When the Pebble Time was announced, it was the only smart watch that truly moved me from my ground, while there are many other wearable brands out there that I also favored, but wearing a Pebble has made it almost impossible to move to other smartwatches as I switch devices for review every week, because this is one of the best cross-platform smart watch, and it is no wonder that the third generation smart watch got sold off Kickstarter extremely fast.
The Pebble Time isn’t really expensive when it kick off its Kickstarter campaign, I got mine a tad more expensive at US$179 and received a couple of days back on the day of writing. The first thing that has truly impressed me is the watch’s packaging, though simple, but the tagline “It’s time” has excited me enough to quickly rip open the box and get the watch activated. Out of the box, we’ve got one new proprietary USB charging cable, the Pebble Time and manuals.
If you have been a Pebble user, you will not be able to use the existing app to pair with the Time as it works very differently from the original Pebble and Steel. The best part of the software experience is that Pebble doesn’t require you to download all of your favorite watchfaces and apps once again as it carries them over to the new app once you have your Pebble account signed on. I had no issues pairing with the Time, though it takes a while to download a new firmware update I was up in about 6-7 minutes later, and you will then be greeted with the Time’s new Tictoc watchface in color – finally a Pebble smart watch with a color display!
Apart from having a much modern design and less cheaper design than its predecessor, the Time’s display is a color e-Paper display, it isn’t as bright nor as colorful as a standard LCD display, but I actually find it very pleasant to look at it. If you can visualize things, just simply imagine your old Tamagochi and Digimon devices with colorful graphics with better resolution and vibrant colors, it is definitely much better than having a monochrome LCD display. Unfortunately, Pebble still doesn’t love touch screens and while you’re limited to use the standard buttons to operate the watch, it isn’t really a major problem to be honest.
One of the most significant updates to the Time is that you no longer require slots to store your watchfaces and apps, which you might first have an impression that Pebble has finally put in gigabytes of memory on the device, however that is not the case. In real fact, Pebble has done a pretty smart move by having those apps and watch faces stored on your phone, loads them on demand when your watch requests for it, and this of course comes with an disadvantage as well, which literally means that you will not be able to change watch faces as freely as you do back on older Pebble devices and use standalone Pebble apps without connecting to your phone.
Pebble is a company that consists of a group of young and creative people, and I have to say that the new Timeline interface does have some fun elements in there – the animations, doodles and menus, everything just feels very retro-style and it would be cool if Pebble could one day allow users to customize themes on their operating system, it is refreshing to see something different after seeing so many flat, 3D designs that I’m beginning to feel very irritated by it, and at this point of time, I find no issues in connectivity and receiving notifications.
I have no regrets in backing the Pebble Time, the Steel has impressed me with its minimalist elegant design and now, the Time has gotten me interested into wearables once again, even though its features still may not be a breakthrough in wearable technology and doesn’t feature a 24K carat gold body, its user experience is fun yet unique and you have got to experience yourselves on what it really is like to have a Pebble Time on your wrists, stay tuned to our final review while we’ll be wearing the Time and see how it goes.
