Pebble will be launching to its Kickstarter backers on January 23rd. Because of the limited 15,000-per-week manufacturing run, the entire allotment will take roughly 6-8 weeks to ship to backers.
It supports standard 22mm watch bands, but its band has been custom created for the watch face. Its screen is not e-ink, but is a variant of an LCD that has a refresh rate of 30fps. This allows it to actually render images and scrolling text smoothly. Because it has been created with sports in mind, it is light and extremely durable, made out of polycarbonate. This also applies to its water resistance, which is rated for 5 Atmospheres.
It will have a magnetic cable that prevents any unwieldy charging methods. It also has an ambient light sensor and magnetometer (for compass applications), both of which are not functional at the time of shipping, but it will be activated via an OTA software update. That is has Bluetooth 4.0 integration makes Pebble extremely future-proof, as most phones don’t even come with support for the low-power standard yet.
Pebble supports Android 2.3.3 and up, as well as iOS 5 and up. It does work better on Android 4.0+ and iOS 6+, but its backwards compatibility is appreciated.
There is a Cloud service, much like Facebook Connect. There will be a “Log In with Pebble” button available for webmasters to integrate with the push notification service.
Pebble’s interface has been optimized as much as possible for its black-and-white colour scheme. There are many watch faces available by default, but developers have been creating custom faces based on popular ones over time.
One of the coolest pieces of integration with Pebble is web service IFTTT (If This Then That), which can be customized to a very fine degree. You can also interface with the mobile app and download new watch faces as well as other apps that have been integrated with the device.
The company is committing to update Pebble every two to three weeks — “It’s an ongoing project,” says Eric Migicovsky — such as RunKeeper integration, which will come in the first or second update.
Developing…
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