TECH ESSENTIALS
The Pebble Time is much less like a miniature smartphone than other smartwatches, and this is certainly not a bad thing.
For starters, the Time does not have a touchscreen. It has a pair of buttons that let you select options and back out of menus, and another pair that let you scroll up and down. It’s weird if you’re used to swiping, but it does keep your glass clean and is nice and precise.
The device also doesn’t have a bright, flashy screen capable of displaying high-resolution images. It has an e-paper display (like a Kindle e-reader) that can display 64 colours. It looks great, and the main functional benefit of e-paper (apart from allowing the battery to last several days on a single charge) is that the screen is always on.
Basically if you’re in an environment well-lit enough to read from a piece of paper, you’ll be able to read the watch’s display easily. If you happen to be in the dark, a shake of your wrist or
The case of the Pebble Time is metal and glass, but the actual body is black, white or red plastic. press of a button will light up the screen for a few seconds.
With a big metal frame and thick black bezel, the Pebble Time has a cool retro-future look about it. Some people won’t like the plastic body, which is a little toylike, and those people should wait for the Steel edition coming later this year (that body by the way is curved, light and textured, making this by far the comfiest smartwatch I’ve worn).
The Time will accept any standard 22mm watch band, so if you’re not happy with the silicon strap that comes attached you can whip it off and slap on whatever you got from a jewellery store or Trade Me or eBay.
Speaking of fitness, the Time does include a basic pedometer, so it’s compatible with the Jawbone or Fitbit phone apps you may already be using for step counting and sleep tracking. The device is water resistant to 30 metres, so it’s fine to take for a swim too.
HOW IT WORKS
Functionally the latest Pebble sticks very much to the original’s playbook, rejecting the shiny coolness of big tech while prioritising the most important functions of a smartwatch: important information at a glance; readability; handling the more passive functions of your smartphone by proxy.
The watchface serves as the home screen for the Pebble Time, and the information displayed there depends entirely on the face you choose. There are thousands available for free from the Pebble Time smartphone app.
One of the primary functions of a smartwatch is to serve your phone notifications to your wrist, and it works exactly as you’d expect with Pebble Time. Every time your phone gets an email, for example, the Pebble will buzz and display the sender and subject line. The options for dealing with the notification (dismiss, reply with an emoji, snooze etc) depends on which app is sending your phone the notification. It all works a little more smoothly on Android, as Pebble can make use of the Android Wear infrastructure, but you’ll still get notifications from an iPhone too.
Entering text is never fun on a watch and Pebble Time has decided to not even try. In general, if you can’t deal with a notification with the press of a button you’ll need to grab your phone. There’s also a microphone to dictate text replies, and it works fine if you’re in a quiet area.
SHOULD I GET ONE?
More than any other smartwatch the Pebble Time feels like a watch that does heaps of useful stuff, rather than an extension of your phone on to your wrist. A lot of the most useful apps are selfcontained and not part of your phone at all, meaning it’s still pretty functional even if you’re nowhere near your phone.
The always-on screen and big battery life (I’ve been getting four to five days) just make sense for a watch, and the ability to use any watchface and band you want means it can reflect your own personality rather than Apple’s or Motorola’s, even if the cutesy interface means it will always be a little bit unsophisticated.
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