More (and this time actually useful) thoughts on the Pebble watch

Ok, so I’ve already gotten a (valid) complaint at how useless my “first impressions” post so here is my actual review thus far:

It’s a watch; it mostly tells me the time. I’ve played with a few of the watch faces but I’ve been warned by other reviewers not to use any of the faces that have a second hand since that will kill the battery so I’ve mostly stuck with the “text-watch” face pictured in my previous post. I do wish that instead of displaying “one five” it would display “one oh five” or something like that but it doesn’t. This works well for “one fifteen” and “one fifty one” but not so much for “one five”.

Navigation is pretty simple and the buttons were easy to figure out. I’m sure there are instructions somewhere but of course I didn’t read them. (The buttons are “menu/select”, “up”, “down”, and “back”.)

Connecting to my phone: This one was a bit annoying. You’re supposed to be able to just press the “connect” button in the Pebble app on the phone to pair the watch to your phone via Bluetooth. I could not get this to work. Instead I ended up going to the phone’s Bluetooth settings (Android) and pairing via that interface. This worked and once paired the app immediately recognized the watch.

Power: three days on a single charge so far. I plan on letting it run until it’s dead under my “typical use” scenario and will let you know how long it lasts. The charging cable is USB at the “wall” end but is definitely custom to the Pebble on the other end so if it dies, there’s no generic replacement that I’m aware of. The cable also attaches to the Pebble magnetically instead of plugging in, so that’s a nice design feature.

Alarm: I tested the alarm feature this morning and it’s a basic vibration alarm. I did not wear it on my wrist all night and left it sitting on a soft-ish surface but I did hear it go off. (Granted I set it for three minutes before my usual wake up time so that may have influenced its success.) I’ll try it again another time and leave it on a harder surface to see if it wakes me again.

Notifications: Based on prior reviews I installed the separate Pebble Notifier app which gives me more control over which notifications I receive on my wrist. Through that I turned on notifications from only certain apps such as Facebook, my e-mail client, and my SMS client. I’ll probably turn off Facebook as it’s annoying, but the SMS notifications are nice. As for e-mail I’ve set my client to only get new e-mail manually so being notified that I have new e-mail seconds after I tell it to check for new e-mail seems a bit redundant at this point. However, the slight vibration and the text on my wrist is handy since I don’t have to pick up and turn on my phone’s screen to see the message.

Form factor: Again, I’m not used to wearing a watch so I’m going to keep away from claiming it’s too big as many others have. I don’t trust my own judgement on this one. What I will say is that the rubberized band is causing sweaty wrist syndrome for me, but that could also vary from person to person.

So there you go. An actual, hopefully useful, review for you.