NEW YORK (AP) — You have a cellphone, maybe a tablet. Sometimes you lug around a laptop. Do you really need one more gadget on you? Yes, you do. You need a smart watch.
At least, that’s what I learned after I got the Pebble, a $150 watch that connects wirelessly to iPhones and Android smartphones to notify you of incoming calls, texts and emails.
The Pebble has a lot of rough edges, but it does a good job of demonstrating the potential of “wearable” computing. Apple has filed patents that demonstrate it’s working on a watch, and other “smart” watches are proliferating.
The Pebble has impeccable underdog credibility as the brainchild of a 26-year-old Canadian entrepreneur who struggled to find money to make it until he posted his project on the fundraising site Kickstarter. There, it was a runaway success, raising more than $10 million in less than a month from nearly 70,000 friends and strangers.
What’s great about the Pebble isn’t that it’s particularly smart on its own. Considering that it’s a watch with the processing power of a cellphone from 2008, it really doesn’t do much out of the box. In fact, it does less than many sports watches; you can set alarms, but it doesn’t come with a timer.
The watch qualifies as a “smart” device because you can download and install applications, such as a timer. So far, the apps are pretty rudimentary. Apart from the timer, the only app I bothered to install is one that walks you through a popular seven-minute workout routine.
The Pebble’s real use is as an extension of the smartphone, a replacement for the ring signal.
Think about it: how many times have you missed calls and texts because the ringer was off, and you didn’t feel the vibration because the phone wasn’t on you? Or you forgot to turn the ringer off, and it rang at the wrong time? These things used to happen a lot to me. The Pebble put an end to that.
When you get a call, text, email or calendar reminder, the Pebble vibrates. You can set it to provide you with Facebook notifications, too. Because it’s strapped to your wrist, it’s a signal you can’t miss, yet it’s unnoticeable to anyone else. After a few days, I turned off the cellphone’s ringer and vibrating alert — and left them off. The Pebble’s vibrating alert was right for every situation.
The Pebble also gives me the freedom to distance myself from the phone. Rather than carrying the bulky thing in my pocket so I could feel it vibrating, I leave it in my bag. At home, I leave it on the charging stand in the foyer.
The Bluetooth wireless connection between the phone and the watch works fine throughout my small New York apartment. The company says the range is 20 to 30 feet. It worked at longer distances in my test, but I wouldn’t count on it maintaining a connection throughout a multilevel home.
The Pebble doesn’t work flawlessly with every phone, so buyer beware. It worked fine with a Kyocera Torque, a Samsung Galaxy Nexus and a Motorola Razr M. All of them use Google’s Android software. With a fourth Android phone, the HTC One, the connection to the watch dropped many times a day, and it wouldn’t reconnect automatically once it dropped. That made the Pebble pretty useless.
A colleague tested the watch with her iPhone 4 and found that while it maintained the connection fine when the watch and phone were close by, it wouldn’t reconnect automatically if they got separated and then reunited. That was annoying.
With the right phones, the only thing I had to worry about was turning off the connection between the phone and the watch at night, so it wouldn’t buzz me in bed with incoming email. Yes, I’ve actually started wearing the watch to bed. The vibrating alarm wakes me up without disturbing anyone else in the room, and I never have to fumble for the alarm on the nightstand.
If every buzz from the watch sent me scrambling for my phone, the setup would be pretty annoying. But the watch’s stamp-sized screen shows the first few lines of every incoming message, or the name and number of the caller, so a glance at the watch reveals if the message is one to ignore or get on quickly. You still have to fish out the phone to reply, though.
The watch has only four buttons, and there’s no way to type on it.
The watchmaker calls the black-and-white screen “e-paper.” That sounds like it’s a paper-like display of the kind found on Amazon’s monochrome Kindle e-readers, but that’s not the case. The Pebble screen is a liquid-crystal display that doesn’t need a backlight to be legible in indoor or outdoor light, which helps save battery power. There is a backlight that kicks in whenever a button is pushed, so the watch face is legible in darkness, too.
You can pick from a dozen digital watch faces.
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