With 5000 apps, Pebble is winning the smartwatch developer war, at least for now
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
Read: about 100 apps that actually do anything useful.
I say that as someone that owns and rather likes their Pebble.
I wasn't sure if Samsung's claim of 1,000 apps included watchfaces, so I went through the Galaxy store and counted them by hand. The results (sections may be off by a few numbers as I was counting kind of quickly):
108 clocks 11 health 21 finance 211 lifestyle 17 social networking 129 entertainment 171 utilities TOTAL = 668 Note that the actual number is lower, since several apps were repeated across multiple sections and I didn't subtract them from the total.
So, Samsung does include watch faces, but the ratio of apps:faces is much greater. As for the actual number not being 1,000 apps, I'm guessing Samsung is counting apps for different languages that wouldn't appear in the US store. I wasn't sure whether to get into this level of hair-splitting in the piece, but ultimately figured I could get into it more if someone brought it up.
Anyway, I wouldn't really discount the importance of watch faces, especially on Pebble since they're key to customizing the look of your device. And I think they'll get more useful with time; Jawbone's app is technically a watch face, for instance, and some faces can display the weather, battery and calendars.
I agree that bragging about app count stops being instructive at some point, but in this case I think they show Pebble has done a fine job of establishing itself.
Thanks for reading!
Besides that, who would wear a kids like looking watch? Ok maybe some of us, but with some good leather straps, the Moto 360 looks really good and somehow unnoticed, like a normal watch. This gives me some real value, but also I am not a very young person too ;).
All this talk about how Tizen on watches will beat AW and how watches will have their own 4G connection is really off the mark. Its just more mindless 'featuritis.' People want a good experience, not a checklist of features that suck to use in the real world.
The pebble reminds me of the Treo smartphones before the iphone came out. Sure it could do stuff, but it wasn't very pleasant and you had to be something of a techie expert to really make use of it. I'm surprised the pebble people haven't made an AW watch yet. They have the branding and the know-how. AW is going to steamroll them if they don't contemporize.
If all Pebble Steel owners could channel their anger into comments below mine it may save us some space...
[1] http://www.finebyte.co.uk/?page_id=9
EDIT: FWIW, I don't use Google Now on my phone itself, so I admit that some of the novelty or utility of what it can do from your Android Wear device might be lost on me.
I also use it to track yards I go swimming, Runkeeper for tracking my runs, and miscellaneous things like the music app and the Swarm app.
With respect to "OK Google," more often than not, I find myself in places where talking to my watch would strike me as obnoxious: the office, outdoors, the subway, an elevator. Sure it's quick, but again, a button press or two strikes me as being more effective in those situations. I really would only think of using voice commands in my own home, or in the car. I guess it's all a matter of personal preference... I know exactly how the UI of the Pebble app works, and exactly what it's going to do in a certain amount of time when I press a particular button, which feels pretty seamless to me.
Lest I only say good things about Pebble, I have to mention that in a little over a year of ownership I'm on my 4th one: 3 RMAs due to persistent screen defects. This 4th one should be sent back, too, but I've yet to get around to the RMA process again. Two of the RMAs were within 1 year of purchase, and one was beyond, so my credit goes to their customer service.
I completely agree though that the Pebble is best as read-only and notify device. Interacting with it, even to change apps, is a chore. But I don't really see the point of putting a lot of interaction on a watch when, at some point, it's easier to just pull out my phone.
The pebble has waterproof, and longer battery life. But I'll trade that for android wear.
I think that tech people are overestimating the potential of wearables as useful tech. There isn't much a smart watch does for you that you couldn't pull out your phone and do.
However, the whole reason smart watches exist is to increase the LTV of a customer. When you are selling a $200-600 phone, selling a $200+ watch is a nice bump in LTV.
Apple's interchangeable bands is not just to make the manufacturing process cheaper and more efficient, it's also to make it so you can buy multiple bands to match different outfits. I know some people who own tons of Chuck Taylor shoes of different colors to match every outfit they own. Same kind of deal.
In many ways, wearable tech is less about tech and more about fashion businesses. Fashion is a great business because it's disposable. Disposable things get repurchased.
Phones are disposable, laptops are disposable, all of it is disposable and that is almost like a form of recurring revenue. Devices as a service in a way. The push for all of this is driven by profit, not by much else.
It would also make things very interesting if they could release a color version that achieved similar battery life.
I just wish they develop true wireless/cordless charging using something like ambient light, hand motion or whatever so I don't have to charge it every few days!
(I still have my Alerta that was hand-delivered.)
I do not expect them to have the big numbers of the others, but there should be room for entry level "smart" watch makers. the prices bandied about by Apple and others are simply appalling for a device which is slaved to another for some functions, at these prices it should be a phone on its own
"Apple Watch requires the presence of an iPhone to run third-party apps. Creation of a third-party app requires two separate bundles: a WatchKit app that runs on Apple Watch and a WatchKit extension that runs on the user’s iPhone. The WatchKit app contains only the storyboards and resource files associated with your app’s user interface. The WatchKit extension contains the code for managing the WatchKit app’s user interface and for responding to user interactions."
On the other hand, the 5000 is a bit inflated. It is more like 1000 apps and 4000 watch faces.
And of course, the race is still very much on. I would think sales numbers will be more important than app counts because they will drive app counts up. In that sense, the "over 400.000 sold" (http://fortune.com/2014/03/20/pebble-sold-400000-smartwatche...) from last march is better news for Pebble than that 1000 apps.