Pebble Time, the fully-coloured, e-ink paper based offering from Pebble is here, as speculated. While keeping the design inspiration similar to what the old Pebble offered, the new Pebble Time is sleeker, vibrant with colours and offers a whole new OS experience too.
Not only did Pebble debut its new watch today, it also debuted a whole new time-viewing experience. The watch now features a more sleeker, slimmer design and continues to support the week-long battery life it has been always been so admired of.
The new watch has been aptly named “Time”. It embodies the principles of time and has been designed by keeping that very entity as the focal point. All the app notifications you get are showed on a time-based priority. The watch shows you what you need to know for now, and what may come up in future.
It’s 20 percent thinner than the original Pebble, while still supporting customer watch faces. It continues to retain its physical buttons with three on the right and one of the left. This may come as a surprise to many considering the gaga over Android Wear’s touchscreen interface. But then, simplicity and more productivity is what Pebble is made for, not pomp and show and half-a-day battery life. Isn’t it ?
The front surface continues to feature water resistance thus allowing you to take it on an adventure in the pool, or a warm, relaxing shower session. Pebble Time features a Gorilla Glass display, coupled with a stainless steel bezel available in three colors at launch. It connects to your device via BlueToothe with the introduction of a microphone.
Make no mistake, the e-ink screen is as crisp and as smooth as any of the other put there, and at 30 Frames per second, the animations are butter smooth. Pebble Time also now uses standard 22mm watch straps, giving you the liberty to change them with any of your custom straps.
The new OS is stunningly refreshing. The watch now places all the information you need, in a glance, at one place, without the hassles of flipping or sliding or swaying or air-waving gestures. Its your everyday, go-to smartwatch, and continues to deliver on its promise of being the simplest, yet the most admirable in this category.
Pebble CEO and founder Eric Migicovsky said in an interview,
Put yourself back in 2013 or 2012 – smartwatches, they showed notifications, apps were just starting to come out for Pebble, but there was still a big conversation about what the hell people would do with smartwatches anyways.
However, what has come as surprisingly interesting, is the fact that Pebble Time has been debuted on Kickstarter today. Surprising ? Because a established brand doesn’t usually need crowd-funding platforms to launch products. Interesting ? Because it is awesome to see Pebble going back to where it started from, a simple Kickstarter campaign.
Eric explains it with this one-liner,
We want it to be a bit of a spectacle, a little bit of an event.
On Kickstarter, Pebble Time can be pre-ordered for $159, which is a decent $40 lower as per the expected retail price. The watch is exected to start shipping for its backers by May, and will then hit retail later in the year, both online and in physical stores.
