Affirmative wrist action: Pebble Time raises 20 MEELLION BUCKS on Kickstarter Startup Pebble Time – which, we're told, plans to start shipping its wrist-puter in May – raised more than $20m during a month-long Kickstarter campaign. A quarter of the cash was ponied up within the first few hours of the biz crying out for money to support its development of the outfit's 9.5mm-thick Pebble Time smartwatch …
I thought that e-ink couldn't be backlit because all the elements were too close together for a backlight to work.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned if the colour e-ink will make it into an e-reader any time soon.
The straps could be a big draw for this as well.
Well, just like the original mono product, when they say "e-paper" they do not mean e-ink, though they're happy for you to make the assumption.
In fact it's just a more-reflective-than-usual LCD panel.
What they called transflective, back in the days of the original iPaq.
I thought the Pebble Time was quite tempting, with an open SDK and useful battery life without excessive bulk (It's amazing what comparisons against the competition will do to your perspective), but it's actually a walled garden every bit as restrictive as Android Wear or Apple Watch.
To make the watch anything more than a decoration, you need a Pebble Account. And the Pebble Account Terms of Use prohibit, among other things:
1) Figuring out how it works so you can use the watch without the account.
2) Using anything you learn from the Pebble to make your own anything, competitor to Pebble or not.
3) Disparaging Pebble in public.
4) Accidentally breaking the Pebble service.
I'm sure at least some of those terms are illegal in the state of California, and they even insert a provision at the end that basically goes, “If a term is illegal, act like it’s legal anyway.”
But, you know, nobody reads the terms of use.
Luckily somebody's already figured out how it works without an account...https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=nodomain.freeyourgadget.gadgetbridge
That's interesting. It didn't show up when I searched for alternatives for Pebble's proprietary software...
Oh. That's why. I read the Terms of Use and discovered their offensiveness on March 13, and this AGPL-licensed alternative was first published on F-droid on March 19.
At this point, I prefer to wait for somebody else to confirm that Gadgetbridge works with Pebble Time, and maybe also see if somebody releases an alternative to the software on the watch itself. A lot of people didn't like the original Pebble's software upgrade to 2.0, and it's nice not to depend on such a deceitful company.
I actually tried to look this up and failed - do you have a link for those claims...?
God forbid you actually read and interpret the Pebble Terms of Use that I linked to.
1) Figuring out how it works so you can use the watch without the account.
Section II paragraph 2 sentence 2: You may not decompile, disassemble, reverse engineer or otherwise attempt to obtain or access the source code from which any component of the Services or the Service is compiled and interpreted, and nothing in this Agreement may be construed to grant any right to obtain or use such source code. (Emphasis added.)
2) Using anything you learn from the Pebble to make your own anything, competitor to Pebble or not.
Section II paragraph 2 sentence 3: You agree not to copy, duplicate or imitate, in whole or in part, any concept, idea, business model, business process, product, service or other intellectual property or other ideas or content embodied in the Services or learned by you from your use of or access to the Services. (Emphasis added.)
3) Disparaging Pebble in public.
Section III paragraph 2, excerpt: You may not: 12. portray Company or its affiliates in a negative manner or otherwise portray its services in a false, misleading, derogatory or offensive manner;
4) Accidentally breaking the Pebble service.
Section III paragraph 2, excerpt: You may not: 13. use the Services in any manner that could damage, disable, overburden, or impair our servers or interfere with any other party's use and enjoyment of the Services;
“If a term is illegal, act like it’s legal anyway.”
Section XIV sentence 8: If any provision of this Agreement is found by a court of competent jurisdiction to be invalid, the parties nevertheless agree that the court should endeavor to give effect to the parties' intentions as reflected in the provision, and the other provisions hereof shall remain in full force and effect. (Emphasis added.)
I'm not even sure what the smartwatch thing is all about. I stopped using a (dumb)watch since i started having to lug a mobile around and that's some 15y back...
Given that said "smart" watches need a "smart" phone to do more than basics that would NOT require such a hefty price tag, you now have to lug and care for two pieces of junk instead of one.
Guess one for hipsters where form will beat function all the time.
As with many things, it's about fashion with a side order of self importance.
There is no real added value at the moment for smart watches, although there may be one day.
I also gave up wearing watches a long tome ago, I work in telly and I spend so much time keeping an eye on the (very accurate) clock at work I can't be arsed to do the same in my spare time.
That said, I do have a 'binary' watch which I occasionally wear as it amuses me.
Although trying to explain base 2 to a customs official in Canada when he queried what I was wearing on my wrist means I no longer wear it when going through airports.
For me, the appeal of a smartwatch is as an alternative control and notification system.
I stopped wearing a watch 5 years before I got a cell phone, when I started carrying around a PDA. It's just much better at everything a dumbwatch can do, except for immediate access and battery life. Now I use a smartphone.
But a smartphone sucks. To interact with it, you enter the unlock code and then hunt down the app that you want to use. Taptaptaptaptap, swipe swipe, tap, wait which messenger app, tap, wait, tap... I'm getting repetitive stress injury from this thing.
Part of it is that Android sucks. I miss Maemo and its extensible chat program. But I imagine that I can decrease the pain by using a watch to unlock the phone, and to do other routine interactions.
With a little more independence and a lot more security, I think a watch could be pretty useful. For example, I hate carrying keys. It would be nice if I could do that watch-door-entry trick from the hotel, but at my home and work. I guess a lot of people like the heartrate/pedometer sensor thing, too.
I've got the original Pebble, more because I'm a curious geek more than anything else.
I spend a lot of time in a suit and the phone lives in the inside jacket pocket if not actually in use. I found it all to ease to miss alerts, calls, messages and notifications as the phone would be silenced and just vibrate. Now my wrist vibrates no matter where the phone is. I'll continue wearing some form of alerting watch from now on.
(And no, I don't spend time phoning myself just to make my wrist vibrate. Honest)
Could the Apple thing be a total flop?
Could these investors lose all their money?
Who cares about watches anyway?
Aren't they so ... un-cool?
Well this will make more interesting viewing than the UK Election where only one thing is certain and that is that the SNP will stop at nowt in their efforts to make the UK ungovernable. No change there then?
When people talk about smartwatches, they often look at them in the context of their own little world, and forget that there are other people in the world and some of them are different and have different requirements. So, we get these self-absorbed assertions "it's pointless, just a solution looking for a problem, nobody needs a smartwatch or even a watch". Etc.
Newsflash: It's not all about you.
I have lots of watches and rarely wear them since the rise of the mobile phone. Now I wear my pebble steel and rarely look at my phone unless I want to interact with it. That's worth a couple of hundred monies of anyone's salary. I also like the pedometer/sleep tracking capability, one reminds me I'm being too lazy, one reminds me I need to get up. I'll let you work out which is which!
Battery life and screen readability means the pebble is the only choice for me. I don't want to nanny two smart devices...
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