The Screen Is Still Great

Moving from a greyscale ePaper display to a color version had me nervous. Apple and Android offerings of LCD screens that are bold and vibrant make competition fierce. To my delight this display is crisp, easy to read in direct sunlight or any condition, and is responsive. Yes it does not meet the level of clarity of an Apple Watch but it’s not meant to. This display doesn’t pretend to do that. However it is the driving force behind two killer Pebble features over its counterparts:

It’s always on. No wrist-raising, no button fumbling. Glance at your wrist and you can see the time. This display uses only a fraction of the power compared to other watches.

The New Timeline / Pebble OS 3 Is A Big Improvement

The Pebble OS is a complete rethinking of how someone interacts with their watch. Instead of a watchface that I exit out of for an app, I now live in a timeline. The watchface is the present. Press the Up button and I’m in the past, while the Down button rockets me into the future without going 88MPH.

Out the gate the Pebble app will pin weather and my calendar to the timeline. If I have an upcoming appointment, I will have a small calendar icon that shows me a glance of the event. Click the center button and I get the full details. When I’m one hour or less from the event, I get a notification AND the timeline opens to a countdown to the event. This is handy.

The weather works similarly with sunrise and sundown pinned. Moving to either of them will show me the current weather and brief condition information. From what I can see, it’s updated hourly.

Other apps can pin items to the timeline though there are limited choices. I found ESPN and PushButton (used for IFTTT) quite handy to pin, so I can keep up on the Stanley Cup Finals. PushButton lets me launch a custom Launch Center Pro music action for my commute home. It pins to my timeline at 5:00 PM and gives me quick access to trigger the action.

In time with more app development this can be a great way to handle information but it’s quite limited. I also don’t know how other items get pinned such as email, which is shown in many images and demos.

Certain Faces Uses a LOT of iOS Battery

I don’t know if this is related to the watchface I started with, but I found the Pebble app using 30% of my iPhone’s daily battery. The face I used showed the weather and temperature on the screen so perhaps it was polling more than it should have. I really wanted to love the face I was using, but I can’t have nearly a third of my iPhone’s juice being sucked away for a watch. Since flipping to a different face that only displays the temperature I find it’s been better. As with many faces and apps, your milage may vary.

Pebble Needs To Curate Their App Store Or Develop Apps Themselves

Even with a large amount of people developing for Pebble, this is the place where I feel Pebble must focus. An open app / watchface ecosystem is fantastic but also a double-edged sword. If you browse only one or two pages deep in their directory, you will find a lot of useless apps and half-baked faces.

Apps marked as demos or countless copies of other faces litter the store. Pebble’s developer portal allows anyone to create apps or faces for the watch and then submit them in. It’s live a few minutes later and that is that. Unfortunately this doesn’t work when trying to find the best stuff for my super-connected watch.

Pebble tries to counter this with some curated categories such as “Color Picks”, featuring collections from developers making lots of faces, and even “Pebble Time Watchfaces”. However these categories have few choices. In the App section there are categories also, but the only difference is the addition of “Timeline-Ready Apps”. On the surface there’s a ton of things to load onto the watch, but this is where Pebble leans too hard on the developer community.

Aside from a handful of Pebble-developed apps and faces, nothing the watch can do is coded by Pebble. Hell, the Time only ships with a single watchface called Tictoc whereas the original Pebble came with 4–5 faces. Pebble Time has a microphone on it, but due to iOS limitations it’s useless for me right now. I’d love to be able to trigger Siri via the Time and use the microphone to speak to my phone. Even better would be native Pebble apps that use the microphone and then can use the text translation within the iOS app. I understand iOS limits text messages and other functions, but I don’t see why I can’t use the microphone for email or something else that the phone app handles instead of it going direct from the watch.

One area where a lack of development shows is in fitness tracking. Pebble will push their Misfit integration or you’ll see Jawbone has a tracking watchface, but these don’t fit the bill. If Apple has a superior advantage over Pebble, it’s in the fitness categories.

With Misfit I have to manually launch the app on my iPhone in order for it to sync. If I forget to do it, then my steps are lost. The Jawbone app was released as a side-project a year ago and has never been updated. Because of the Time watch managing memory by loading and offloading apps, I don’t even get my Jawbone app to run in the background due to other apps taking up space. It’s not nearly ready for Pebble Time.

This is where Pebble needs to step in. Apple is making a HUGE push on fitness and then welcoming in others. Pebble should make their own pedometer app and enable Health access within their iOS app. I could log my Pebble steps to Health and then I can let any other apps I use read that information. It would be so simple. If they aren’t up to the task, then partner up with FitBit, Jawbone, or someone else to make a real app. These apps feel the most half-baked and the fact that everything is free I’m sure doesn’t entice these companies to develop resources to build & update their code.