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Pebble's founder looks back on how this wearable trendsetter met its demise
The Pebble Time wasn't as big of a hit as the company hoped it would be
When we think of smartwatches today, we go right to devices like the Apple Watch or the Galaxy Watch4 — wrist-mounted companions to our smartphones that let us see and reply to messages, make calls, track our fitness and health, and even use some apps. But the concept of smartwatches wasn't born at Apple, nor Samsung, and some of you might recall another big player in the segment that used to be pretty popular a few years back: Pebble. It helped push smartwatches into the public eye with the first Pebble watch in 2013, but the company met its untimely end just a few years later. Now on the tenth anniversary of its initial crowfunding effort, founder Eric Migicovsky is giving us some insight into what went wrong.
If Android Wear doesn't meet all your smartwatch needs, the Pebble series of devices is an impressive alternative... and it doesn't hurt that most of the time, it's the cheaper option. That's especially true today: discount online retailer Monoprice has the latest version of the platform, the Pebble Time, on sale. You can pick one up for just $97.99, plus shipping and local sales tax, when you apply the coupon code "AP20" at checkout. That's a discount of over fifty dollars compared to the retail price of the plastic model.
Android Wear and Apple Watch may have the headlines, but they're not the only two smartwatch players in town. Back before either showed up to the party, a small team broke Kickstarter records to create an intelligent wristwatch with an e-ink display. A few years later, they did it again, except this time, in color.
Part of the appeal of smartwatches is using them in place of a dedicated activity tracker. Pebble watches have had a number of third-party options available, but now Pebble is making a full effort of its own. The company has rolled out Pebble Health, watch software that tracks your steps and monitors your sleeping.
Before there was Android Wear and the Apple Watch, there was Pebble. Honestly, it kind of started the whole smartwatch trend - sure, there were others before it, but Pebble was the first to really gain what could be described as popularity. In fact, it was the only watch dbrand offered skins for at first. At least until now.
Here's the problem with Android Wear. Although my G Watch R is always with me, notifying me and taking my commands, controlling it with anything but voice seems a tad cumbersome. You can realistically hold and interact with a phone using one hand, but you can't with a watch. You need both hands, which, if you ask me, feels like a step backwards sometimes. If my right hand is in my pocket, or holding something, steering, mixing a batch of cake filling, typing, grocery shopping, brushing my teeth, climbing a mountain, squeezing a lemon, or otherwise occupied, I have to interrupt whatever it is doing and bring it together with my left wrist to take care of a new notification on my watch. Or, and I'm not proud to say I've done this before, I have to raise my watch to my nose and swipe and tap that way.
The Pebble Time still has almost a month to get more pre-orders on Kickstarter, but it's already passed the $10 million mark, which is the record set by the first Pebble. In preparation for what is sure to be a big launch for the company, the new v3.0 update of Pebble's SDK is now available. Developers can start building apps for the Time, and they'll work with the regular Pebbles in the meantime.
When the time came to unveil its second generation smartwatch, Pebble returned to the crowdfunding site where everything began. Setting the bar low, the company only wanted $500,000 to call the Pebble Time project, the name of its new watch, a success. Within half an hour, it had already reached a million dollars. Now the project sits over $10.5 million with 29 days left to go.
Can a grown-up company return to the kiddie pool of Kickstarter funding to help with its new product? Of course it can - this is how development works now! This morning the makers of Pebble announced Pebble Time, the company's second generation of Pebble hardware, launching exclusively through a Kickstarter funding campaign (like the record-breaking original two years ago). The company hit its modest $500,000 goal less than half an hour after posting the page.