We got a glimpse of Pebble’s plans yesterday, but the company made things official with a brand new Kickstarter campaign that went live at 10am this morning.
The company’s newest device is called the Pebble Time and, as previous leaks suggested, it is the first colour smartwatch from Pebble. It uses a colour e-paper display to preserve the week-long battery life that we’ve come to love about the Pebble. The company is also bringing a pop of colour to the hardware itself, offering the Pebble Time in three different colours (black, white and red) from launch.
We had also heard that the Pebble Time would be smaller than the original Pebble and would add a mic as well as voice recognition technology and improvements to the backlight. These rumours were all true. The Pebble Steel also boasts silent alarms, a slimmer design, and step tracking for Misfit and Jawbone users. In addition to being 20% thinner, the Pebble Time is compatible with any 22mm band, which Pebble promises users will be able to swap out in less than 10 seconds thanks to a new quick release mechanism.
One of the juiciest rumours about the Pebble Time was a new UI and Pebble’s Kickstarter goes into some detail on that, too. The company claims that apps are an inefficient way to interact with a watch. As you install more apps, your Pebble becomes clogged.
The solution to this problem is the timeline we heard about last week.
The Pebble Time is organized around … time. The Timeline UI presents notifications, reminders, and events chronologically so, as you scroll back through the timeline, you’ll see everything you’ve missed. There’s also a new App Menu with glanceable content built into the icons (so the clock app will display the time, for example). These can be pinned to your timeline so that they’re more immediately accessible no matter what time of day or how many notifications and alerts you receive.
The Pebble Time ships in May and is priced at $159 for Kickstarter backers. Regular retail pricing for the watch will be $199. Pebble met its $500,000 goal in just 17 minutes, so the project is already funded with 31 days to go.
[source]Kickstarter[/source]
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