Comment by Zikes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zikes | Hacker News Reader

A year ago people were foaming at the mouth at the prospect of a watch that was a vibrating e-ink backlit display with buttons and customizable watch face options and a battery that could go a week between charges.

Now it's getting panned for being nothing but a vibrating e-ink backlit display with buttons and customizable watch face options and a battery that could go a week between charges. Go figure.

I backed them on Kickstarter and got a black watch in the mail a couple months ago. I was surprised that it doesn't show me every notification by default, but somebody made a Pebble Notifier app to fill in the gaps there. Other than that, it fulfilled every expectation I had when I backed it, and I love the convenience of checking my notifications without having to pull my phone out of my pocket. The music controls are a pretty nifty feature I use often, too.

It sucks that they don't have their color options available yet, I don't know what their excuse is for that, but if they've worked all the kinks out in producing the black model then why shouldn't they get that on retail shelves as soon as possible?

I mean, the reason Kickstarter exists is so we regular consumers can recognize a company's potential and help them succeed, and now that this company is on the road to success we're going to get out our torches and pitchforks because they're struggling to ship certain variations of the product? I am flabbergasted at the entitlement some people feel, such that they think this company should run themselves into the ground financially just because they didn't get their special-colored watch yet.

Isn't this the classic mistake of assuming "people" on the internet are a single homogeneous group? When Pebble had a kickstarter, a lot of proponents were vocal. Now its going into best-buy, those that are vocal are (a different set of) people who have the opportunity to criticize. Those who successfully funded the project and are proud users of Pebble maybe see less desire to be vocal.

There's nothing really to "go figure", its just different people being selectively vocal in their support/dismissal.

This is spot-on, and an exceedingly common flaw in human cognition. It drives me crazy when I hear things like "Google wants to _____", "France believes _____", "The government is trying to _____", etc. While sometimes it's a linguistic proxy for something concrete (a specific leader, opinion polls, cultural zeitgeist), it's usually a victim of that insidious Dunbar number, and the brain's attempt to cope by treating a large, complex, heterogeneous institution or culture as though it were a single person.

I don't think it's quite the same phenomenon, although related. This is about the mental error that people do in assuming that a swing in vocalized opinion is due to people changing their minds, while it's actually just different people speaking up at different times (when it suits them). Example: "Apple fan-boys used to claim skeuomorphism is the best, but now they suddenly prefer flat design, such hypocrites!".

> a vibrating e-ink backlit display

It's not an e-ink display!

"E-Paper" is the term they used. Yeah, it's an LCD, but it has the features one would want from e-ink in this context; namely, good daylight visibility and low power draw.

Hold on a minute. e-paper and LCD are two very different technologies. You could possibly charge them for misleading. Is it bistable?

There's this big discussion about what constitutes "e-paper". Apparently, in some circles, e-paper is any display technology that is low-power and readable in daylight. The display in a pebble is a low-power transflective LCD display manufactured by Sharp. In Sharp's product brochure, they don't use the term e-paper though. They only say the display is "paper-like".

Wait, is this "low-power LCD" stuff seems an awful lot like what I had in my quartz crystal watch in the 90s. Sure that wasn't "smart" and didn't display raster graphics, but otherwise are we talking about fundamentally different technology?

Yeah, it sounds a lot like my Zire 21. Thing had great readability at any light level, because it was just plain grey high-res LCD.

Ah yeah. I was thinking more of the "preset image"/"seven-segment" style LCDs, but that is even closer to this it seems.

Hmm I find that a bit... different to my expectations. I'd always thought that e-paper absolutely required to be bistable, like paper.

It's a weird little thing, an LCD where each pixel has a bit of memory. This means that you can simply provide enough power to the LCD to drive the pixels and because of the built in memory it will display whatever it had been displaying, there's no need to continuously refresh the display from a buffer or any of the usual tricks of driving a display.

Unlike true e-ink it won't retain its state while unpowered but it does require incredibly low power for operation (tens of microwatts). They are commercially available components: http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/

I didn't back it because it seemed like it was just a vibrating etc.

I have not changed my opinion since that time. I think the thing is that the number of people that didn't back it far outnumber the number of people that did back it. Now the non-backers are saying, "I still don't get why I'd want this."

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