Introducing Pebble Time | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Pebble Time

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658 pointskenny_r386 comments

As I look at the total pledge amount climbing higher and higher, at $5.5m presently, I can't help but think that VCs and bankers got completely cut out of the "deal". It used to be that you had to please a whole bunch of finance guys to get anything done, but this time they weren't even invited to the table. It's a big change.

I also keep thinking about other ways in which the financial sector can get disintermediated. Bootstrapping is always an option, if a very long and arduous one. To speed things up there is Kickstarter in b2c, but what about b2b? Are there ways to get the future beneficiaries of a new b2b product to fund its development, and that don't involve spending 6 month to raise funding? It always bothered me that funding decisions are usually made by people who know a lot about finance and, as a rule, very little about the target market. Surely there is a lot of potential there for the insiders of the target industry?

I believe someone setting up a way to broker first customers to become stakeholders in new companies for pre-paying for services would be huge. I've been in a situation where that would have been totally warranted and valuable, but instead we had to spend months proving to that customer other ways that working with us was properly de-risked. They would have been happy to just take the risk if there was a plug and play model to reward them for it, and I think many other companies are in similar situations (depending on what part of their business you touch/would effect).

Another model that I do not personally believe in but seems promising to others I respect is https://assembly.com - they work to bring teams together to build things and have gamified equity comp. You can even go in there and squash an important bug on a project and get equity in the project forever (ostensibly) for doing it based on the "bounty" that is set.

I totally agree, and here int he UK I've encountered crowd funding for businesses selling to businesses.

I run a software company and one of my clients raised nearly £500k in 2 weeks by crowdfunding via an intermediary.

There's also organisations such as https://www.fundingcircle.com/ that provide crowdfunding on a scale...

There are many crowdfunding platforms but at least here in the US they all need to follow the same SEC regulations which require investors to be accredited which essentially means you have to be a millionaire to play.

Those regulations were essentially removed in a lot of cases by the JOBS act in 2012. The rules are still under review but crowdfunding of equity will be possible sometime in early 2016.

JOBS act owes a lot to Naval Ravikant, http://pando.com/2012/11/15/how-naval-ravikant-went-to-washi...

It depends on your perspective of a b2b product. If by b2b you mean business to fortune 500 business, then there is probably not a way around it. If you're talking about business to mom and pop shop, Kickstarter is perfectly suitable - look at the top tier prizes. They're usually geared towards buying them in bulk, probably with the intent of reselling them.

The reason I would say that it is an impossibility to talk about selling business to fortune 500 type business is because invariably, they have venture arms which function like the finance industry and are usually staffed by former employees of Goldman, JP Morgan, etc. So, the insiders have found a way to do what they want - they're their own bank, unless we're talking about major mergers and acquisitions, which obviously require such fast sums of capital that it's unreasonable to expect such an accessible market.

Don't get me wrong, I want to believe that as well, but where does it say they weren't or will not be? Surely Kickstarter does not prohibit that?

To play devil's advocate let's do this from the perspective of the VC/Banker guys: 1) "Can we have $10 million to build the next wave of our watch?" 2) "Woah. There's a good chance AppleWatch will crush you. It's all anyone talks about. We'll lose our money and you'll waste 2 - 3 years of your life. Not sure it's a good idea"

In the old days 3) was i) nothing happened as the VC guys feared risk or ii) They did lend/invest but with a lot of risk built in to the terms to reflect the uncertainty.

Now 3) = "Let's put it on Kickstarter. That way both of us don't need to guess - we'll just know. If you get $x million of pledges we're happy to give you $y cash at $z valuation"

Seems like everyone can win?

I wonder if it isn't more like, now 3) = "Let's put it on Kickstarter and let ordinary blokes who don't know any better fund us instead".

It's just all-around suspicious when a product you'd expect to be able to get traditional funding, is listed on Kickstarter instead.

From seeing attitudes of friends doing hardware startups, no, the GP's 3) was accurate. Kickstarter is now a marketing and product/market fit evaluation tool.

A friend of mine is halfway through his Kickstarter now and he directly told me that he doesn't expect much more than breaking even on it - the whole point is a) marketing and b) greater chance to get new investors on board, because that's where the real money is.

And, while I'm not sure of that, I suspect it's their current investor who suggested that Kickstarter campaign.

How exactly do VCs win when the company crowd-raises $6m? Seems to me they make exactly $0 and receive 0% of equity, because they are not involved at all.

Except there are already VCs in the equation, so any profitability helps them. It also doesn't dilute their shares, and they don't have to decide if they should risk doubling down on the second round.

If I were a VC, this would definitely help validate my investment while requiring a total input of about zero from me. What business gets all the cash up front!!?

All VC's (at this stage of a company's life) want to see sales before they'll invest. These are the sales. I think Pebble wants a heck of a lot more money than $6m to compete with AppleWatch.

That's a cute viewpoint, but the mere mortals get screwed, same as always.

Let's say a VC invests $2.4 million dollars in a company. Let's assume the company does well and sells out to Facebook for $2.3 billion. The VC, being wise in the ways of finance, profits handsomely from that $2.3 billion.

What if, instead of a VC investing $2.4 million dollars, it was a large collection of mortals each investing a small sum, say $300.

The collection of mortals would simply give the company $2.4 million, and after selling out to Facebook, the company... screws over the puny mortals and simply pockets it all.

Sure, the company gets to keep out the eeeeevil VC and bankers, but the little guy sees no return on their $300.

Yay?

Wait, no, we all got a shiny Oculus Rift out of the deal to play with.

This is why I'm excited about the possibility of the crowdfunding provisions in the recently passed JOBS Act. In theory, this should allow companies to sell small pieces of equity (up to Math.max($2000, 5% of investor's yearly earnings) per investor and up to $1 million total) without having to go through the headache involved with an SEC Public Offering registration. While the potential for fraud needs to be dealt with, this opens the doors to something like "Kickstarter with Equity".

I see that slightly differently.

I, as a "mere mortal", have already _given_ $200 to Pebble, and $400 to ZPM Espresso.

I got exactly the return I wanted and was entitled to from Pebble, I've had a smart watch on my wrist for ~2 years now and _their_ company has thrived (and they are not under any legal, moral, or even politeness related obligation to offer me anything more except perhaps an opportunity to participate in their next big idea. I certainly don't expect a cut of their eventual acquisition payday).

I got an outcome that, while not my most desirable one, was certainly one of the outcomes I was prepared for from ZPM - a bunch of updates indicating they were working furiously trying ti achieve their dream - and finally a message says "sorry people, didn't work out". And I'm perfectly fine with that too.

I know not everyone views Kickstarter that way (and the "blame" for that falls firmly on both project creators and Kickstarter themselves), but if you expect it to work like a shop - buy your stuff from a shop - they'll ship it with close to 100% certainty, you'll be covered by consumer protection laws and credit card fraud policies and other similar well know remedies. "Kickstarter" even implies in it's name they're not like that. You're often funding pre-manufacturing ideas - along with all the risk associated with the assumptions of getting things finalised and manufactured, and hopefully benefiting by getting your trinket well before the general public and probably at a discounted price for assuming some of that risk.

I've _never_ been "screwed" by Kickstarter - even though I've funded several failed projects. That's part of the Kickstarter game. The same as all those non 1000x exits the VCs fund - they're not getting screwed there, they're playing the risk/reward number game. If they didn't want to get "screwed" by the 99.5% of the companies they invest in failing to return 1000x, they'd be investing in government bonds or blue chip stocks.

You only "get screwed" by a successful (or failed) Kickstarter project/company if you choose to view yourself as a victim (or have a tremendously overactive sense of entitlement).

You are essentially pre-ordering one of their watches for a $20 discount. What's there to complain about? Sure, in unproven items you are gambling somewhat (they may not deliver) but you should evaluate that risk when you put your money in.

None of us think we are buying equity when we put money in, and yet clearly 31,000+ people are willing to put their money in to pre-order the product without equity. Good for that company, that they have that level of pre-order demand, no?

You forget the 'mere mortals' working at the company. They keep their equity rather than the VC.

On the Oculus example: I got what I paid for. Did they ever say equity? Did they ever say that backers got decision making rights for a company on the financial high-wire (both IP and hardware capital expenses).

Really, I thought the outcry against Oculus just exposed how little people think through the hard choices of running a business and how entitled they feel for so little expenditure.

The sense of entitlement in this is difficult for me to understand.

Kickstarter works by a person paying for something in advance. Often backers get discounted prices, in return for taking on this risk of backing. Obviously your example diminishes that value of the "shiny Oculus Rift", but it isn't at all clear why.

Your post seems to indicate that you think the backer should get both the product, and a piece of the company for the same price.

How's the economics of that supposed to work?

Specific to the Oculus Rift example, I understand that people resent the company being bought out by a company (Facebook) whose philosophy differs to what they thought Oculus's should be. I can see why people resent that, but I don't think it counts at "getting screwed" in any economic sense at all. I think it is more a moral violation of values they though were shared with a company. I'm not sure how this problem can be solved in any easy way.

> bankers got completely cut out of the "deal"

Seems to me that Kickstarter are the banker, taking 5% of the funds. And their payment processors are taking another 3%.

There are two important differences:

1. There is no discretion involved. When you're trying to finance a new development you have to convince bankers/VCs to give you money. Payment processors don't exactly need to be convinced, and Kickstarter is open to anyone.

2. The size of the cut taken by the middlemen is in direct proportion to the sales volume. With a bank you would normally take out a fixed-sized loan, then spend all the money on manufacturing, then pray that you can sell enough of your gizmos and pay back the loan. With buyer-financed manufacturing there is no guesswork involved.

Less discretion and less guesswork => less overhead.

I think you mis-understand how banks work. There is no bank that will lend money speculatively to fund a new product. If you have collateral, they will lend against that, but that means they aren't taking a risk on the product.

A bank is nothing like a VC.

So far Pebble has raised $375k from angels, plus a $15M Series A (per Crunchbase). If they hadn't had any outside investors, I would definitely agree with you, but the VCs/Angels that invested in Pebble have to be loving the funding results of this Kickstarter. Tens of thousands of new and return customers pre-launch is always a good thing when launching a new product.

But you'll have to agree that after Pebble's Kickstarter sucess + the cash they got from it, they were in a much better bargaining position than your typical startup out to raise its first round.

It's not perfect, but at least Pebble didn't have to fork over 10% of the company for a few hundred grand in cash to investors who brought nothing to the table (besides money)

Having tremendous success with their first Kickstarter likely helped them get favorable terms when they raised their series A, but that applies to any company, not just Pebble.

I don't know what the terms their Angel investors got before the Kickstarter, and I'm not familiar with what is 'normal' for SV angels to get. I do know that YC startups fork over ~10% of their company for a few hundred grand in cash, but YC brings a wide network of connections and social signaling for future capital raises to the table.

Even it was just cash and no YC connections, if I were thinking about starting a young hardware startup, (if it were offered), I'd still probably trade whatever % of my early stage startup for the few hundred grand necessary to be able to hire the handful of right people and get to the point where I had a 'good enough' prototype + software to take to Kickstarter and (hopefully) get enough cash pledged to manufacture and ship a v1 product.

