Pebble smart watch evaluation

A smart watch is more than just a watch of time. It is a state-of-the-art technology that turns your wrist into a quick launch, a "wearable computer revolution." It is also an outstanding representative of the Kickstarter hardware revolution. With 85,000 orders and 10 million raised funds, combined with one or two missed shipments, Pebble is finally in our horizons and is ready to send email and text messages directly to your wrist.

So, is Pebble a gimmick, a gimmick, or a bold new platform? Can an independently run hardware startup succeed in making the first smartwatch for the general public? Or is it a toy for digital geeks that ends up being the same fate as any other smartwatch before? 10 million dollars of funds really give us what benefits? Let us now find out.

Design and hardware

Contrary to its unobtrusive design, almost all other smartwatches are extremely bulky, but for Pebble, if you did not tell your friends that you were wearing it, Most people do not even recognize its existence. It is extremely slim and shiny, and when the backlight is off, the screen is almost integrated with its black edge. There are up / down and select buttons on the right side of the watch and a back button on the left and a set of Pebble magnet power connectors that are arranged and function very similar to the well-known Apple MagSafe system. Pebble did not use cumbersome metal cover and switch interface components, cleverly realized the waterproof function.

Speaking of Pebble's screen, I can only say general. Pebble calls it "e-paper," but in reality it's just a 114 × 168 translucent LCD screen designed for watches. Although it is widely used, it is only a low-resolution black and white LCD, can not demonstrate its noble and perfect. The cover of the watch is a curved plastic lens, and the way it reflects the light is very strange, but fortunately it is not a major problem, but it can be upsetting every time you see it.

The screen itself shows content, including time, music player or notification, which is completely clear without the need of a backlight during the day. However, whether the backlight is turned on has some influence on the display effect. For example, when the backlight is turned off, the screen is purely black and white, just like the screen of a Nook or a Kindle. Once notified, or particularly fast movements will trigger the backlight to turn on, giving the screen an unexpected light blue glow. It looks pretty good, but if the screen looks too cheap, we can not feel the watch's superb. Only pray next Pebble can use a better screen.

The polyurethane strap is completely unobtrusive. Very simple and very ordinary, its role is to make your wrist comfortable to wear watches, no features even make people feel that there are some cheap, but you can replace it with any standard 22mm wristband, so the fact that your choice is unlimited .

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Overall, Pebble is a very good hardware device, comfortable to wear and small size, it is not bad to use. You can put it into the watchcase of a design brand and look very harmonious, and that's a good accomplishment. With it in hand, it's hard to imagine this was designed and assembled by an independent hardware startup that raised money on Kickstarter. It looks very cool is no doubt that the biggest problem now is that it's performance?

use:

Just from the watch itself, Pebble almost useless, its real role is to use as your phone's secondary display means that the need to use Pebble experience effects need to start from the installation of the Pebble app, which is interesting Pebble. Pebble supports both iOS and Android, but its way of working varies widely from platform to platform.

The Pebble app for iOS is basically a placeholder, and you can download a new watch interface and check for connection problems, nothing more. Everything else is done at the iOS system level, such as pairing a Pebble with a cellphone and selecting "Show Notifications," which theoretically enables the use of the watch's features. In fact, iOS has the necessary infrastructure to support devices like Pebble, but it does not actually have any management interface and you can not choose to send only certain app notifications to Pebble, while other app notifications are not needed or just get from one email account Ping, or adjust other settings. This is a bit of a hassle, and countless notifications are really weird.

For example, it takes a lot of steps to get notification messages from third-party apps like Twitter, Facebook, or Gmail. You need to open the notification center preferences for each app, select a different notification type, and reselect the one you really need. It seems that every app notification needs to be connected to Pebble before it works, but beware: once Bluetooth is disconnected for some reason you can only re-select all the notification settings again, which is a real headache Obviously this can not be blamed on Pebble, can only blame Apple has not set up the right management tools in iOS.

There are some other issues with Pebble on iOS, such as when my phone initially identified Pebble as a Bluetooth phone, and tried hard to send it the call audio and Siri. Music player control and every app I've tried worked fine, including Music, Spotify and Rdio apps, but album information sometimes displayed on Pebble was not updated.

Of course, these are some very trivial issues. Once you bring Pebble and work with your iPhone, it is perfect if the two are not always broken. Adjusting Apple's notification center framework does require some tedious setup, but it also means that each app's notifications work with Pebble, which is not the case with the Android system mentioned below. I hope that Apple will continue to establish and improve these tools for future versions of iOS, even if it is for their own research and development of the watch, so, Pebble's iOS performance will be better.

Android system

Unlike iPhone and iOS, which provide basic native support for devices like Pebble at the system level, Pebble on Android is entirely app behavior. You can manage everything in the app, so you can see everything at first glance because all the settings are in one place and you can easily and quickly make adjustments, such as having the watch prompt for a message for a given mail account, regardless of other accounts.

