Pebble - Time Smartwatch 38mm Polycarbonate - Black Silicone

The Pebble Time is my first pebble - I had seen the original around over the last couple years and liked the concept, but didn't like their looks. So when I found out Pebble was coming out with a new version in a smaller, lighter, more ergonomic design (and color screen!) I thought I'd give it a try. So I backed the Kickstarter campaign. What I like most about the Pebble compared to other smartwatches is how you immediately get the sense that it's comfortable with its purpose. Other watches seem to be in their teenage years, still getting their feet under them and trying to find what they're good at. The Pebble has reached maturity; it's had some life experience and found its calling. The base functionality brings notifications and reminders to your wrist, and lets you take simple actions based on them. The third party apps and watchfaces let you build off of that and do all sorts of crazy stuff (like order pizza or play flappy bird), if you're so inclined. While the Pebble works with both iOS and Android, it has quite a bit more functionality when paired with an Android device. The design is a bit... playful. I like my watches to be a bit more classy and refined, so I immediately put a link strap on it (it's compatible with any 22mm strap) and a Gadgetwraps brushed metal skin - the result is quite nice. Battery life is quite good - while not the 7 days advertized, I probably get about 5 days on average. Definitely better than the competitors, though not as good as the original Pebble. The screen is nice - it's still an "e-paper" display, so it reflects light rather than emitting it (although for low-light conditions, a flick of the wrist will turn on a backlight for a few seconds). In addition to the obvious aesthetic benefit of having a color screen, having more colors available means everything looks much less pixelated than the original now that anti-aliasing is an option. In summary, I would definitely recommend this watch to anyone. Whether it's your first smartwatch or you have another one with which you're growing dissatisfied, the Pebble won't disappoint. Feel free to comment if you have any questions - hopefully I'll have an answer.

I have had my pebble time for 3 weeks. It takes a bit of time to learn everything. I am using it with Iphone. First off all Pebble devices get better with time. They are a great company that listens to its customers and always improves on its products and gives updates to the software. I love this watch! It is everything I wanted. It looks and feels great on my wrist. Very sleek. I can see texts and incoming calls on the watch and don't have to dig for my phone. You can get a number of other notifications on the watch too which is great! Just about any notification you get on your phone you will get on the watch. I love being able to control the volume of my music on my phone from the watch and skip forward or backward songs from the watch. I love being able to wear my Bluetooth headphones and control my music and volume from the watch too. There are a lot of apps that you can use with the watch too. Sync with a health tracker apps on your phone, control your thermostat in combo with a phone app, many many other things. I love the ability to switch watchfaces in the blink of an eye. Many customizable faces available on the app and through the web. View weather and temp on the watch face too! Lots of third party watch bands and face skins available to customize it all your own. It takes a 22mm watch band so you can essentially swap it out with anyone you find in a store. Pebble Time with Iphones are missing a few things due to Apples strict software guidelines. As of 6/22/15 Pebble Time for Iphone cannot reply to texts with pre set messages from the watch. It cannot reply to texts with voice replys, and cannot show album artwork on the watch of your music. Pebble is working with Apple to allow these features in the future and update the watches that currently cannot do those things. UNDERSTAND that this is an e-paper display. It looks great in sunlight, outside, or in high light areas and the colors are full. In the shade or at night it can look a little hard to read and colors kinda faded looking. Thats the nature of e-paper displays. If you can understand that you will understand when you see it and won't be disappointed. The ads and pics Pebble takes of the watch are always in high light areas to make it look great. The backlight is good, but doesn't stay on long enough (another update they are working on to increase that time) The watch has a light sensor in it to determine if the back light needs to be on or not when buttons are pushed. The one thing I also thought was poopy is the watch was said to have a 5-7 day battery life. It can but it depends on what apps you are running, the watch face if it has seconds showing, weather, temps, etc. How often you use the back light, scroll through the options etc, etc. I am finding mine to last 4-5 days before I absolutely must charge it again. Something I have no problem doing. It takes about 1.5 hours to charge from a 10% battery. No biggie to me expecially if I charge at night. Overall if you can get past its quirks and feature lacks due to Apples rules at this time it is a fantastic watch! I am very happy with mine.

