ink display, the same battery and the lot but it’s now thinner, has a stainless steel frame and is protected by clear Corning Gorilla Glass. Watch it in action in this promo video here –

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Pebble Smartwatch CES 2014 event set for 6th Jan, has “Something Special” to show off

Pebble CES 2014 Teaser

Pebble unveiled its first SmatWatch at the CES 2013 last year before it started shipping them to Kickstarter backers. This year Pebble has announced that it would show off Something special, in a blog post titled “Something Special This Way Comes to CES…”
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Pebble Smartwatch gets an update, adds Do not Disturb, Multiple alarms with Snooze and more

Pebble, the popular E-ink Smartwatch just recently got updated to support all iOS notifications and the new 2.0 SDK. But as an early Christmas present, the company has released another Firmware update(v1.14) for the Smartwatch that enables several new must-have features like Multiple Alarms with Snooze, Do not Disturb mode and improved notification control. We have been using this smartwatch for a while, and we must say, these additions were much needed and we are happy to see a small(but growing) company like Pebble deliver. The company, largely known as a Kickstarter success story, is on a path of refining the software for the Smartwatch, and the recent updates show that they are serious. With SDK 2.0 release, Pebble promised more app integration from the like of Foursquare and Runkeeper. While we are still waiting on that, it’s good to see more features added to it in the meantime.

You can update your Pebble by just connecting it to your phone and opening the app. The app will do the rest.

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Pebble Smartwatch app for iOS 7 update 1.3.0 now live, brings full notification center support

A few days back, Pebble, the Kickstarter success story that makes E-ink smartwatches, revealed their new 2.0 SDK with which developers could take advantage of the new capabilities and hooks in the software. It was also announced that there will be a new update to the Pebble Smartwatch app for devices running iOS 7, which will take advantage of the notification center Bluetooth APIs that Apple introduced with the new update. Well, that Smartwatch app update Pebble promised, which carries the version number – 1.3.0, is now live on the iTunes app store.

Download the 1.3.0 update for Pebble Smartwatch

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