This is why I loved my Pebble.
The LCD screen meant it was readable in any light and also had fantastic battery life.
The LCD screen meant it was readable in any light and also had fantastic battery life.
I have yet to see another smartwatch do what they did, which is a bit baffling to me. Watchy came close, being fully programmable with an e-ink screen, but the bulk of the housing was atrocious.
I'm guessing pebble watches didn't geolocate you, and report your position, and probably didn't record everything said around you then "anonymize" it, so it was likely deemed useless by VCs, and thus died?
No wonder there's no replacement!
To all VCs, my startup sells geolocated tools, and also orders screws and nails, automatically, by selling special nails, with an rfid tag build in!
(next day? 1B buyout)
If there is demand, the product will succeed. See: all the companies that came from bootstrapped startups.
If there is no demand, no amount of VC money will make a successful company. See: Magic Leap.
Arguably, Pebble was an example of this. They initially presented the smartwatch as a productivity tool and many users loved it. But the productivity market was much smaller than the fitness market so they kept adding fitness related features. This eventually enabled them to be bought out by Fitbit (for a good exit) who saw no further use in the brand and killed it.
Another example is planned obsolescence: there's very little money in producing a product that has few returning customers because it continues to work fine for decades.
Saying "consumers" or "demand" or "your wallet" implies a level of agency and democratic control that isn't really there in practice. Consumers don't decide product success, profit and growth does. And consumers certainly don't get to make any direct decisions, they just get to pick through what has already been preselected for them.
Yes, a lot of "new"/"modern" companies that have shiny balance sheets with the colour black used, and not red, follow as you attribe. But there are plenty whom do not.
There are two schools of thought over this: they just don't care so it's fine or the wool has been pulled over their eyes.
The backlash from industry against laws that are largely just intended to inform consumers and keep them in the loop (like GDPR) kind of hints that it's not the former.
Consumers are especially bad at pricing risk. Just because they made a decision doesn't mean that they walked into those risks with open eyes.
Money decides hardware success. It may not come from a VC, but it's always the deciding factor.
You can still get transflective displays on Garmin fitness/hiking watches. They're great, because they allow for always-on display with more than a month of battery life. Some of their new consumer products are OLED that wake up when you turn your wrist, but the core audience really likes the transflective displays.
I do might the Timeline UI, it still is in my opinion the pinnacle of what a smartwatch OS should aim for. It focused to keep the core function of a watch (time and time-related events) at the top.