Yesterday I finally received my Pebble which I ordered a while back when they were in their Kickstarter phase of “Should we do this?” – I for one am glad they did as it’s a great device!

For those of you who are not aware, a Pebble is a cool watch witch uses Bluetooth to connect to your iPhone or Android phone and allow you to do cool things like…

Receive vibrating notifications straight to your wrist for most of the apps you would normally receive them from on the phone like Email, Caller ID, SMS, Calendar Alerts, Facebook, Twitter etc etc

Play retro style games – Remember Snakes on the Nokia (or QBasic before that) and Space invaders, Tetris etc

App integration with apps such as runkeeper to display your pace, mph, how long you have been running

Control your music with iTunes and Pandora and other music apps, skip songs, display title and album.

Specific apps like the 7 Minute workout App

Use it with If That Then This for further updates

And that’s just the start, there are also some funky watch faces which you can install many of and simply switch between them with the push of one button, the watch faces and a good number of games can be downloaded from http://www.mypebblefaces.com

Also, the design of the watch is very cool, its water resistant so you get a nice magnetized usb charger, apparently the charge lasts for around 7 days because it is made with e-paper. Its slick and sexy and has a vibrating motor and accelerometer with gesture detection which is used for the light to ensure readability at night when moved.

Check out their site to find out more details or order yours…. http://getpebble.com

My Watch Faces

Of course the first thing I did once my family had stopped sending me “funny” SMS messages just to see them appear on my wrist! was to create a few watch faces of my own, nothing interactive for now but just something cool to switch to at VMUGs or VMworld etc, these were created with an awesome site here: http://www.watchface-generator.de

A slight issue

After receiving my pebble and pairing it with my watch and going through the setup wizard I was receiving SMS and Caller ID fine but was not receiving twitter, calendar notifications, emails and others. The only way I found to fix this was to go into the notification settings of the iPhone and for each of the items I wanted to receive them for I would disable and re-enable the notifications. This is a glitch which I’m sure will be fixed in the future but I wanted others not to b as puzzled as I was for a few minutes.

Next Steps

With the Pebble having an API I think it would be cool to come up with an App that allows you to control VMware vSphere using the watch, just thing, instant stats and inventory numbers to your watch, deploy and delete VMs, Snapshots, Power on Power Off all from your watch – Now that would be cool!

-Alan

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