Of course, you could work a day job and save back that necessary cash and then fund the startup yourself and keep 100% of the company. Or be already independently wealthy. Or be a savant and do all the work yourself. Or get a traditional bank loan. Or some combination of the above.

But the SV way of trading a relatively small percentage of your company for an initial cash infusion of a few hundred thousand dollars is a valid option that many people would love to have.

VC's provide more then money too. They provide connections/strategy/experience just as much as they provide cash.

Despite what the text on the page implies, these are essentially pre-orders for the Pebble and not "funding" in the VC sense. They didn't raise $5.5MM, they sold that roughly that many of their products. It's an impressive achievement, especially relative to most other Kickstarter campaigns. But if apple only sold $5.5MM in pre-orders for their new watch, they wouldn't be very happy and someone would probably get fired.

As far as B2B bootstrapping goes, companies invest in other companies all the time. Mostly for the reasons that you've outlined, because they want to help potential partners to grow and often as a precursor to an acquisition. They generally don't do it at the very early seed stage because it's too speculative. That's what angel investors are for.

Kickstarter has become a sales platform, whether that's what they wanted to be or not, and they should just embrace that. It started off as "fund great ideas and help them get off the ground" but as soon as they allowed products to be given away as rewards it became "buy stuff that doesn't exist yet, and you may or may not receive it". There's clearly a demand for it, and it doesn't seem like the failed products are enough to stop people with disposable income from parting with a few hundred dollars to be early adopters and feel like they're helping someone else. It's worth noting that under this system the amount raised almost always reflects revenue as opposed to funding/profit. A campaign that raises $100k on Kickstarter will usually only get to "keep" $40k-$60k of that as actual funding, because they have to pay for the cost of the products and swag that they give out as rewards. Sure beats starting from scratch though.

Are there ways to get the future beneficiaries of a new b2b product to fund its development, and that don't involve spending 6 month to raise funding?

Sort of... I've been spending my free time learning the ins and outs of retail/distribution. It's not the most transparent industry but 'factoring' plays a pretty big role. If you are pitching/selling a physical product (iphone case) to category buyer from a Big Retail chain and they like your product, then send you a Purchase Order to buy your product, but you don't have the funds to manufacture/package/distribute the product you can find a Factoring Company who will fund the money in exchange for the Purchase Order from the Big Retailer. Some say the rates are too high and terms aren't great, but they can be a good source of backing. A lot of companies use Factoring. Perhaps maybe some Angels will start thinking about doing Factor deals in the near future.

What happened to 'Kickstarter is not a store' - https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-not-a-store ?

Offering multiple quantities of a reward is prohibited. Hardware and Product Design projects can only offer rewards in single quantities or a sensible set (some items only make sense as a pair or as a kit of several items, for instance). The development of new products can be especially complex for creators and offering multiple quantities feels premature, and can imply that products are shrink-wrapped and ready to ship.

Honestly, that seems like a completely arbitrary policy which serves no real purpose.

In general I'd stay the hell away from hardware projects on Kickstarter, but in this case Pebble has a proven track record of delivering a quality product in a reasonable time frame. I assume that gives them a little more leeway when Kickstarter is approving their campaign.

That Kickstarter policy update was in response to the rising levels of failed projects on the site. It was an attempt to fight off bad press. Of course, it turned out to be pretty toothless (Just take a look at the joke of a 'risks' section of almost any kickstarter project. That section was also introduced by this udpate).

I'd agree with you that Pebble probably have a better chance than most at delivering on their promises, but as people have commented elsewhere, Pebble are only really back on KS as a promotional exercise. This is not really comparable to most other KS projects.

Still, it's one rule for them, another for everyone else. KS are doing well out of this promo too.

Perhaps someone should go and report Pebble for their other rule-breaking? Those watch pictures at the top of the page are clearly computer renderings. "If a simulation or photorealistic rendering is discovered after a project launches, that project will be canceled." :)

The risks section is great because you can tell very quickly if they've put some thought into logistics or not. No need to enforce that it's properly filled out.

> Pebble has a proven track record of delivering a quality product in a reasonable time frame

Perhaps I'm remembering this incorrectly, but wasn't the Pebble a textbook example of significant production delays for a Kickstarter hardware project? I'm pretty sure I knew someone who hadn't received his watch from Kickstarter many months after the supposed delivery date, while at the same time he could have gone to Best Buy and bought one.

> but in this case Pebble has a proven track record of delivering a quality product in a reasonable time frame.

Hardly.

http://readwrite.com/2013/07/09/why-i-cancelled-my-pebble-sm...

If it quacks like a preorder...

I was thinking the same thing. Whatever, if they adjusted the rules someone would find a way around it. It's pretty smart marketing.

$3,956,662 (as of this post) happened.

I wonder if they are getting the usual 5% or if there's some sort of partnership based on the two companies' histories together.

If Pebble have any sense they'll have negotiated some kind of better deal with Kickstarter, in return for the guaranteed revenue and publicity.

I suspect that the reason to continue using Kickstarter even with the 5% fee is that it comes included with publicity from not just Kickstarter, but the media outlets that will relay this story.

I think it's highly unlikely that Pebble didn't negotiate that 5% way down. While it's a symbiotic relationship, I think that at this point it's safe to say that it benefits Kickstarter more than Pebble.

Pebble is getting a very cheap line of credit with theoretically no obligation to repay (hence why any money you give in a KS is a 'donation' or 'pledge').

There's a contract to deliver on the promises made:

https://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use#section4

The language isn't real strong though:

If a creator is unable to complete their project and fulfill rewards, they’ve failed to live up to the basic obligations of this agreement. To right this, they must make every reasonable effort to find another way of bringing the project to the best possible conclusion for backers.

I was burnt by Kickstarter when a project didn't deliver. In this case, it was obvious fraud -- the guy walked away with about $15k. There was an article written about it:

http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2013/02/9807-kickstarter-fra...

The response that I got from Kickstarter was basically "Sorry, that sucks" and "Try contacting the creator through Kickstarter or through Facebook". They wouldn't provide any other contact information for the product creator.

I understand that they're responsible for the production of the product, but they do profit from the transaction. The right thing to do would have been to at least refund the 5% that they collect as a gesture of goodwill. I understand that projects fail, but they should be at least partially responsible for outright fraud.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/500095192/md-pen-minima...

"partially responsible for outright fraud" gets them into the business of deciding when outright fraud has occurred. I can see why they don't want to do that.

I also think that encouraging skeptical backers is going to be better for the ecosystem in the long term than doing more and more to make it 'safe'.

$4,970,378 and climbing

$5.2 million with 31 days to go. Damn.

120 $ per seconds between your two comments ! 5,490,313 now. Impressive.

$7,000,000

That's from 2012, and as someone mentioned, was in response to a lot of risky hardware projects. More recently, Kickstarter changed their rules to be a lot simpler. https://www.kickstarter.com/rules

Perhaps this campaign violates what you perceive as the spirit of Kickstarter, but Kickstarter itself has never had a problem with established companies/entertainers using the platform.

yeah, who would want to use kickstarter for a risky hardware project!

When you can use it as a store by a company that raised more than $10 million, and this time sell a fully completed product with no special rewards or community input. They didn't even try to come up with any rewards this time - at any price, or show any part of how it was designed. it blatantly has nothing to do with the kickstarter spirit whatsoever.

I'm pretty sure the Kickstarter spirit is defined as "whatever the people running Kickstarter want it to be".

In my experience services that don't change over time are the ones that go away. Kickstarter seems like a fluid concept that continues to evolve. As I look they're passing $5 million so it seems as though the community is responding.

yeah, you can see how outraged people are by how much they are refusing to support the offering

Well, there's risky and then there's risky. I believe that post was put up at the same time that the LIFX light bulb campaign was prematurely ended at ~$2 million. That project was from someone whose previous KS project was a cardboard lightbox that had missed its shipping date at that point, so I think the likelihood of collateral damage there made Kickstarter pause. (Credit to LIFX that they learned/hired quickly and managed to ship.)

Whatever you take the spirit of Kickstarter to mean, I think that Pebble has it. They're grateful for Kickstarter, and foster a user community — launching a new product this way just feels native.

This spirit is better for me. I'll never back another Kickstarter project in the old "spirit". One project failing and taking all my money with it is enough for me. I'm nearly certain that I'll get my watch, so I backed this one.

$250k+ in fees (and growing!) for a product by an established company, that's what. KS isn't going to turn that down.

The upside of this is that Pebble get to rake in people's money for pre-orders - not a finished product - which means they manage to pre-empt Apple Watch stealing the show. The drive is going to run until ultimo March, with Apple Watch being ready in April.

The downside is that you eat a lot of fees by using Kickstarter, when you might have been able to run your own drive independently like Lockitron, so it's interesting to consider that they went with Kickstarter. I guess the idea of being a "big success on Kickstarter" would be good PR, when Apple is, well, Apple.

Maybe people are just much quicker on the draw with the credit cards there, which wouldn't surprise me. Especially after the Stripe payment system.

Kickstarter has other advantages. For one, everyone who backed the original Pebble watch already has a Kickstarter account.

I wouldn't be surprised if kickstarter worked out a deal with pebble with a lower fee. All this traffic and press is clearly good for them too.

I really don't see the point of ordering a Pebble from Kickstarter myself, even if I had a desire for such a watch.

The nominal amount I might save by doing the pre-order is more than offset by the risk I'm assuming. I'd much rather wait until the product is released, and then read some independent reviews... especially ones where the reviewer has been wearing it for a month or so.

I've only funded two crowd-sourced projects. One was for a buddy of mine, the other was for Sandstorm.io, where they were already basically done, and just wanted some more funds for enhancements. And it was open-source, so its just the same in my mind as when I send money to Debian or OpenBSD (which is not often enough, but that's another discussion). And even with Sandstorm, one of the principals is also a friend of a friend, so I had confidence the money was going towards a good purpose.

For others the price isn't the important point, being along on the kickstarter is merely about being first in the queue for a new toy.

Indiegogo started making a lot of money due to that differentiation, because you could sell many items on Indiegogo.

My understanding is that the Kickstarter policy came in BECAUSE of the original Pebble selling packs of several devices. It's ironic that the policy was reversed and the same company is using that same "multiple products" trick to make a new record on the platform.

Ultimately it DOES change the Kickstarter brand. New projects use "Kickstarter" in their press releases and they're set to the same bar of selling millions of items. I feel like the whole concept of "a kickstarter" is no longer what it used to mean.

They should have stuck with the "Kickstarter is not a store" policy.

I was waiting to see what Apple had in store but...oh, what the hell, I'll pull the trigger. Fact is, I'm pretty satisfied with my original KS-backer edition Pebble. Apple is going to have to have a pretty convincing story for me to charge a watch every single day. I spend enough time away from 5VDC power sources that such short battery life could become occasionally annoying.

