Two summers ago, the battery on my watch stopped, so I replaced it, but then found that my watch stopped again within a few days. I gave up on my watch and decided that I didn’t need a watch as I have my phone with me all the time. Fast forward to last April when the Pebble smart watch appeared on Kickstarter. I was getting tired of having to pull my phone out of my pocket, so I became interested in it. The watch had 2 features that interested me; one it tells time and second, it would tell me when the phone rings. I’ve found that when my phone is in my pocket, I miss calls; people don’t call me all that often, but I like to answer the calls. These 2 features sold me on the watch.
When iOS 6 came out, it added a Bluetooth profile called MAP which allows messages from the phone to the watch. This sold me even more on the watch.
So with these 3 features promised, I waited and waited (just like everyone else) for my watch to be delivered. Before receiving it, I read mostly positive reviews, but some negative comments. For me, I just wanted these 3 features and almost didn’t care about anything else. From reading the specs and what people had to say, they indicated that the watch was big. I wasn’t too concerned about this as I actually wore a Fossil Palm OS watch which was huge!
Now that I’ve had the watch a few days, I have mixed feelings about it. It does everything that I wanted it to do in terms of telling the time, letting me know when a text message arrives and when I receive a phone call. I’ve gotten some other notifications and now I want more; it appears that iOS only consistently notifies for messages, but inconsistently with other notifications. Pebble has documented a dance to get other notifications working, but that doesn’t seem like a very good answer. Given that MAP support in iOS 6 is new, maybe Apple will add options to specify exactly which notifications will get passed through to MAP in the Bluetooth settings for the device as seen below.
The watch isn’t the prettiest or cheapest watch on the market, but for the moment, it is fulfilling a need for me.
Pros
- It tells time.
- It lets me know when I get SMS or iMessages.
- It lets me know when the phone rings.
Cons
- It’s big.
- Notifications other than SMS/iMessage/Phone are inconsistent (apparently an iOS 6 bug/issue).
- Drains the iPhone’s battery a bit by having Bluetooth connected all the time.
Summary
If style is a main concern of yours, don’t get this watch. If you want a completely bulletproof product, don’t get this watch. The Pebble team is releasing updates fairly often to work out kinks and I think it will still be awhile before everything is worked out and issues settle down (like getting Apple to figure out what to do with notifications and MAP; there is a jailbroken hack that fixes this, but I’m not jailbreaking my device). The jury is still out of the watch’s battery life, but it doesn’t negatively affect my iPhone such that I’ll probably be buying a Mophie juice pack Helium.
I’ll definitely be wearing the watch while I wait for something better to come along; the rumors of an iWatch are interesting, but don’t sound like a product Apple will bring to market anytime soon.