I own the Pebble, and now the Pebble Time through Kickstarter for about two weeks. I love it, use it for MapMyRun walking daily with the ability to voice reply (text conversion) to Messenger and texts while I am out. I switch music and monitor email, too. All with my phone in my pocket. The apps and watchfaces are plentiful and growing daily. Time Line keeps my calendar and appointments available with reminders. Plus I have gone 7 days on a charge, and that is while still tinkering and playing more so than I will be as I get everything set up (like one might expect), so more than a week will be my normal time between charges. Recharging takes less than two hours. It is waterproof! So I don't worry about sweat and rain, or even swimming with it on. There are more features than I will ever need, or use, so it is perfect for me. I have dressed it up with a bezel cover and clear lens protector, plus new watch band to match. And I can change it as I desire with alternate bezel skins since they peel off and watch bands that attach with standard 22mm pins (the installed band has a quick disconnect pin, too). The watchface color choices also can be set to match your bezel and band colors, too. I use my PebbleTime with an android phone, but it also works with iphones. It is light weight, and hardly noticeable to wear. The e-paper display stays on all the time, but a back light will show automatically in darker conditions to provide adequate viewing with a wrist flip or by installing the Backlight app like I have done and use. See my blog, updated daily at http://pebbleusers.blogspot.com/ for pictures and more details! I have no connection with Pebble other than as a customer and wearer of the watch, but I love it and the excellent customer support they provide. Which, for me, is a big plus! If there are ever problems you can count on them to be there for you. I look forward to the future smart watch bands, too. These devices will expand the functionality of the Pebble Time and provide future needs and purpose. News is forthcoming every day and this is what makes Pebble an exciting company and excellent watch choice.