The original Pebble does what I want it to do. In fact, it does more than it promised pre-shipping (counts steps, as one example). I'm hardly one to be brand-loyal to a watch, but ignoring late shipping to KS backers, Pebble has exceeded expectations, so I'll give them another whirl. Apple, OTOH, is going to have to do a hell of a job to convince me to spend almost twice as much on a new platform that needs daily charging. And I say this as one with a house full of Apple gear, much of it pre-ordered on the day of announcement.

I really just want a "normal" watch that has some "smart" features. I already have a sports tracker (Garmin Forerunner), and I have given up wearing my Moto360 because it's almost never useful in compelling enough ways that I don't just pull my phone out after seeing a notification ... and I have to charge it nightly.

If you want a normal watch combined with a fitbit, check out: http://www.withings.com/us/withings-activite.html

They have a lower-end version of that now too: http://www.withings.com/us/withings-activite-pop.html

That's a sexy watch, not sure how i didn't see it before. Thanks for the link.

Very sexy.

Though the band ruins it for me, as I wear my fitness tracker while doing actual fitness. The rubberized Garmin Vivofit can handle the beatings.

They do a cheaper version called Activite Pop which ships with a silicone band.

"In the box: Sports strap. A set of silicone straps for sports activities"

Wow, that's a smart watch I could actually use. 8 month battery life, doesn't look awful, not priced terribly (for the version with silicone band). The only thing holding me back is that it seems to require a phone app. Right now my phones are Windows and Blackberry; it'd be nice if I could just use a web app in the browsers on those.

Yeah, I agree. It's a possibility that their android app might not require play services, though, and will work on your Blackberry (and my CyanogenMod).

That's one sexy watch. Seems a lot like one of my fav watches [0].

Although:

> Android not compatible now

> Coming in end of February 2015

[0] http://www.baume-et-mercier.com/en/classima-10144.html#wf

This reminds me of the movie Her. This is the direction I want wearable tech to go.

That looks amazing. Why haven't I seen this until now?

Wow, that's a beautiful watch first and foremost, and a "smart" accessory second. It reminds me of the Bauhaus style of Nomos and later on Stowa, both held in extremely high regard by the watch community.

$450 is high for a smartwatch, but low for a watch in general. Nomos watches cost thousands. Granted, that's in large part to their in-house mechanical movements. But $450 is certainly not unreasonable for a high quality quartz watch -- see Seiko and Citizen. And this has the aesthetics to compete with the best of them in my humble opinion.

I have a Moto 360 and I stopped wearing it a bit over a month in. The extra features it has aren't very useful to be completely honest, and it's a bit bulky, having to charge it daily was really a drain, and it just felt flat-out fragile. I was afraid to even wash my hands while wearing it.

Lack of Android support is unfortunately a deal breaker for me right now, as I don't have an iPhone.

Something like this?

http://engineeredby.hp.com/michael-bastian/index.html

Another option is the latest Fenix from Garmin... https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/on-the-trail/wrist-worn/feni...

While it isn't a true smart-watch, it does provide alerts from your phone. I imagine for many users, that's enough.

If I hadn't stopped wearing a watch completely a few years ago, I'd probably buy this one.

I hate to say it, because they're local here in Kansas City, but I'd stay away from Garmin if you want your device to integrate with anything else. I bought a GPS of theirs last year. I've never experienced frustration like I did trying to download a map from the internet and put it on this device. I now have SIX Garmin applications on my computer that I have to use to manage the device. (I'm not kidding.) Garmin BaseCamp, Garmin Express, Garmin MapInstall, Garmin MapManagaer, Garmin POI Loader, and Garmin Web Updater. Every one of them is buggy and hard to use.

Run far and fast.

Wow. That is awful. I use their fitness devices (Edge 500 and one of the ForeRunners) and they've had some issues (bugs in the firmware), but nothing like that. Both integrate with Garmin Connect (the web site) using the Garmin Express app (OSX).

If that did sleep and activity tracking, then I would be in. Also, I didn't see battery life, but that might be an issue also. All I want is to log my heartrate throughout the day via my phone along with good sleep tracking. I'm ok with wearing a heart rate band.

What sort of features?

My biggest problem with the Apple watch is that I don't want to have an expensive, high-demand Apple device on my wrist...it's going to be a bigger thief-magnet than a new iPhone. For that reason alone it will be a while before I consider getting one.

Thefts of iPhones actually dropped massively since iOS 7 introduced activation lock. Some cities published stats. Interestingly thefts of Samsung devices went way up as the market for useless stolen iPhones dried up.

The peeble seems to be mainstream ready, watching their videos, I felt like buying this just like buying a casio watch in the 90s. It seems sturdy, functional, fits the trends of the day just enough, not too expensive.

I'll admit to being disappointed. After the Pebble Steel I thought they were going to take appearances seriously, but the Pebble Time barely even looks better than the original Pebble. Maybe if they make a Pebble Time Steel it'll be the one for me (and the sales figures suggest plenty do not agree with me).

That said, kudos to them for getting it out and being independent competition to Android Wear and the Apple Watch. We need that.

Yeah it is too bad. I know many people who will not wear a smart watch if it doesn't look good. And these are people who have / wear many fashion watches of various sizes. The apple watch is the first watch that they actually like appearance wise.

At least come out with a shiny gold, brass and rose gold colored versions. Not actual gold mind you, just gold colored. There are certain market segments that love those colors.

I don't need fashionable watch. But this thing looks so childish.

You don't, but many other segments do.

I don't need a fashionable watch, but I really don't need an ugly watch. My phone tells time, shows notification, and does everything this does perfectly fine.

If it were fashionable, I'd be tempted. But it has to be at least one of useful and fashionable.

They announced it would be actual gold. Just like for luxury gold watches.

I know, but for example, the 'champagne' (gold) color iPhone 6 is a very popular color in China. That's why I said it doesn't have to be actual gold.

Ah sorry, it sounded like you thought that was what they were doing. re-reading I get it now.

It's like the started with a target price ("N under Apple Watch") and worked backwards. I don't care if it costs more, the industrial design of this pebble is too cheap for me to wear.

Just wait for it. In the coming weeks we will probably see a steel version added to the Kickstarter

Nah, they'll probably wait a year first like last time. They know that too many people would just shift their pledge over to a steel version. It'd make waiting to release it pointless

They've specifically hinted that they want people to shift their pledges to a "surprise" that's coming later in the campaign.

It's been speculated that the metal version will be called "Business Time" :P

What I think is good about this is that they are thinking of a new paradigm for UI on a wearable. For Android Wear devices it feels like Google just decided that voice was going to take care of UI, and no decisions about physical controls needed to be made. But there are two problems: voice isn't that reliable, and more importantly, there are a lot of situations where you want to use your watch but not talk to it.

> voice isn't that reliable

Maybe it's because I'm from Minnesota and sound like Don LaFontaine, but Google's voice recognition is easily 95% or better for me. Probably closer to 98%, even on spoken sentences for sending emails or texts. When I'm navigating, or trying to call someone, it's closer to 99%.

Voice recognition has improved tremendously for me as well. But what I can't seem to get over is that it's almost always slower than using my thumbs. Talking is slower than typing, plus the process time needed to interpret the voice commands. -- from a keyboard shortcut junkie

Your post has 47 words. A 95% success rate means 1 in 20 failure, so you're going to have to stop, swear, fix it, and restart dictation about two or three times in your post. Even the somewhat optimistic 99% still gives only a systemic fifty fity odds of your post being error free.

Its just too annoying for most people to use.

What voice recognition reminds me of, is a disobedient / distracted little kid, the kind you have to tell everything twice.

> A 95% success rate means 1 in 20 failure

I'm not sure my success rate is any better than that typing on my iPhone.

But the correction is simpler and less distracting. I can backspace the word I misspelled and fix it without breaking my thought flow, whereas when I try that with dictation... well, it doesn't work that way. Especially that the whole point of dictation should be that you're not actually looking at the screen and double-checking if what's recognized is what you said.

"Especially that the whole point of dictation should be that you're not actually looking at the screen"

I've noticed UIs always get "needier" over time. Call it VLM's Law. In the old days a dumbphone could be operated tactile in total darkness without looking at it at all. Then smartphones came along which needed occasional glances at the screen to verify the screen and touch screen position/orientation (portrait vs auto-rotated landscape). Now you need to stare continuously at the screen to watch mistakes in the speech to text dictation system as you slowly, tediously, agonizingly argue with a machine.

How clumsy of a UI, like going thru life wearing oven mitts. And VLMs Law is it always gets worse over time. It'll take a lot of work, but we'll find a way to make UIs even more painful.

Yeah. What I loved about dumbphones and feature phones was not just keys - it was that they had firmware instead of a full-blown OS, and thus predictable timing. I could operate my K800i in total darkness without looking at it, because I knew that, say, "joy-click, wait for around half a second, left, joy-click, down, joy-click" would take me to my messages. If I tried something like that with my S4, I'd end up pretty much wherever, because the UI likes to hang for half a sec every now and then.

#nostalgia

That is near the success rate I have as well. And when I dictate a text on my phone voice works great because I can retype the one in twenty words it gets wrong. There's no keyboard on a watch. Worse, when you are misunderstood Wear is likely to launch the wrong app or pull up the wrong information. So you have the problem of canceling one thing and trying, awkardly, to get to what voice didn't understand.

If you look on the wear store, apps that create rows of icons on your watch face are very popular. I think that shows that this is a common concern.

I feel the exact opposite as far as controls go. Android Wear decided voice and touch would take care of the UI whereas Pebble has gone completely with buttons (4 of them!) and as an owner of the previous generation of Pebble I always found them very awkward to use especially if I was doing anything except maybe standing still.

I also own a Moto 360 which is okay but honestly I'm not as big of a fan as I thought I would be. If they made Pebble Time have touch controls to get rid of the big buttons I would buy this thing in a heart beat.

I disagree with you in parts. I've a pebble while my wife has an android watch. The killer feature on the android phone is voice commands. I agree that when in public it's a privacy concern to use voice commands hence an alternative is necessary. But its incredibly convenient and useful to control your phone and watch say when you are driving or at home. It's incredibly useful to set reminders just by saying "Ok Google, Set reminder for..." etc. Btw, our native language is not english and have bit of accent although that hasn't caused any issues. The second great feature on android watch is gestures. Just swiping and tapping to control is useful than having to fiddle with 4 buttons.

However the best thing I find on the pebble is - Battery Life, - Readability in daylight, - Slim and light weight.

Smart Watches are quite nascent tech and if we get to where we get ones that are amalgamation of all these features, I'll be a content man.

Why can't you just ... issue voice commands to your phone?

Because at home I don't carry it around. Outside, I would have to get it out of my pockets to be able to access it. Also in inclement weather a cheap/water proof watch is less of a risk.

What's the range on that smartwatch before it is disconnected from your phone?

We have not tested it in the open. Inside home it stays connected when I'm in kitchen and the phone is in bedroom. It has also stayed connected when I went out to my car which was across my patio.

that's incredible; much better than I would have guessed.

Yes it is. Although, I believe it depends on the bluetooth's strength which may be device specific. Mine is a SGS4.

