Review: Pebble Smartwatch
Posted by Anura Samara, 10 April 2015
How does the Pebble smartwatch compare to my old Pulsar digital watch?
I wrote about retiring my old watch last year, in favour of my new Pebble. Let’s forget about the psychology of giving up my old watch, and talk about why I love my Pebble.
From the start, it has to be said that the Pebble is no flashy timepiece. It will never compete with the hundreds of flashy Swiss-made watches in the stores that I walk past everyday. It’s plain to look at and makes no other statement than “I’m here to do a job”. In other words, it’s a great watch if you value function over form.
I find it incredibly comfortable to wear. The rubber strap is perfectly adjusted for me – in the past, I’ve had problems with getting the metal links on other wristbands to fit properly with the watchface flush on my narrow wrist. This is good, because the watch doesn’t jangle around when I’m excersing. It’s light, so that you don’t really notice it’s there.
The standard features for me are:
- the backlight. Coming from an old watch where the backlight had failed years ago, it’s just so convenient to be able to flick your wrist to see the time in the dark,
- the customisable watch faces. With my failing eyesight, I like to have big, bold numbers and letters on the face. At the same time, there are other faces with the traditional day and date, weather and more, and
- battery life. OK, the battery life isn’t quite up there with my old Pulsar watch – I think it only needed 2-3 batteries in its 30 year life – but the life is long enough that I really don’t need to think about recharging it every day. I’ve only been caught out three or four times with a dead watch, and with care you can make the battery last longer.
Of course, it’s branded as a ‘smart watch’ but the Pebble is really an extension of your phone. On the plus side, that means that with no phone nearby it will still function perfectly as a watch, but it remains pretty dumb until properly paired with a smart phone.
Notifications are probably the core function. The idea of being able to see what’s happening on your phone without having to get your phone out to look at sounds really cool, but in practice it takes a bit of time to customise and get right. For example, Facebook notifications sound cool but when your friends are having a group chat to organise a party do you really want your wrist vibrating every couple of seconds as someone makes a new comment? I’ve now reduced my notifications to SMS messages and Facebook notifications only – to me, the very concept of an email suggests something that doesn’t need to be urgently read right now. The notifications themselves are very subtle – there’s no sounds, just a vibration on your wrist that isn’t audible (unless you put the watch down on a hard surface).
The other key feature is integration with health and fitness. As an on-again, off-again runner but also a big walker, I like the way it natively integrates with Runkeeper on my iPhone. It means that when I’m out running, I can see my key stats including elapsed time, distance and average speed. The other thing that I’ve recently realised is that it has the inbuilt capacity to record steps – I’ve now got the Jawbone watchface as my default face showing my total step count for the day. The watch helpfully alerts me when I’ve been inactive for 30 minutes and a double flick of the wrist shows me my steps for the last week.
The new Apple Watch has been announced and the new Pebble Time is on it’s way. Am I interested in upgrading? Well, I’m always on the lookout for the next gadget but I do like to think long and hard before just handing over my cash.
With an Apple iPad and Apple iPhone, the Apple Watch sounds the perfect complement to my iOS lifestyle. But at the same time I know that I’m already having trouble squinting at the screen on my phone – how much harder will it be on a watch? And having turned off most of the notifications between my phone and Pebble, it seems like I will have to turn them on and start using them to get the most out of a Apple Watch. Finally, there’s the cost – it’s not that I can’t afford one, but when I go out firefighting I tend to forget what I have with me. That’s why I always wear cheap sunglasses – I’ve often jumped from a truck with them on – and the Pebble feels rugged and secure enough to be treated the same way. And if I do break it, it’s not so expensive that I’ll cry.
The Pebble Time on the other hand might just offer enough additional features whilst still sticking to the same basic formula – rugged, long battery life and clear screen – to make me want to upgrade.
But the Apple Watch does look very cool …
Categories: Reviews
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