It’s been almost three years since the Pebble smartwatch folks took in over $10 million from their original Kickstarter project. Now they’re going back to the Kickstarter well with their new smartwatch concept, Pebble Time.
The Pebble Time Kickstarter site:
At its heart, Pebble Time is an awesome watch. The new color e-paper display is easy to read and always-on, perfect for displaying incoming notifications and your favorite watchface. Compared with display technology like LCD or OLED, power consumption is minimized, enabling Pebble Time to achieve an industry-leading battery life of up to 7 days.
Highlights
- A new timeline interface.
- A new color e-paper display and microphone for responding to notifications.
- Up to 7 days of battery life, water resistance and customizability.
- Pebble Time is fully compatible with all 6,500+ existing Pebble apps and watchfaces.
- Three colors available exclusively on Kickstarter.
- Pebble Time starts shipping in May.
The color e-paper display is always on, with minimal power consumption, allowing users to go up to 7 days between charges. (My current Pebble can go around 4 days before I need to charge it.)
Pebble Time will include a built-in microphone, allowing users to send voice replies to incoming notifications, and will also allow users to make short voice notes. The company says that while voice replies will work with most Android apps, it will at first be limited to Gmail notifications on the iOS platform.
Pebble Time is 20% thinner than the original Pebble, coming in at 9.5mm. It also sports a curved design which the company says allows it to fit comfortably on either wrist and it slides easily under dress shirts.
The Pebble Time’s lens is made from scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass, and the bezel is made from stainless steel.
Pebble Time is available in three colors:
- Black watch case and silicone band with black PVD stainless steel bezel
- White watch case and silicone band with silver PVD stainless steel bezel
- Red watch case and silicone band with black PVD stainless steel bezel
Pebble admits that app management on the original Pebble was inefficient, leading them to create a new method of app management.
Items like the weather, step counts, and reminders and notifications will all be organized into a timeline, instead of inside apps and menus like they were on the original.
Pebble says all the old watchfaces and apps that worked on the old Pebble will work with Pebble Time. Pebble will also eventually be porting the new OS over to the old Pebble models.
Pledges for the Pebble Time begin at $159, and go up to $5,000, so check out the Pebble Time Kickstarter site to see which level is right for you. Pledges on the site, in just a little over a half an hour after going live, are already at over $1M, (the goal was $500,000), so these are going fast.
For more information, visit the Pebble Time Kickstarter site.