Basically the only things I use voice commands for is "set a timer for..." while cooking or "remind me at noon to..." when I need a time alert.

Oh, and saying "What's my name" and having Siri respond "Your name is <name>, but since we're friends I get to call you Captain James T Kirk". But that's just personal amusement.

Huh. When I ask my name, it says "Your name is <name>. That's what you told me, anyway."

Seems a lot more suspicious of me for some reason..

It's like a tamagotchi- you have to take care of it everyday for a bond to develop.

I'm not sure if it works with Siri, but my favorite google voice command is "remind me to {do something} when I'm at {some place}"

I use it for stuff I forget to buy when I'm shopping, mostly. The stuff you don't buy often, like "remind me to get deodorant when I'm at Kroger."

Also the timer-type reminders/alarms are great.

I really wish it was easier to compose notes and the like. I finally found how to reliably get a newline with the voice keyboard (by saying "period newline"...the period is required).

"Her" was pretty inspiring for all of the voice-related stuff. But I'm still weird about using voice commands in public. If everyone was, I'd get over it.

I agree that voice commands are sometimes useful, but they also sometimes aren't. One problem is that voice is more reliable when it has context, like a complete sentence. That doesn't always fit the use case of openign an oddly named app.

Another problem is typified by a commmon Android Wear app which allows you to request a fake phone call on your phone. This example shows one of the use cases for a wearable: its a device you can look at when its socially or physically awkward to pull out a phone. You don't want to say, "Google, this meeting is boring!" But you might want a button that lets you do something about it.

voice is more reliable when it has context, like a complete sentence. That doesn't always fit the use case of opening an oddly named app.

One could get around most of that by being able to set aliases for often used apps, like, "quick open 1." If it's hard to open a seldom used app, it's not that big a deal.

As I said earlier, I agree that in certain circumstances voice commands are not adequate. But in cases where they are, they are extremely efficient, handy or safe. Hence I believe selection of user interface be at user's discretion.

> Just swiping and tapping to control is useful than having to fiddle with 4 buttons

What's fiddly about buttons? It's much faster than swiping a couple of times to get to the option you want.

The screen interface is more accessible than the buttons. With buttons I've to feel my way around since there are three on the right side. Also I've to support the watch from the side opposite to the one where the button is being pressed. Also with gloves, jackets etc I've to wiggle my way to be able to press buttons also sensing which button I'm pressing is not easy.

For me, being able to operate the buttons by feel is a key feature, and I find it pretty easy to do on my original Pebble. It's useful for controlling music playback or dismissing alarms without having to look at the watch.

I agree that there are disadvantages too. One of my jackets does make it harder to access all the buttons. And scrolling through a list one item at a time can be more annoying than just swiping and tapping on the item you want.

I do wish the pebble buttons were easier to press.

I agree. Voice control in the Apple/Android paradigm is... weird. Talking to the phone, requiring Internet connection, unusable on a busy street. Take out the phone, unlock it, move it in front of your face (now I can't see a thing and start bumping into people), "ok Google", say it again, wait for the S4 to react, say something, see it's interpreted wrong...

I very much prefer to type, it's faster even on a touch screen.

So here I am, waiting for a subvocal recognition system and the comeback of off-line speech processing.

Android has offline speech recognition.

I'm not sure if it'll use it anytime there's a data connection, though.

I've also noticed it has a couple of flaws, like you can't use "newline" with it.

Voice in my case is super reliable. I'm always a little surprised at all the things it gets right. I think the work google has been doing on context aware speech to text is paying off. I've had edge cases where it couldn't get things right, but just making an effort to speak slower and more deliberate solves that. Thankfully I don't need to do that often.

Meh, most of the time I can just whisper something ambigious if I'm concerned about privacy, or just pull out my big ass phone and type on it, which is what I would have done if I didn't own a moto 360.

I tried one of those keyboards for the watch, and its really a non-starter. Wearables only make sense as voice devices. Even the large moto 360 can't support an on-screen keyboard and I imagine future smartwatches will be smaller, especially one's marketed at women and children.

I can't disagree more. 4 big buttons in comparison to a touch screen is not new and actually backwards.

Touch screens are not the solution for every problem.

I just saw a TV show the other day where the bomb squad was driving a robot with an iPad. Yes, all driving input and finite movement of the robot arms was done on a touch screen.

Terrible idea; nobody would do that in real life.

A touch screen that is 1.5" square is effectively four buttons.. without the tactile feedback.

At least I don't have to take my hands out of my glove in this cold to operate it.

It's interesting that they've chosen to launch the product on Kickstarter. They don't appear to need the funding structure; they're simply using it as a shop.

Marketing. This will generate a lot more publicity.

Right. As a Marketing guy myself (6 years in Procter & Gamble), I'm always baffled when people in HN don't get obvious marketing moves, but in the other hand, I'm always learning so much about tech stuff that my colleagues would never get in a decade. This community is awesome.

I'm sure the guaranteed number of sales prior to investing time and money into the project doesn't hurt either.

I'm pretty sure they "get it", but agreeing with this practice is different thing. Sure, KS is as happy as everyone else, but that's not what they used to present themselves as.

Marketing as mentioned is one thing, but the other thing is that by having the community fund it before they invest in developing it, they don't run much financial risks themselves - a lot of products are developed where a company, or its employees, invest their own money, often having to do stuff like forfeit income. Having this kind of money beforehand prevents this.

They'll be shipping in 3 months, so components for the first run have been bought, tooling has been made, all the developer salaries have been spent on the new UI and firmware. Not much risk is being alleviated here.

Are you really willing to bet that they'll be shipping in three months? On what basis? Because it says so on the kickstarter page? Kickstarter never miss their targets, right?

This is way more common than you think. The most successful kickstarter campaigns usually have their demand already assessed (the number I've heard is usually 25%) before launching.

So you're saying successful "campaigns" are simply the ones using kickstarter as a pre-ordering platform?

That's very sad.

Unfortunately, yes.

Kickstarter is a business too.

They get a kickstart by having successful brands use their platform. You could could call it sad and unfortunate but it is inevitable.

Kickstarter seems to be considered mostly as a marketing tool by startups nowadays. My friend and his hardware company is in the middle of a campaign right now and he told me that they aren't really hoping for much more than breaking even - they're doing it just for marketing and thus increasing the amount of money they can raise from investors.

Why is this sad?

For independent comics creators, drawing the book then going to Kickstarter to handle pre-orders is a great thing. I've done it twice and will be doing it again soon; it's a great model that lets you generate some excitement around a book release, and maybe get some new fans as well. If you go to a comics convention, I can bet that a lot of the books you'll find being hawked by their creators were funded via Kickstarter, with roughly that model. You can only say "here is a pitch, give me lots of $$$ to spend a couple years making it" if you have one hell of a track record, and a huge fan base.

I'm guessing they have a understanding with Kickstarter. Pebble is guaranteed to break some records with Kickstarter and it will get great press. With competitors like GoFundMe and Indiegogo I'm sure that Kickstarter welcomed Pebble back with open arms. Good for them!

That and the 5% they get for funded projects.

I highly doubt they didn't negotiate that way down.

Does it matter? That's just how Kickstarter makes money. The idea that they wouldn't welcome Pebble because it's low-risk and somehow makes them appear more "store-like" is unrealistic.

Yeah it's at 3+ million in about an hour, this will undoubtedly set some kickstarter records.

Borderline abuse / misuse. I do not support this behavior because they are already a well established group and shouldn't be using kickstarter.

I'm quite surprised at the number of people who have just said "marketing". I don't doubt that's part of it but even without it I think it's a fairly solid idea.

Kickstarter have all the right tools for selling and a proven capacity to scale well. They've sold over 4 million dollars worth to over 20 thousand people in three hours without any hassle. They're handling all the user management, accounts, live updating figures, "stock" and payments.

How much would it have cost them if right at the peak their site went down for 2 hours? Or people weren't sure if their order was accepted? Could it cost them 5% of their orders minus the amount it would have cost them to build on their own? How long would it take to have built and tested their own site to handle the load of orders (and given that they only see this peak for a short period after launch).

Plus of course marketing and the fact that a lot of people already have a kickstarter account (reducing even more the barrier between "oh cool" and clicking buy).

is it actually interesting or is there a subtext here

The killer feature here is something that no one is talking about!

>We've included a soft silicone band with each Pebble Time, but all standard 22mm watch bands will fit. All new Pebble watch bands include a quick-release pin, letting you swap bands in under 10 seconds.

Standard watch bands is something that most other wearables aren't embracing. This makes the Pebble significantly more enticing.

think the original pebble used a standard watch band. steel did not (which I just bought a week ago, gah)

Yes, the original Pebble works with any standard 22m band.

My original KS Pebble uses a regular band that I got off Amazon for $12. I'm not much of one for swapping bands regularly, but putting on a band of my choosing is not a great feature, it's just what I expect out of a watch. It's like telling time is a "killer feature". I'm more disappointed when other wearables (including the Pebble Steel) don't have this.

Some of the Android Wear devices support standard 22mm bands as well. I had a custom one on my LG G Watch, but am staying with the stock band with the Moto 360 (since the one it shipped with is actually quite nice)

I bought a replacement metal band for my Galaxy Gear. No clue if it was standard, but certainly replaceable.

This is false. The Asus ZenWatch, moto360, LG G Watch, LG G watch R all use standard 22mm bands.

But not 'quick release'?

That's a feature of the band not the watch.

The fact that standard bands can be used is great.

The fact that most watch bands are painfully incompatible with <insert your laptop here> wristrests is laughable in this day and age.

Watchbands need to be reengineered if these companies want people to wear them for more then the first few weeks.

Source -- love my pebble but only after suffering with that stupid buckle for months, stopped wearing it and then finally found a buckle free band.

It's a bland gadget. I'm really not sure about that approach. It's so cheap and uninspired. Whatever you think about the overall shape of the Apple Watch, at least it's not a bland gadget. It seems to pay meticulous attention to all the micro details that make jewelry jewlery and not a bland tech toy. (Seems to because obviously no one has looked at it in detail. But first indications are good.) This one does not.

I'm really not sure why more smart watches don't try to be actual worthy jewlery. Pebble has this really cool and really functional tech, why not pack it into something worthy of being called a watch?

They seem to care about the technology side more. Plus, once you get this right, you can work on your casings to sell it to people that do care about it more.

Also, this is what they've done with the first Pebble - first the initial, plastic one, and only after - Pebble steel.

Exactly, a tick/tock product cycle. Apple does the flip of this - using the same case for two models, with different internals. Though they start with the high-end model. Are there as many examples of working your way upmarket?

I think it may also be due to costs. The color e-paper screen obviously costs more, and perhaps a full Steel model would teeter within range of the fashion smart watches (including Apple Watch Sport), where the comparison would be less flattering.

I don't think any smart watch == jewellery argument works, because jewellery doesn't require software updates. There is nothing timeless about modern electronics that need battery replacements.

I think that for any mass-market adoption (arguably not what the Pebble Time is aimed at), any smart watch will have to bridge that divide. Most people buy a watch as a fashion piece, not as a practical tool.