However, replacing a system-level support with a full-blown app has some drawbacks. For example, Pebble's Android app requires permission on many aspects of your phone, including your Gmail account password, which Android users can see on Pebble Each message has more information than an iPhone user, because in fact the app checks the message through IMAP, not just the notification. In addition, you need to turn on Android's usability feature so the app can read the notification and display it, warning the user that the app can read all of the textual input, and I believe Pebble can be lawful, but this is not valid for my data and my personal Information is also a potential threat.

Since everything on Android is implemented in the Pebble app, you can only receive notifications from Pebble support. This means that you can only receive messages from Facebook, and messages from Twitter can not be received. Also, WhatsApp can be supported, but GroupMe can not. I hope the company is working hard to support more apps, but if your favorite project does not appear in the form, you may need to wait a while.

Comparing the iPhone's support for Pebble was not upsetting these questions, and it worked as expected once you picked Pebble up and running. This is a very interesting trade-off: the Pebble experience on Android is better in many ways than on the iPhone, but it loses some of its security.

In general, whether you are using an iOS device or an Android device, once you've connected your Pebble to your phone, you can pick up one of your favorite dashboards and start your day's work. As a watch, Pebble is really unobtrusive and it's so small that most people even think it's just an ordinary watch. Pebble's dial interface from the traditional style to the mysterious style readily available, I personally chose the traditional pointer mode display. However, it is strange that even without the traditional digital display mode, I think some cattle developers will soon solve this problem.

Pebble makes a small buzz and lights up the screen if any of the notifications arrive. To be honest, this is great, and you no longer need to look at the phone to know who sent you messages, emails, or phones, and it goes without saying that only you can see what you think is important , Or you can completely ignore the phone, I really like the screen call from my wrist too. However, the downside is also obvious, that is, you can not ignore the phone or do a sliver of messages when doing other serious things. Pebble buzzes every message or message on your wrist, and you have to stay vigilant about your inbox for some filtering and prioritization. Having Pebble did change the way it distracted, but did not diminish. Once you get used to the notification alert on your wrist, you may not be able to escape.

Once you see a notification, you can simply cancel the reminder by simply clicking the Select or Back button. Pebble's official website states that you can shake the watch to cancel the reminder, but I did not succeed. In fact, I really want to know how the upcoming Pebble app will eventually take full advantage of all three buttons, but for the moment everything is intuitive and the user interface responds smoothly and quickly.

It also provides basic control of your phone's music, which shows the song's name and allows you to pause or skip the track. After testing, I found that it works with all the music apps on iOS, but for Android, it only works with apps that support the Bluetooth AVRCP protocol, such as Spotify, which is not compatible. However, music control from the dial interface contains a lot of button-driven, not as good as direct operation of my phone, so I rarely use this feature.

Pebble promises more apps in the future. The company has a software developer's kit for developers, and the company's idea is that you can download and install watch app directly from the Pebble mobile app later. It is conceivable that Pebble can do many other things. For example, the company has begun to show many solid models, such as golf rangefinder, cycling app, running app and so on. These are all very clever ideas, but for the moment they're just illusions and promises, and the point of app support has not been set.

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Life time:

Pebble claims the phone can run for about a week on a single charge, and of course we do not have enough time to verify the claimed battery life, but we never had any concerns about the battery during the test. Part of the reason is simply that there is not any battery indication on the device, but there is a low-battery warning when the battery is low, otherwise you are not aware of it.

Using Pebble affects more or less about 5 percent to 10 percent of your cell phone because its Bluetooth wireless signal needs to be on all the time. We found that the battery usage on the iPhone was better than Android, and Android was more power hungry, probably because Android apps often run in the background. Pebble supports the Bluetooth 4.0 standard with lower energy consumption, but it is not used yet, so the power consumption problem in the future is still expected to improve.

to sum up:

advantage

· Shape is like a normal watch.

· Works well with iPhone and Android.

· Reliable battery life

Disadvantages

IPhone support is limited by iOS itself.

· Android support is limited by app development.

· The screen is still normal.

Pebble price is not cheap, for 150 US dollars (about 933 yuan), of course, it is not what the necessary items now. But if the Pebble team could deliver the rest of what they promised, creating the first mainstream wearable computer platform may not be far from that day. However, even if they did not meet their goals, Pebble now has a lot of people who are overjoyed.

Smart watch feature : With the coordinated development of major science and technology in the 21st century, the four basic functions of wrist decoration will usher in a historic change, and this change refers to the watch "social function" and "religious function" , The relative degradation of "decorative functions" (rather than absolute degradation), and the strong rise of "utility functions." And lead to a major change in history is the "smart watch." Smart watches in the present can be described as a hot word, the world's leading technology companies have stepped in, hoping to take a share in the new round of market boom ... [into the topic]