Pebble Time with Michael
At $199 for the Pebble Time, and $249 for the Pebble Time Steel, the cost of owning a Pebble Time is certainly more than what I would consider an “impulse buy”. So, is it really worth the money?
That’s what I want to discuss in this article. Does the Pebble Time really provide sufficient value for the money it costs?
It’s a Wristwatch, and So Much More
Even though you can get the current time right off of your phone, most people still choose to wear watches. It’s just a whole lot easily to glance at your wrist than to wrestle with getting your phone out of your pocket, waking it up, and reading the time from its screen.
Above all else, the Pebble Time is a watch. It displays time very accurately and in a most aesthetically pleasing manner through any one of thousands of possible watch faces. In fact with so many of them available from the Pebble App Store you can have exactly the watch face on it that most pleases you, and if you feel a whim to change it, that can be accomplished in seconds. You can have a watch face that’s classic, high-tech, way cool, zany, or whatever – whenever you want it. That’s a pretty nifty feature for any wristwatch to have and compared to the price of many high-end timepieces, the price of the Pebble Time now doesn’t seem all that high.
Nevertheless, what really pleases me about using a Pebble Time as a wristwatch is that is can display a whole lot more than just the current time of day on its watch face. The picture above (yes, it’s the same picture as appeared in my previous article, but it’s just so appropriate for this article, too!) shows the watch face I usually use on my Pebble Time: DIN Time.
Not only does it show the time of day with great accuracy, it also gives me the date, day of the week, and a wonderfully detailed weather report. I’ve never seen a regular wristwatch at any price that could provide me with all this valuable information – and all of it available to me from just a quick glance at my wrist. Now, all of a sudden, the price of the Pebble Time seems downright inexpensive, even if I’m just using it as a wristwatch. It’s really a premium wristwatch at pretty reasonable price!
In summary, even if I just used my Pebble Time as a wristwatch I personally feel I would be very satisfied with it. It’s the simply the nicest and most useful watch I’ve ever owned.
What’s the Big Deal About Notifications?
Of course, the Pebble Time does a lot more than just act as a wristwatch. The “killer function” this smartwatch offers are its notifications.
The Pebble Time sits on your wrist and keeps you informed of all the communications you are receiving from others, and the events of which you need to be reminded. You can peek at it when it vibrates to see if you just received an important message or something that can be safely ignored. You can do it with minimal disruption to any ongoing activities in which your are currently engaged. All it takes is a quick peek and no one need notice you doing it.
Over everything else, this offers the what I think is its greatest advantage, because you can stay informed while out and about without rudely interrupting activities with the people around you. You won’t look bored in meetings or disinterested on a date, and you won’t distract audience members in a movie theater with your brilliant cell phone screen while checking to see who just sent you a message. The Pebble Time allows you to stay connected and informed without constantly interrupting your life. It’s far more discreet than pulling out your phone and also much, much faster.
I personally have found that being discreetly notified of messages and reminders is absolutely the most valuable function the Pebble Time performs for me. As much as I love it as a really nice wristwatch, notifications are by far the most valuable service it provides to me. I’m simply extraordinarily happy with the way it works to provide them.
Are Pebble Time Apps Really Worth the Bother?
So, it’s a really cool wristwatch and discreet notifier. What about all of the thousands of apps available in the Pebble App Store? Aren’t they valuable, too?
Well, in my opinion most of them are really not. This is mainly because there are some very real limitations on exactly what can be accomplished by a smartwatch app.
Because of the very design of a smartwatch, the processing power is limited, input capabilities are extremely constrained, the screen is tiny, and communications, especially via Bluetooth, can be very slow. Given these very real limitations I’ve found very few applications that are truly useful to me and which will operate at any kind of reasonable speed. I personally feel that most of the apps in the Pebble App Store are simply curiosities and toys rather than pieces of software that can improve my personal enjoyment of life and/or improve my efficiency and effectiveness.
Now having said these very harsh words, I have to admit that I have found a few Pebble Time apps (very few!) that I do find to be very useful to me. Right now, I have only seven apps that I feel are worthwhile to have running on my Pebble Time. You can find them discussed in All About Pebble Time Apps.
My own personal absolute favorite app right now is Nav Me, which is only available to Android users. My favorite app that’s available for use with both iPhone and Android devices is ESPN.
Now I’m constantly trying out apps I discover that appear to be useful. I also constantly discard them because they are too slow, provide very limited real usefulness, or end up being more trouble to use than they are worth. Let me give you a specific example of an app I just tried this week and ended up discarding: TV Shows.
Now, first of all I want to say right off the bat what a really cool app this is. In fact, it won Pebble’s own Pebble Timeline Challenge Week 12 award. No doubt about, it’s amazing what the authors of this app managed to accomplish. They should be very proud of their work in creating this app. In no way should what I’m about to say be construed as bashing or belittling their work in any way.
However, after installing this app on my Pebble Time I deleted it after a couple of days use. Why? It was just too hard to use. The difficulty I had was not due to any limitations in the skills of its authors, but rather limitations of the smartwatch paradigm. In short, there’s no keyboard and the screen is really tiny!
I originally installed this app because I felt it would provide me with a service that would be useful to me – automatically alerting me of the appearance of TV shows that I liked when a new season premiered. Now, in fact, this app actually does much more than simply that, but that was all of the functionality that I really wanted to use. Since television shows, especially those on cable channels, can have season premieres at any time of the year, I wanted an app that let me know when an old favorite of mine started reappearing again.
Well, TV Shows will do that, and have the show’s episodes appear in my Pebble Time’s Timeline, but I found it a royal pain to set up. What the app does is download an extensive list of network and cable channels and about four days of programming information for each one. You are first presented with a very long list of possible channels. You need to first scroll through this list on your Pebble Time and then select the channel of interest to you. You’ll then get a very random appearing list of about the next four days worth of programming for that channel. All of the programs are identified as either reruns or new episodes. After you scroll through all this information, assuming you actually find the show you are interested in tracking, you can then select it. It will then appear in a list of shows to which you have subscribed and as new episodes of the show are scheduled to be broadcast they will automatically appear in your Timeline.
Again, it’s not the fault of the authors of this ingenious piece of software – but what a pain it is to use on a Pebble Time! Tons and tons of scrolling!
I’ve found similar problems with most of the apps I’ve tried on my Pebble Time. Either they perform too slowly, or they are more trouble to set up and use than they are worth to me. There are those few gems that I’ve kept on my Pebble Time, but most apps I try end up being discarded.
So, in my opinion, the availability of apps is one of the least valuable aspects of the Pebble Time. I know this may sound surprising – it certainly surprised me. Having gotten so much value out of smartphone apps I assumed apps would prove to be just as valuable on my smartwatch. Alas, this has not proven to be true.
Personalization
Another very nice feature of the Pebble Time is how easily and inexpensively it can be personalized to your own particular taste. As the picture above shows, my Pebble Time has been personalized to my taste for the color Red through an inexpensive replacement watchband, an inexpensive and easily installed vinyl skin applied to the bezel, and a watch face customized to my color and style preferences. All of this really increases the visual appeal of my Pebble Time to me and was easily accomplished at an extremely low price.
Overall Economy
So, all-in-all, I personally consider the Pebble Time to offer terrific value for its price. It’s a great wristwatch that can show time , date, and weather information, a personal assistant for discreetly notifying me of messages and events, and which can be inexpensively personalized to my own particular tastes. I think that’s not a bad deal at all!