Maybe watches can be practical tools again, and not just a status symbol hanging off your arm.

For some people they are... and maybe in the future they can be both (hence Apple making a smart watch with gold). It will probably segment, but the average non-techie probably wants fashion over practical.

Fine watches are only limitedly used as status symbol. Look at forums.watchuseek.com for afficionados who prefer keeping their watch for them - collecting them for example. Also note that, if you are unfamiliar with watches, you might not spot people wearing expensive watches if those are no Rolex.

It looks like a sport watch. That's still a watch...

I'm ok with pebble not trying to be jewelery.

You say bland, I say functional. Since my Casio data bank watch in the 90s I didn't wear a watch until I got my Pebble.

To me a watch is a tool, not a fashion accessory. I understand not everyone looks at it that way, but really I don't think there's any smartwatch that looks like an elegant timepiece anyway.

I think that's a totally fair point. I mean, I was once obsessed with those Casio G-Shock watches (when I was a child until maybe a couple years into being a teenager), so I know people want watches like that. I'm mostly coming at this from my own biased perspective, I guess (and I somehow assume that's the more universally shared perspective with the bigger potential market without actually knowing that's the case), and for me this won't do.

If a watch can convince me at all that's it's worth wearing it I need it to not look functional and techie and my guess is that would be a more widely appealing approach to these watches. Maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe there is just no market at all there and this is just a momentary fad. This will be interesting to watch.

It's not a choice between bland and functional. Metal and sapphire crystal is much more robust and functional than these cheap materials.

> Metal and sapphire crystal is much more robust and functional than these cheap materials.

The screen is Gorilla Glass and the bezel is stainless steel!

What's with the exclamation point?

Anyway, Apple is using sapphire for everything except the low end: https://www.apple.com/watch/gallery/

Yeah, contrary to their "No Compromises" promise, this does seem significantly inferior to the Apple Watch (resolution doesn't look nearly as good, no touch screen, polish and finish, etc).

With the price at nearly half ($199) of what the low-end of the Apple Watch price range is expected to be ($349), however, this does open the smart watch option up to more people that don't have that sort of cash to spend on wearables.

Apple is targeting "a full day of use", while Pebble is targeting 7 days of battery life. Not having to charge my watch daily sounds much nicer to me.

Cue the advent of colour e-paper smartphones.

Actually, it would be nice to have a smartphone equivalent of a Toughbook. Very difficult to crush, e-paper display and large battery so it can run for a few weeks on a charge. There are mission critical industries that would like a phone that just works for a very long time.

I question your taste. This Pebble looks better than the Apple Watch to me, certainly better than the Apple Watch Sport version which is made of similar materials. Just because there is an Apple watch cast in gold doesn't mean it's better designed.

I highly question yours... you sound crazy calling this better. The Apple Watch isn't the most beautiful designed gadget but you are making a really silly statement. It's honestly blowing my mind how you think this.

I'm really glad Pebble are sticking to their own unique values and serving their hardcore supporters, instead of trying to compete with Apple.

If you think it's bland, it's obviously not for you, but going by the rate at which dollars are pouring in, enough people seem to think otherwise.

It depends what "smart" actually means. Something like the Withings Activité [1] can afford to be a well-designed piece of jewellery because there is no expectation (or possibility) of software updates. This isn't true of Android Wear or the Apple Watch; models sold this year will become obsolete within a timeframe that is much shorter than one would want for high-end jewellery.

[1] http://www.withings.com/us/withings-activite.html

It would be a mistake to try and out-compete Apple on the exact same turf because they'll always be out-spent by a comical margin. Much better to maintain their current aesthetic and brand (and price point!).

Hm, I think you might be completely right. I mean, it seems like there are more than enough people who want this and that you can turn this into a decent and very cool business. They don’t have to compete on the turf Apple is competing and can still do tons of cool stuff (and they do and, hey, I genuinely think their software here looks really, really cool). And that thing with me not liking the physical design is then just a subjective taste thing, nothing more.

Also, we don’t even know if a watch that is visibly not a tech gadget (like the Apple Watch aspires to be) will even be successful. In a very real sense the Pebble is more proven as a product than what Apple is doing.

(Also, on a personal level: Yeah, I don’t like the look of this Pebble, sure, but I currently don’t even wear a watch at all and currently I am not even convinced I will ever get an Apple Watch. That’s not at all a promising case study for Pebble to really put resources into making this a non-gadget watch.)

I gave my original away. The novelty lasted about 2 hours. They don't even have an estimated ship date. That worries me a bit.

This isn't a pre-order. Even if they wanted to provide a ship date, it will inevitably change.

Smells like a pre-order to me, except with a lot of the downsides and risks pushed onto 'backers'.

Oh, who are we kidding? Of course it's a pre-order. Are you claiming that if Pebble didn't meet their funding goal, the Time will never ship? That there's the possibility that I'll never see my Pebble Time after pledging? Pebble is now an established company in the wearables market, the Time is shipping regardless of KS. Pebble doesn't need the money, it's marketing.

... how the hell is this not a pre-order? Are the rewards just going to up and disappear after the campaign is over? Not from an established group like this.

> EARLY BIRD: Your choice of one Pebble Time watch in any of the three colors. Regular retail price will be $199. Estimated delivery: May 2015 Ships anywhere in the world

"Estimated delivery: May 2015"

> Estimated delivery: May 2015 ?

Oh my. Missed that. My mistake.

If you want jewelry, buy a necklace. Or maybe an Apple Watch. Yeah, yeah, I get it. But I want a functional device as I'm one of those "a Rolex doesn't tell better time than a Casio" types. What's next, artisanally-crafted pocket knives? I'll stick my bland yet functional Victrinox or Case.

To each their own, and may both markets be well-served. For those that would rather pay for function, there's the Pebble that doesn't look all that bad to me. We'll see how well Apple serves the high end.

> What's next, artisanally-crafted pocket knives?

You can spend a pretty penny on pocket knives.

The appeal of mechanical watches is the idea that there's this beautiful mechanical machine inside (often visible through a transparent crystal back) which is powering the watch, either through a hand-wound mechanism or by converting the kinetic energy of your wrist's movement into potential energy stored in a spring. Mechanical watches are jewelry, and they're designed to appeal not just to the eyes but also to the mind.

This Pebble is 100% function over form. It's far more useful than a $2k Nomos, but also far less beautiful. It's not something I would ever cherish, or keep for decades, or pass down to grandchildren. I would never look at it and marvel at how it manages to work. I would never love it. But it would be useful.

The Apple Watch is likely something of a middle ground. It's prettier on the outside, but there's nothing interesting about the inside. The Moto 360 sits in this same category as well.

Like I said, I get it. The very reasons you've listed are why I've been tempted by such devices in the past. But when it comes time to shell out the cash, I buy function. Neither right or wrong, it's just why I paid for what is now my second Pebble and why (I take it) you likely won't be buying one at all.

"it's not a bland gadget"

I pulled up an images search of the apple watch and the white watch looks almost identical to the new pebble, to the point of "oh oh someone's gonna get sued".

I claim that a dude on the street at a glance is not going to be able to tell the difference between an iWatch and the pebble. Maybe with a couple minutes of study or if they have a watch hobby / fetish they'll notice quicker...

So is the trash talking about the pebble's style simply astroturfing or are there specific complaints that can be addressed (I'd respect someone who said it needs a Disney Frozen sticker or My Little Pony branding. I'd disagree, but I'd respect it a lot more than providing no specific data other than the mfgr label defining what makes it cool)

It's a shame. I think the navigation paradigm is really neat, the screen looks great, and 7 hours of battery life is right on. But those buttons look kinda clumsy and cheap to me. There's a lot to like, but the form factor isn't very enticing.

7 days. :)

Heh, right. It's such good battery life, my fingers didn't even feel natural writing "days".

Pretty sneaky to advertise $159 and not mention the $10 shipping which makes it $169, and KS doesn't even advertise that until you've already clicked through to the 'pledge' (aka purchase, what happened to "Kickstarter is not a store"?) page.

And now that the 'early tier' is gone (great UX on that, they took me to the credit card page, I entered my info, then they reloaded it and went "oops, that tier's full now tee-hee!"), why would you save $10 to pay them for a product that might ship 2 months later if they get around to releasing it? So, no Kickstarter for me, it's actually plus because I'll get to see real reviews and not hype.

Unless you can lock in the early bird, I don't believe there's any point in pledging. I just about scraped through and pledged $179 + $10, which puts me about $20 ahead of the final cost (assuming shipping will stay the same).

(If I downvoted you, sorry. Stupid tiny arrows on mobile, and no undo or even a way to see which way I voted.)

Meh, you get it a few months early, and they're not shipping retail until the Kickstarters are released. That, and as an original KS backer I get a special engraving I'll never, ever see. :-)

(Off topic) Is there any reason we can't undo voting on HN (like we can do on Reddit)?

Especially since post editing is allowed, though maybe post editing could just drop the votes or something.

Yes, that is pretty sneaky. Especially since people are used to Kickstarter products including shipping.

I'm glad that they finally broke out shipping from the pledge itself. A lot of smaller Kickstarter projects have been caught off-guard and hammered by the high costs of international shipping.

True. it's nice that they don't have to say, "manually add $10 to your pledge if you are outside the US." I bet the compliance with that is terrible.

Without a doubt. Based on the horror stories, I excluded international shipping options from my own Kickstarter just to avoid all the headaches.

I've owned an original pebble for a couple weeks now, but I'm still skeptical on their usefulness. I save maybe 5-10 minutes of time per week by being able to check the weather forecast or dismiss non-urgent emails and texts using my watch instead of having to pull my phone out of my pocket, but that's about the only benefit I'm seeing so far.

Maybe a smartwatch would be more useful to me if I was more popular and had calendar events to keep track of or more friends who contacted me regularly, but as your typical socially-isolated introvert software engineer, this thing seems to have limited utility.

I've had my Pebble Steel for just at a year now and I have the opposite experience. I consider it to be as important as having my phone on me at this point. Part of this is no doubt due to never wearing a watch (for more than a day or two) prior to owning the Pebble so I love having the time/weather on my wrist at all times. I love having texts, calls, emails on my wrist and I've started using Pushover (Push notification API with app) more and more since I don't have to dig my phone out of my pocket to read push notifications any more.

Consider looking at the Glance app. I enjoyed my Pebble to start with, but it became far more useful with Glance. I can now reply to text messages from a list of options I created on my phone. I filled the list with the messages I send the most: "ok", "yes", "no", "on my way".

I really like deciding if messages are worth my time without having to dig out my phone and I really like being able to send quick messages without fiddling about with unlocking and on-screen keyboards.

For me its not necessarily a raw measure of just time saved.

I realized that the physical habit that we've all developed of pulling our phones, unlocking , checking time or messages etc is a really really annoying physical habit.

It's disruptive and awkward to do, interrupts conversations or basic interactions with things in your environment.

A two handed fumbling time check/message check becomes a no handed operation with a smart watch.

I don't actually check my messages any more often, in fact less, since the notification is actually much more obvious then phones chirping in a pocket and my decision about whether to handle the information now or later is just much more quick and fluent.

