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I've had mine since January, which has given me enough time to get over the newness and just get used to it. I don't hate it or anything, but I'm fairly disappointed in it. Right now it's just not living up to what they promised, largely due to the lack of a proper SDK and a really barebones firmware. I'm pleased with the hardware, especially the fact that it's waterproof, so I guess it's just about having patience until they get the software up to where it should be. It's handy having notifications on my wrist and all, but even that isn't being handled well. You have to look at them exactly when they come in, there's no history, and they only show up for a couple minutes before disappearing. If you get two of them back to back, you can forget ever seeing the first one. So yeah, right now the Pebble is only doing one thing out of the many things they promised, and it's not even doing that one thing well. In 6 months it'll probably be awesome, but for now it's a real beta-level product. Edit: Oh, and the screen does scratch and scuff, it's just a matter of time until you hit it against something hard/abrasive enough to do it. I was able to polish out a scuff on mine using a cheap tube of Polywatch and then bought a screen protector for $6. Normally I wouldn't care about a few cosmetic scratches, but scuffs make it hard to read in daylight, due to scattering the light or whatever. xamphear fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Apr 30, 2013 |
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Apr 30, 2013 15:31
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IuniusBrutus posted:I always wear a watch already anyways, and I don't like pulling my phone out at work. Is purchasing a pebble still A Dumb Idea? Or is it solid enough that I won't be upset by using mostly for just time and notifications? If what you want the pebble for is time and notifications, then you will be 100% satisfied with it. It's only other people (such as myself) who were sold on the whole "app store for your watch" stuff that are a bit let down with the thing.
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Jun 5, 2013 21:42
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Long shot, but have any of you guys tried developing an app for the watch? I did briefly, and my general impression is that it's an absolute mess. I'm seriously impressed by the few people who have managed to stick it out long enough to get anything other than a simple watchface working. There's no debugger, no simulator. You have to recompile, redeploy, and manually reinstall the app to your watch (via clicking an .apk link on a local webserver) every time you want to test. Plus, there's no basic services provided by the Pebble app on your phone, so if you need any sort of communications with features on your phone or the cloud you need to roll your own iOS and Android app on top of that. There's a generic "httpebble" library and matching app that lets you do a very limited set of JSON calls, but trying to bridge between that and other services is sort of impossible. The whole thing has a long way to go before anyone other than seriously hardcore "i love a challenge" types will do anything with it, let alone anything that's really new or otherwise not obvious (ie: not a timer, stopwatch, time & temp display, etc...)
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Jun 6, 2013 13:55
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It's a cool device, but it's not worth 2x the retail price. Stay strong or you're going to wind up with a serious case of buyer's remorse.
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Jun 7, 2013 03:00
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The buttons are mushy due to the membrane that makes the watch fully waterproof to 3 meters deep or whatever it's rated for. The back says "5 Atmospheres" but I left my "earth's atmosphere at sea level to submerged depth in saltwater" conversion slide rule at the office.
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Jul 10, 2013 02:06
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amiantos posted:Steve Jobs wouldn't let a screen that does this "normally" go into production.
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Jul 10, 2013 19:36
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Yeah, I've stopped wearing my Pebble on a daily basis. I bought it as an "app watch" which is how they sold it in their Kickstarter. But as it stands now, it's basically just a "notifications watch" and anything above and beyond that requires a bunch of micromanagment hackery and doesn't look or act good enough to make it worth the effort. You really hit the nail on the head when you called that comment about IFTT "pebble as hell". Their response to loads of features has been "we're not going to implement that in a first-party simple way because you can accomplish it already if you spend an hour hacking together a bunch of 3rd party apps and services." I'm not all angsty about my hundred bucks, and I don't feel ripped off. But at the same time, I really did want a watch that was capable of easily running a bunch of cool apps, and that's just not what this is. Getting notifications on your watch is pretty cool and can be really useful, but if that's all it ever does, that doesn't justify me wearing it around all day, everywhere. I'll probably wear it only on occasions where I don't want to keep whipping my phone out, or where I might not hear my phone ring/feel it vibrate. xamphear fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Aug 30, 2013 |
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Aug 30, 2013 21:51
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mcpringles posted:What apps were you expecting? Runkeeper and Golfcaddie were both released and there are a few games and other 3rd party apps. Okay, so we've got runners and golfers and fans of 2-bit/3-button games covered; so really, what else IS there, right?  The whole upsell was that it was going to have an awesome SDK and that people could just jump in and start building poo poo. If I'd asked you back in 2004 "what apps were you expecting" with regards to phones, you'd probably have said, "My phone can call people, take pictures, and even play solitaire. That's all I need." but here we are, with phones doing poo poo people never asked for or knew they wanted. I could list the cool poo poo that I think the Pebble watch should be doing, but what I was really looking forward to were all the things people more creative and inventive than I would come up with. At this point, I'd settle for the really obvious poo poo: Weather. A phone dialer. Call ditching w/ SMS reply. Notification history. The ability to send canned SMS replies. Unread item counts. And please, don't link me to the handful of android apps that can do some of those things. I know they exist. I've installed them. I've tried them. They represent a lot of hard work by their programmers, but they're all disappointingly hacky due to the unfinished nature of the SDK. Last I saw, they haven't even exposed an API for the motion sensor, one of the core user input features of the device. JFYI: I've downloaded the SDK. I've used it to make an app. It's really painful, and even with HTTPebble, your options for 2-way or even 1-way communications are supremely limited. I tried to make an XBMC remote control and it's literally not possible. HTTPebble's JSON implementation isn't compatible with the XBMC RPC server, and you can't turn off the JSON content/type so that you can pass the call embedded into a GET request. I went into it thinking that a simple play/pause, volume up/down, prev/next app would be super simple, and it ended up being impossible without either writing a companion iOS/Android app or rolling out some sort of proxy server that could translate the HTTPebble JSON calls into ones that XBMC can handle. xamphear fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Aug 31, 2013 |
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Aug 31, 2013 17:42
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My Pebble has been in the closet, battery dead, for months now. SDK 2.0 sounds like what they originally promised backers would be released ahead of the watches even shipping. If people start putting out interesting poo poo, that might be enough to get me wearing it on a daily basis again. But, I'm not holding my breath. If I get super loving bored some weekend, I might download the new SDK and see if I can even make that drop-dead simple XBMC remote app (it really just needs to execute 6 HTTP GET requests to work). If that can't even be done, then well...
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Nov 7, 2013 14:56
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sirbeefalot posted:Its gonna be tough with your battery wrecked from sitting discharged for months. Yeah... That wouldn't break my heart, though. Which I guess is just about the most negative thing I could really say about Pebble. "I don't care if it's broken."
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Nov 7, 2013 18:34
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mcpringles posted:I don't see why anyone would want to see missed calls, SMS count and email count. You see all of those when they come in through your watch, so whats the point? The other features are neat though. Unless you get so drat many emails/texts/whatever that you don't want them to constantly go to your watch, instead you just want to see the unread count. Also, my watch booted when I plugged it into the charger, so... yay? I went to update the firmware and it said I was already at the latest. Has this thing seriously not gotten a firmware update since like July?
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Nov 8, 2013 02:13
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