The main value prop over the Apple Watch and current Android wear appears to be the battery life. They're advertising over 7 days on a charge, which is certainly better than whatever the Apple Watch will be in terms of battery life. I just worry about the market for apps after the introduction of apple's watch around the same time.

There's a second value prop: It actually works with Android.

The Pebble Timeline interface UX might also be better than the Apple Watch app model or the Android Wear card model.

Actually, they're saying "up to" 7 days which is obnoxious because that could mean anything.

But probably more than the almost-a-day the Apple Watch is likely going to get.

Being able to sleep with your watch on most nights of the week is a bigger deal than a lot of people realize.

> Being able to sleep with your watch on most nights of the week is a bigger deal than a lot of people realize.

This is huge for me and why I wear my FitBit instead of my Moto 360 most of the time. If I can wear it while I sleep I can set multiple alarms to wake me up that do not wake up the spouse or kids and it's less annoying than trying to turn a very loud beeping off.

personally, i don't like wearing my watch when i sleep.

There's still the drag of having to remember to recharge it every night, even if you're taking it off.

I experience this now that I've gone from the XBox 360 to the PS4. The XBox 360 battery lasted what seemed like forever. I would go a week or two without even thinking of plugging it in to charge. The PS4 controller battery life is so bad you have to plug it back in every time you're done playing.

I've had many people say "what's the big deal, just plug it in, are you lazy or what", but it is noticeably irritating.

PS3 controller also lasts forever. It's weird how much they regressed on that front.

But it glows!

There is literally no way they could say "at least" with any number that would mean anything to anyone. Even if they did a range between worst case scenario (app refreshing as often as possible and running the CPU and Bluetooth radios 100%) to best case scenario (watch face that updates once per hour), would you really want to see a number that says "Between 5 minutes and 7 days of battery life!"?

You can't really even have a "under normal use" battery life claim. My Pebble lasts between 4-5 days depending on app usage. Other have theirs lasting 2-3 days. My personal iPhone sometimes needs to be recharged in the middle of the day. My work iPhone gets charged once every three days.

"Up to 7 days" is the most meaningful number they could put there, because it shows you what to expect while using it as a watch. Everything else is up to you.

My current Pebble works for four days without any problems. Frequently longer.

So if they can increase that to 7 days and I can charge once per week then I'll be even happier. But largely I like the idea of a colour one.

They advertised "up to 7 days" of battery for the original pebble, too.

Which translates into about 4 days of heavy use, and over 12 days of no use. I once misplaced my Pebble, and found it 12 days later, and it was still running.

ePaper is very different than the displays that are in the Apple Watch and various Wear devices. You can see it in bright sunlight. It can be a big drawback, particularly for a fitness device, to need to shade your display to read it.

Which is probably why they're de-emphasizing apps (which I agree with from a UX standpoint) and emphasizing ease of developing from the web. If you hone your use cases, developing for Pebble doesn't have to be as complicated as apps. It amounts to rich push notifications, or perhaps Twitter Cards.

I agree that Kickstarter isn't a store. It's an informercial platform optimized for hype and maximally dumping risks onto your customers.

I am a fan of Pebble, but I find this campaign on Kickstarter (after an already successful Kickstarter and three years of continued success), to be both excellent marketing and an utter disgrace to the goals that Kickstarter once stood for.

I think animated transitions are the skeuomorphism of 2015.

Mind you, I'm technically impressed that an E-Ink display can now be animated, but I can't wait for the end of the animated UI boom.

Do you... Do you just desire UI to not be animated at all? that the next item in that list just appears at the top?

Fast animations are good. I have a jailbroken iPhone and the first thing I do is turn off a lot of the animations and the phone is super-snappy compared to stock. Whenever I use someone else's iPhone, it's just so painful to switch apps and navigate around.

So I understand not wanting to watch some stupid animation over and over instead of just getting to the point. But some animations are helpful for seeing when things change.

It's just interesting seeing someone promote the precise opposite of the now ever so popular Material Design thought of basically using animations everywhere to convey motion, meaning, and hierarchy.

Everything can be overused. Microsoft pretty much invented the "flat" movement that has been happening but they're also guilty of making things so flat and undefined that you don't even know what to click on! The iPhone uses animation as filler to hide slow app loading in the first gen but it isn't necessary anymore. Even skeuomorphism is ok when it conveys meaning but most uses are garish effects that provide zero benefit.

Animations that are merely cool looking might be fun for the first dozen times but then it gets old.

Do you just desire UI to not be animated at all?

In general, yes.

Here are some examples: MS Word (2013? I honestly have no idea what version I have installed what with the new UI) does a horizontal page-turn animation when viewing documents. It literally makes me nauseous, and I don't see any way to turn it off without entering document edit mode. Android's Camera app now starts up, shows the control buttons (video, camera), then animates them off the screen. They're not shown long enough for you to press one unless you're gunning for it, and you can't pull them back on screen until the animation finishes. Lollipop in general has a bunch of animations which exist solely for the sake of animations. If I pull a menu out, I want to immediately start using it, not wait for the slick, deceleration of the animation to finish before I can begin interacting.

It all reminds me of Vista's Aero interface. MS saw OS X, wanted translucency and drop-shadows, and implemented it in a completely useless manner that degraded usability.

I highly doubt animated transitions are going away any time soon. Not only do they look great aesthetically, but they improve the UX by giving users hints as to what's going on. They make it much harder for users to enter a state in an application without knowing how they got there or how to leave.

If animated transitions disappear, it'll be because something newer and better comes along, not because they fade out of style.

hey boy improve ux if they are thoughtful and make sense, but I take your overall point

"Animation" is a pretty important part of UX. The movement helps the product tell the story of what you're doing.

The user perceives lag after 300ms, and switches thought in less than a 1000ms. If your screen doesn't engage the user while it's making the switch, you risk them starting something else. And where's the fun of building a product people don't engage with for as long as possible? :D

The user perceives lag after 300ms

So write efficient, responsive software.

If your screen doesn't engage the user while it's making the switch

There are many ways to "engage the user" without wasting cycles on animation. If your software performs so slowly, why exacerbate things by burning cycles on animations?

Not all things are about speed. Helping the user to understand the "story" of what they're doing is just as important. Most UX kits involve transition animations for this reason.

Not all things are about speed.

Are you kidding me? You just wrote:

The user perceives lag after 300ms, and switches thought in less than a 1000ms. If your screen doesn't engage the user while it's making the switch, you risk them starting something else.

That was the entire premise of your prior comment. Any other points you want to hop to?

Isn't the Pebble using E-Paper and not E-Ink? Wikipedia says the original Pebble used an 144×168 pixel Sharp Memory LCD (http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/1-26-inch-memory-lcd.html)

Correct. E-ink screens don't have a FPS anywhere near what is displayed in the video, and there wasn't any screen refreshing. The Pebble is using a LCD with no backlight, the terminology is slightly confusing.

Yes, I misread. So now I'm not really impressed with anything about the product. ;-)

Well, thank marketing for you being impressed.

It's actually the only issue I have with Pebble. They are all amazing and unicorns, but why on Earth intentionally confuse people to think they're buying an e-ink display? It's not e-ink, it's e-paper, a fancy name for something that is not the thing that uses zero energy when not updating.

The site in the OP explicitly states that it is an e-paper display, and so does the video....

So it was with the original Pebble, and then, just like now, most people don't know the difference. "E-paper" is commonly understood as "the stuff Kindles are made of".

I actually asked them about it during the original Pebble campaign, because you couldn't really tell if the display is e-ink even though they strongly implied so. I don't recall getting any response.

Looks like this will finally get me to jump on the smartwatch bandwagon; the original Pebble didn't really do it for me. The new interface is looking great and the week worth of battery is nice, especially since most LCD smart watches need to be charged every night.

Same. At roughly £100 for the earlybird with shipping to the UK it's just about cheap enough that I can buy it, play with it for a bit and give it away to someone else, if I'm not happy with it when it arrives.

It looks good enough that it will probably find a place to stay in my life anyway...

I have to admit they did a good job with the new watch, adding color is great and still having the week of battery is huge. I was one of the early supporter for the first Pebble and have zero regret. It did convinced me of how useful a smart watch can be. I will be a little bit sad when replacing it with the Apple Watch when it comes out: I decided to change ship, but the Pebble will always have a special spot.

It's great to see they have a strong supporter base, and that will force Apple and others to stay active and compete.

I will for sure miss the long lasting battery of my Pebble!

You talk good about the Pebble Watch but still you want to replace it with an Apple Watch. Are there any interesting reasons for this decision you might want to share?

This type of display is definitely a must. The size and build seem to be quite nice as well. Only (from a first glance) dealbreaker for me is the price. I'd guess half from what it is. Sure they have to pay a lot of R&D not relevant to producing a single unit, but with a run of 40k JUST for this KS campaign? It's just too much.

edit: Now it seems that the stock will run out by the end of the day :)

Aaand they're already funded ($775k out of $500k at this moment). That was quick.

Edit: To clarify, it was already at $775k at 16:27 CET.

going up at ~ $1000/second, as I've watched.

That's about right, I watched almost 500K pour in no time at all. I'd bet this will set a record for fastest funding on KS.

It's very interesting to see the higher tiers selling even with the early bird available, which is cheaper per watch than any other tier.

I was just thinking the same thing, I locked in at the early bird price but couldn't understand why people would volunteer to pay more for the same product...

It's currently trending towards a cool 68 million dollars:

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/597507018/pebble-time-aweso...

Hmm are there even enough levels for them to reach that goal?

Nope.. Adding up all the tiers up totals a maximum of $9,550,000, for a total of 56k watches.

Interesting that they didn't design this to break their 10.2M record of the first campaign. I'd bet they are going to increase the slots or or announce addons for the pledges to go for it. At this rate they are going to be sold out in a couple hours, if that.

I'm sure someone at Kickstarter would be happy to immediately add a new tier for them if they max out.

They should be able to do that themselves (I've seen a lot of projects adding tiers in the middle of campaigns, you can't remove/change existing tiers).

Kickstarter shouldn't be able to add new tiers by themselves, as they have no say what the price/rewards should be. The current tiers are likely (hopefully) carefully planned based on their manufacturing plans and how many watches they can fulfill in the schedule given.

They posted an update saying they're bumping the 2nd single-watch tier by 10k, and will add a new single-watch tier with a later ship date when that sells out.

168 million now, WOW!

Was it $775k when you wrote that comment 7 minutes ago? It's past $1M right now (10:35 EST). Wow.

Yep, it's going to the moon. Already $1.25M.

Wow, $400k in the last five minutes? That's a good brand if I've seen one.

Its now crossing $1.9m as I write this.

33 minutes later...$2.7 MILLION?!! I think this is gonna break a record!

21 minutes later, an extra $1M.

30 minutes later and we have round 2 million dollars. This is insane, they could smash the record of the previous Pebble ($10M)

Let's see how much a successful KS project can increase due to well earned trust.

Anybody know which display technology they're using? It kind of looks like Qualcomm's Mirasol from the videos.

Here's my guess: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2842092/sharp-smartband-lcd-u...

* Original Pebble used greyscale version of same tech from Sharp.

* Available in 1 inch size.

* In production spring 2015.

I'll get one if the $159 pledge becomes available again, but I'm really looking forward to the "Steel" version of this watch. This is one aspect of the watch that Apple is getting right from the very first iteration. It needs to look sexy and make you want to wear even when the battery is dead.

How did they get the e-ink display so fast? Or is the video only an explanation of how it works (and therefore not real)?

It's not e-ink, it's "e-paper". A power-efficient display, but not the stuff you get on Kindles. I wish they wouldn't mislead people again with this.

"We will ship Pebble Time worldwide, with the exception of Cuba, Myanmar/Burma, Iran, Sudan, Syria, and Russia."

Russia?

Doesn't the US still have an embargo on Russia for the whole Ukraine thing?

I find Cuba to be interesting. I thought we ended that embargo in December.

They might have finalized the copy before that.

The embargo might have ended, but perhaps all of the details are not yet in place to make it practical. Customs forms need to be reprinted (whether paper or electronic). Are UPS and other carriers ready to go? And so on. An entire generation of US businesses and people have never done business with Cuba, that isn't going to change overnight...or even in a few months.

Or maybe the Pebble founders just don't like Fidel.

The Cuba embargo has not been lifted, restrictions have just been loosened a bit.

A lot of scams come from Russia due to their lax enforcement of laws when the victim is out of the country.

Well, they are shipping to North Korea. A new gadget for Dear Leader, to crush the imperialists!

I'm extremely torn. On one hand (or rather, on one wrist) I have the pebble steel and I LOVE it, couldn't imagine going back. But on the other wrist I have an iPhone and the pebble works better with Android ATM so the Apple Watch looks attractive. Back to the first wrist, the pebble has much better battery life and is cheaper than the even the lowest priced Apple Watch...

Edit: Ok, I pulled the trigger, I can always get a refund or just resell it if the Apple Watch blows it away or something like that.

The Apple Watch will be better with strong competition. It's great that there's a company that spends all day thinking about making a better watch.

Anyway, you'll need to wear something while your Apple Watch is charging. :-)

Agreed and if the rumors on iPhone battery life are true [0] (which they probably are) then you're right, I'll need something for when my Apple Watch is charging lol.

[0] http://9to5mac.com/2015/01/22/apple-targets-for-apple-watch-...

Apple isn’t competing with Pebble; it’s odd that people don’t get this. It’s like saying Porsche is competing with Kia. They both make cars but they’re targeting two very different markets with very little overlap.

We shouldn’t confuse consumer choice with competition. I know several Pebble owners who wouldn’t buy an Apple Watch even if it cost the same as a Pebble because they don’t like what they believe Apple represents.

I'm still rocking my original Pebble. I really wanted to upgrade to the Steel, but I figured I would just wait for the 2nd (3rd?) gen. to come out. Now it looks like I'll be waiting even longer, until they come out with the TimeSteel, or whatever they will call it. Kudos on the awesome updates, but the watch body just looks terrible to me. BTW, they raised a cool $100k in the time it took me to watch the video. That's just crazysauce.

FWIW, I have a regular pebble, and was a KS backer from the first campaign. I'm considering a second backing, mainly because the delivery date is may 2015, which is probably late enough that I'd be in the market for a new one anyway, and the promise to have a special something for double backers is a nice touch.

Personally, I use my pebble for just about whatever you'd think. It's nice to control my music (don't laugh- the nexus 6 is a pain to take out of my pocket just to change tracks), to have a quiet and personal alert of important emails, (the notification is a lot less noticeable by other people than the buzz of a vibrating phone) and to have ridiculous watchfaces.

QR code of the current time in a watchface. My favorite! https://github.com/TrueJournals/pebble-qrwatch

Finally, Android L has this nice new trusted-bluetooth-device notion, so when I'm wearing the pebble, I don't have to unlock the phone. I know it's a bit of a security risk, but it is one I'm willing to take.

The refresh rate on the e-paper is impressive. I remember some first-generation ereaders that required a whole second to refresh a page.

Pebble has never used E-ink, despite all the confusion in the media (not that Pebble was in a hurry to rectify it, since it played to its advantage). The color one doesn't look like E-ink now either. They used some transflective PixelQi-like displays in the past, but not sure if they're using an upgraded version of that now (with color!) or something like Mirasol, and they are just naming it the same.

Ahh, and I was most excited about the new E-Ink tech I thought they were showing off in those GIFs. Hopefully something like it can come to the Kindle eventually. Would be great for comic reading (and the animations are so smooth!).

Damn, that's really misleading. I've always thought E-ink would be good for smart watches, because it shows text well, has great daytime visibility, and is power-efficient.

I got the Pebble for Christmas and wondered if I needed it, but it does a really good job on a few simple things. It tells you whether that buzz you just felt on your phone was a text or important email or just a Snapchat. A few other features, but that simple thing is by far the best part about it.

We are developing a smart sensor strap for Pebble time: check it out: http://www.gethbeats.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWqbaX94_lA

Do you have a rough idea about the price? Am I expecting 2 figures? 3?

2 figures :)

Your site is fairly low on information, mind if I ask a few questions?

So this would be a replacement 'watch band' for the Pebble Time, which provides biometric data to it? Your website seems to suggest it'll work with any device, will it still interface with the "smart accessory port" on the Time? Do you have advance information about the protocol/form-factor that the sensors, or are you going to finalize that part of the design once it's available? Also, I'm not sure I understand why it's called "contactless".

Seems very interesting though. It seems most wearables lean either towards "interface for your phone" or "fitness device", so something that boosts the Pebble's biometric tracking could be pretty cool.

Yep,replacement strap. We were devloping it to work with any device, but now with "accessory port" on Time, we will be able to leverage the battery and data connection to watch, which simplify the design.

@Contactless: we are developing a new sensor technology for measuring HR which will not be in contact with the skin(like optical sensors/bio-impedance metal stubs). This means that the sensor is embedded inside the silicone strap as you can see in the demo video.

Any suggestions ? pls mail me : ms@gethbeats.com

I am studying at Waterloo, I love Pebble and while this is exciting news, I wish they had made the screen's margins thiner. The watch looks like a toy and is certainly not on par (design-wise) with other watches on the market. I hope it will work well for them though!

Is it just me, or does it look like he's squeezing the buttons fairly hard in the timeline demo images? I suppose you have to make the buttons firm enough to prevent accidental presses but I would hope that you could use the buttons with one figure comfortably.

I can't recall ever wearing a watch with buttons on the side that I could press without "squeezing" the watch

You may be right, I never got into the habit of wearing a watch myself.

Awesome! The first thing I noticed was the battery life - 7 days (like the original). I'm buying it :).

In the video, Eric makes a very good point - most smart-watches are trying to replace the phone, but instead should focus on what's critical to a watch - Time.

I'm glad they went with ePaper, but I think I'll hold off until the battery life has developed to be quite a bit better (lasts a few months on a single charge?). The biggest value prop to having information on a watch to me is that I never have to think about charging my watch so I can always rely on it having the information I need. I don't recall ever replacing a watch battery and I'm looking forward to when smartwatches reach that kind of longevity.

Considering my Kindle lasts over a month on a single charge, I'd be thrilled to have an e-ink watch that showed me a listing of notifications and the time that lasts just as long.

> I think I'll hold off until the battery life ... (lasts a few months on a single charge?)

You'll be waiting a very long time.

> Considering my Kindle lasts over a month on a single charge

Your Kindle isn't maintaining a bluetooth connection to your phone or updating the screen frequently, and has a much larger battery than a watch.

> I never have to think about charging my watch so I can always rely on it having the information I need.

With the Pebble you don't have to worry about it either. It notifies you when it's getting low (has a day or two of battery life remaining) and you charge it when you get the chance. And if you don't have time to give it a full charge, in my experience with just 10-15 minutes charging time you'll get a few more days of use.

I agree with your sentiment about battery life though. It's why I don't understand why anyone would even consider any smartwatch besides Pebble. Fall asleep without charging your watch one night and you can't wear it the next day? That's crazy. It also means you can't really use your watch as an alarm if you need to charge it each night.

Oh I don't know if it will be all that long.

http://www.withings.com/us/withings-activite.html seems to be able to track and synchronize physical activity with my phone, runs on CR-2025 for 8 months. Don't know how they pull it off, but an inventive UI/watch interface to show me notification information like this one might be the ticket.

That is pretty impressive if it can really get 8 months on a battery while maintaining a bluetooth connection! Of course, this is quite a different category of product as it doesn't have a screen and just has normal watch hands.

Still, you're asking for an order of magnitude improvement in battery life, so I'll assert again that you'll be waiting a while :) I think you should relax your position, since imo there's really not much difference in having to charge a battery for 30 mins to an hour once a week vs once a month. You still rarely need to worry about your battery, which is qualitatively different than Apple or Android watches that you need to charge once a day or they die on you.

The color ePaper thing is interesting to me.

If its like my brothers older sony reader (b/w ePaper), the refresh rate was slow but the battery lasted a long long time. If I remember correctly it only uses power when the display changes.

I guess the minus would be its harder to read in the dark. If the refresh rate is too slow it might be annoying but I for a watch I don't think its going to be a problem.

> I guess the minus would be its harder to read in the dark.

There is a backlight when you want it. And the plus side is that it's readable always, not just when you activate the screen.

It's 2PM CST on launch day and they already have preorders for nearly 30,000 units. It's really a cool thing to see considering that 5 years ago this situation wouldn't exist.

What's that "e-paper" screen technology they are using?

It's an LCD without a backlight.

pretty sure it's not that. color e-paper tech has been in the works for years now

Nope, the refresh rate is clearly too high. Compare with amazon's newest Kindle e-ink, quick animations are not possible with ink yet, and there is ghosting. Also, deducing from the battery life of 7 days ONLY, this doesn't look like eInk, which would last for weeks or longer, since it does not require power at all to keep contents on the screen. However, I have to admit that their display is the most interesting part of the watch.

well the thing is this thing has to stay connected to bluetooth the entire time, so that's part of the battery. The animations are also 3 frames or so... so maybe it's fine.

I think the ghosting comes from not explicitly setting bits. with the color e-ink screen you're probably resetting a lot of things, so even if ghosting is present, it's not very visible (especially after a lot of changes)

Looking at this closely though this _does_ remind me of something like the GBC screen. This might just be LCD.

I have to think that Pebble, and most other smart watches, are going to get crushed by the Apple Watch. iOS has an amazing ecosystem of developers that enhance the value proposition of owning iOS-based products to the point where literally no one can compete. People argue over the size of the smart watch market, but whatever it is, Apple will take a huge chunk of it. I see Pebble faltering before the end of the year, so I wouldn't want to buy one at this point.

I'm glad they're continuing to iterate on their product. This is certainly a nice improvement. Though I don't really understand the insistence of putting buttons on a watch that are used to interact with the thing. Pressing buttons, on the side of a watch and on your wrist while doing anything but standing still is always really awkward.

I was really hoping their v2 would have axed the buttons. I would be very tempted to pick one up if they did but oh well.

I actually love the buttons.

I can change the current song or take a call while on the bike without taking the of the road, just because I know where the press. This would not be possible with a touch screen. If I want to do stuff where a touch screen would come in handy I take out my phone anyway.

its absolutely possible with my moto 360. swipe once up and left and tap forward and backwards.

Whenever I went for a walk or run and tried to use the buttons it always felt awkward and cumbersome. I'd rather have buttons on my headphones or something that's really easy and obvious to hit (such at tapping the screen or something).

I mean the Android Wear watches can do this (so it's possible) but it's not always the most intuitive either.

Mmm, this looks awesome. Now, I'm just hoping for an update to Pebble Steel so that I can have a metal pebble with a color display and timeline. Would be awesome!

All the best,

3 million dollars and they can't hire an industrial designer to make it look like something other than a preschool toy? They feel like a bunch of developers competing against Apple. No offense intended, I'm a developer myself. I think they'll have more and better features, since that is how developers think, but you need to look good to really capture all the consumers.

They've sold over a million watches at a retail price of $100-$200

Have you ever seen a normal watch? Like a Wal-Mart, off-the-shelf Timex? They're hideous. Absolutely atrocious. If people want a nice looking watch, they buy a Rolex or a Tag. What people get from a Timex is a functional watch that is easy to read, relatively oops-resistant (can take some damage and go under water without breaking), and has some features they really need. A $500 Rolex probably doesn't have a stopwatch with a lap counter, but that $10 Timex sure does.

There's precedent in the watch-world to not care what the watch looks like. Watches are not always fashion items, which is why the watch section exists in Wal Mart. I keep hearing people say "it doesn't look as nice as the Apple Watch or Android Wear" (personally, the Apple Watch looks awful), but if you're looking for features over fashion, this is the device for you.

What are you blabbering on about? There are plenty of good looking cheap watches, just not watches that are aiming at the same buyers as Richemont/Swatch/LVMH do. If you want to complain justifiable, point your disdain at Invicta and their ilk.

Eh, for $10 you take what you can get. For ~$200 I don't need expensive materials but I would like it to not look like what it looks like. This double bezel thing is kinda ugly. I mean if you spend $20 more from the $10 Timex you can get a Timex Weekend, which looks pretty nice.

It's all relative to the market. The original Pebble is $100. Compare that to the LG G Watch R at $300. Going to the LG, you get a nicer looking watch but you lose more than six days of battery life, you lose cross-platform functionality, and you lose the ruggedness that the Pebble has.

That was my point. If you want a nice looking smartwatch, they exist as long as you can handle the tradeoffs.

Good design does not mean expensive design. It's not a comparison to the LG watch or the Moto watch.

And this thing is ~$200; not $100, so comparing the original pebble to the LG G is a dishonest comparison anyways. Also the original pebble was a better design than this thing and it had way more leeway of not looking nice since it was such a niche product at the time.

I love the UI/UX concept they're going for with the timeline but I would not want to wear this watch. It just sticks out too much like a computer on your wrist.

A $10 watch and a several hundred dollar smart watch are two very different animals. When Pebble first came out it was new and innovative so first adopters bought it regardless of appearance. Now they're competing in a field that's getting more competitive every day. The poster isn't saying they should trade functionality for appearance, they're saying Pebble should at least put some effort towards design to appeal to the non-first adopters who care at least a little about appearance.

PS used low end Rolex watches start at several thousand

I guess that goes to show what I know about the watch market. One of the other guys who responded with a bunch of watch manufacturers had the gall to accuse me of blabbering, when I barely understood half the words he said.

At any rate, I don't think the smartwatch market is getting more competitive. All we're seeing is the same watch being released over and over again by Samsung, Motorola, LG, and Apple. Exact same watch. Touchscreen (for no reason), all glass and metal (when we have that on phones, we wrap it in plastic and rubber), and a 12 hour battery life. They're putting a smartphone on your wrist, but worse. There's no one competing with Pebble, who is developing actual smart watches.

They had the Pebble Steel, and there's nothing saying they won't make a Steel version of this one, too.

A little correction from someone who happens to wear one: An actual Timex will probably run you $30-50, depending on how good a deal you find. Walmart knockoffs are cheaper, but much less durable; I bought one once, and the face was almost unreadably scratched within a month.

It's not a piece of jewelry, i.e. a status symbol, but it's comfortable, inconspicuous, and functional. It gives me the date and time at a glance, is accurate, times things, and has an alarm. I can strap it on my wrist and forget about it, because it lasts years on a single battery, and endures in the face of dust, water, scrapes, and bumps.

I actually think Pebble is going in the right direction here, with longer battery life and color e-ink, but smart watches have a long ways to go before they can compete with plain old digital watches. I have to worry about charging and protecting my phone, as I would with a smart watch, but my current dumb-watch is entirely worry-free.

Out of curiosity, how much do you think it costs to hire a top industrial design firm?

Divided by a couple million watches? Like $5...

I like the look of it and I like the look of my original KS-edition Pebble. It's plain, muted and functional. I bought it for functionality and not as a status symbol. There are far better watches for that. It seems to me that Pebble knows their audience and that their choice of design wasn't due to a lack of industrial design experience.

I've been using my Pebble I got from UIUC when they gave hundreds away:

https://blog.getpebble.com/2013/12/16/pebbling-schools-in-th...

It was some good marketing, because I just bought a new one because I loved it so much.

> Works with iPhone, Samsung and Android.

So I guess I won't be buying this one either, doesn't work with my 1520!

Whatever about the product, their timing is spot on. Not that it will really make much of a dent in the Apple Watch sales, I'm sure there are a lot of people who'll get this now instead. Major differences, battery life & price do make this a tempting product.

The demographics feel very different. Is it meant to compete with Apple Watch, or with Android Wear?

Now if it wouldn't be THAT ugly.. It even looks cheap on the movie :(

I guess i'll stick to a real watch.

New Smart Sensor Strap for Pebble Time: http://www.gethbeats.com/

POC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWqbaX94_lA

I don't understand how this many people are supporting a new version. Anyone I've talked to who bought one was extremely disappointed with the product.

I had one to work on some prototypes about a year ago and it was nothing but frustration. Bad documentation, scattered, outdated already.. Getting code running on it was painful and most ideas were very limited by the watch abilities.

To top it off, the ios application to sync notifications was a complete joke. Bluetooth is pretty typically bad about staying connected, but the Pebble should win an award for how frustratingly often it would drop. To get it back, you must open the app or repair.

Beginning to end, a very poor experience. I get the design being pretty poor on the first version, but it seems like they didn't work very hard to fix that for v2.

Maybe I just happen to meet the only people who had these problems too, and every other person who bought one was very happy, but I'm honestly baffled.

This is my next smart watch:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/920064946/oscilloscope-...

As soon as it ships, of course ..

They are clearly trying to differenciate from Apple by using more sporty apperearance. I would have prefered more business-like layout but ended up ordering anyways. It looks very promising!

Does anyone have insight into how this fits into the market? I don't understand how this isn't a strictly worse phone (given that people carry phones with them all the time).

It's a phone accessory. It lets you see and respond to things like SMS messages, caller ID, calendar reminders, etc. without taking your phone out of your pocket.

Kind of a small thing, but actually pretty handy when you're walking around or in a meeting or other places where glancing at your wrist is easier or less intrusive than using your phone.

(Plus, it tells time.)

This review goes into more detail: http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-smartwatch/

"At anytime up until your watch has shipped, you may request a full refund"

Nice. I own a pebble and pebble steel. Hardly use them but the full refund policy won me over.

I hope they've managed to improve the color and sharpness on color e-paper displays. The ones I've seen over the years have been rather less than vivid.

If it's anything like the old Pebble display, it's not e-ink like we would see in a Kindle. They call it e-paper, but it's really a low-power LCD with no backlight. There's no problem making an LCD full color.

Sharpness was never really an issue with e-Paper displays, as they have long been able to display at more than 150ppi. However, refresh speed and ghosting are the real issues. In order to speed up drawing and quickly wipe the screen, developers will prefer 1-bit access modes over slow/ghosty 8-bit drawing modes, so text will indeed look sharp.. And aliased.

$2million in an hour.

Is that a record?

(What else has sold anywhere near this fast?)

It gained over $500k in the last 15 minutes, so... yeah, I think we are looking to break several records here.

I think that answers the question "Is the market ready for smart watches?"

I don't think it's fair to consider this campaign as any sort of 'record'. Pebble is an already successful company with a history of success using Kickstarter as a store. If Apple decided to release the iPhone 7 on Kickstarter it would also break a ridiculous amount of records, but it's still not really 'fair'.

The amount is increasing by around $2-3k every second!! This ones going to beat every kickstarter record out there!

Man, I wish they'd just release their firmware as open source. And get rid of the 8 app limit.

To see in realtime the figures increasing like that in the page is sort of scaring.

Definitely. During the time it took me to watch the video, the counter went up 100,000$

Does anyone know how you are going to go about charing this device? MicroUSB?

I'd go with the four metal dots visible on the back (some connectir unique to the watch)

$6.2 M and 31 days to go. Wow. This is definitely a successful campaign.

What I like about Pebble- Display + Battery + Cross-platform support.

How much money do you think they are going to raise? I think $25M.

7-Day Battery life. Why does no other smartwatch offer this?

Possibly because the others aren't using e-paper.

Kickstarter, the pre-order website for the rest of us...

I hope they reduce the price of orginal pebble. ;-)

Honestly I find it real hard to believe that they sold over 13K pebbles in less than an hour. imho it doesn't make sense.

They have a great product, but not 13K / 60 min great

The evidence suggests otherwise.

1. We don't know of 13K different ppl bought it or if just 1K different ppl. 2. Don't you think that it's great marketing both for pebble and KS?

I still find it hard to believe this numbers, but I might be wrong...

Well, I put in for two and I imagine some others did as well.

hth, adric

new interface is probably the basis for touch screen interaction in 3rd gen

Scrolling among items (up/down) as demonstrated needs to be changed.

Black ops 2

It seems everyone and their brother wants this, but

> up to 7 days of battery

is a deal breaker for me; when/how do you recharge a watch? Isn't the point of a watch to never go off your wrist?

I'm old enough to wear a watch (and to not remember a time when I didn't) and having to thing about recharging it would kill the whole watch experience for me...

Is the idea that you have a second battery and swap them out or are they going to have a charging stand you put it on the charge at night time?

Innovation! A watch that tells time!

I sure hope the previous model told time as well ... but they seem to really be pushing the angle this time 'round. What with literally calling it Time.

The future is now.

Oh come on Swizec ;). You have to give them credit, they're apparently the only smartwatch brand that doesn't suck. I like that there is at least one company that, as opposed to Apple, seems to care about providing a useful tool instead of a fashion piece.

God why is this thing so fugly. I thought with the advent of the Moto 360, smartwatches would become at least what watches were before: jewelry, sadly the pebble time even lags behind the pebble steel

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