The Pebble Time: My experience with the Pebble Time has been wonderful to date. I do have to say that Pebble has certainly came out with a decent smartwatch that fits for a lot of different people. I, for one, greatly enjoyed the experience of using this device. I will be going through my experiences with this device over a few categories. I will be reviewing the health aspects, the smart functionality, the app on the iOS, and the Pebble’s own OS. The build quality is quite decent for one. It does not feel that cheap. The band for the watch can be switched out with bands from Pebble and third party bands. This is a nice feature to dress up or dress down the watch to fit the occasion. The bezel of the watch is one of its weaker points. It can be scratched easily to reveal the steel or aluminum underneath. Other than that, the device has a nice feel around the wrist. One of the strong points of this build is the fact that it is water resistant and water proof down to thirty meters. This means that you can easily go swimming with it, take a shower with it, even go shallow diving with it, as long as the seal stays good. A VERY strong suggestion is to not press the buttons while submerged. Overall I generally liked the build quality and the feel of the watch, it was not too heavy of a feel, and the tactile buttons on the sides of the device feel solid. There is a nice small mic that is decent for what it is used for. I will go into the mic later when I talk about the OS. The battery life is not as advertised, but it is quite close. I was a decent user and got anywhere between four to five days instead of the seven days claimed. This is not a problem for me at all because the watch worked flawlessly even at a ten percent that I did have it at for battery testing. The screen is a nice full color e-ink/paper display. The viewing angles can be a bit annoying at times but the backlight works well in most situations. The resolution is good, just not great, but I can’t complain as it works well in most situations. The screen guard can pick up fingerprints easily. There is no touch capabilities. Health: The health tracking of the Pebble Time, or the Pebble OS, is rather basic at best. It does a fairly good job in tracking your steps, calories, distance, and active time. It does something that is new for me. It shows what might be typical for your day for steps at the current time block. I find this actually quite informative and motivating. The typical step count is taking from your past week. I find this actually quite accurate and find this a motivating force. The Sleep tracking of the Pebble Health and the Pebble time is actually decent for what it is. I find it pretty accurate for the most part. One of the biggest issues that I have though is something that I see in other fitness trackers: The ability to edit your sleep start and end times. I found this a rather annoying issue when on one of my days, I did not go to sleep until much later, but the fact that I napped, woke up, then went to sleep regularly, it tracked the nap and the wake up period as part of my regular sleep. I have seen the Garmin sleep tracking do that, but I was able to fix the issue by editing the sleep time. Smartwatch functionality and the OS: I do have to say that I really like the smart features of the Pebble Time OS. This has been an enjoyable time with it due to the fact that I have been able to get my notices through the watch. I also have the ability to go through the past notices, and go through my calendar events that I might have put in, such as of writing this a few days after June 6th, I have put in a calendar event for that day for the obvious reasons that it is the mark for D-Day, and also the mark for a string of battles on the Pacific front in 1942. Even though I will rarely, if ever, forget the date, I still have it on the calendar and it came up as a note in the morning. From that, I do want to talk about the Timeline feature. This feature is actually decent at best. It gives you a timeline of your day and you can add to it through the calendar or through voice to timeline apps. This timeline feature is decent, but it has a limited use. It only lists a total of five days, two days in the past, the current day, and two days in the future. Other than the limitation, the timeline feature is good. There is a wide variety of apps available on the Pebble App store/list. This service is powered by KiezlePay. There is a wonderful variety by third party app designers and Pebble themselves. The app support is quite wonderful. There are also big names out there that have built apps for the Pebble App ‘marketplace’ such as Pandora, Uber, Runkeeper, Misfit, and others. I found out that they can work with companion apps on the phone, such as Uber, Pandora, and Runkeeper. They can work with the respective apps on the phone. I used the Pandora watch app and the Pandora app nearly flawlessly. One of the minor issues that I have with this, as with the Garmin devices, is that the Pebble App on the phone needs to stay open in the background. If you close the app, you might have some issues with other apps that require a connection such as Pandora. This is a small issue in my opinion besides the fact that it can use your battery even with BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). There is a nice range of customization of the watch face through the app/watch face lookup. I looked through a lot of watch faces offered by Pebble and Third-Party developers and I am pleased with the selection as well as the options that are for a good portion of your faces. You can easily customize it to the color options you want and take full use of it. To change the settings of the watch, there is a settings app for the watch within the watch and you can change all settings of the watch through it. There is very little to no settings that you can change through the app on the phone. This, I find, is quite nice. It frees you from using the phone to fix the settings on the watch. This gives the watch more versatility to use without tying it to the phone for basic settings. The only setting that you cannot change easily through the watch is the watch face settings, that is done through the phone as there is at times, a lot of settings to change that would be cumbersome and unwieldy on the watch itself. The Phone App: The phone app is rather intuitive to use. I found it quite easy to use. With the Health portion, you can easily go through the past day, week, moth, and year. This goes the same with sleep. You can review your steps and sleep through it. This is also where you get your watch faces and apps for the watch. That menu section works very intuitive as well. The app also works as a store for the website as well. The app ties the watch to the phone and that is about it. The main thing about the app is that you can change the watch face and the settings for it through the app. That is the main tie for the app and the watch. Overview: Overall this is a very decent smart watch. I have been pleased with it throughout me review time. If I had the choice between the Garmin VivoSmart HR and the Pebble Time, I would choose the Pebble Time over the Garmin VivoSmart even with the issues that I have with the Pebble Time. The reason why is that the Pebble Time is a better Smartwatch and that is what I have been looking for overall. This watch has been what I was looking for if the Blocks has not come out or was not announced. Some of those issues that I have with the Pebble Time can easily be fixed with later updates to the firmware and software. I might suggest the ability to change the sleep times to Pebble after this review so they can possibly fix it. There might be a third party app that would allow you to do it, but I did not look that hard for that app. On the other hand, I would recommend the Pebble Time as a fallback device if you cannot afford the bigger name devices.

TL;DR/Overall impression: Of all the smart/fitness watches I tried, I liked the pebble time the best. It is a watch first, and smart/fitness gadget later. Love the battery life, comfortable feel, always on big screen [compared to fitbits/band, notifications and customizable faces. I dont have an iWatch - way too expensive for a watch IMHO. Areas of improvement - backlight, color brightness Detailed impressions: Watch: + The relatively big size with a huge range of customizable faces is a huge plus over fitbits and ms band. + Has a natural feel on my wrist - doesnt feel plasticky like fitbits or heavy like the band + Awesome battery life - goes without recharging for >3.5 days [manufacturer claims 7 days, havent validated that] + Doesnt turn off unlike the band/fitbit/apple watch - screen is always on + Screen works great outside/ in the sun - Colors appear washed-out in low light - nowhere close to the brilliance of the iWatch or even the band - Backlight is pretty muted - I have progressive glasses, and I find small fonts on the screen hard to make out in low light, even w/ backlight. No such issues in bright light Overall - a far better value for money IMHO as a watch over a band/fitbit/iWatch *Smart*watch: Wasnt quite sure what to expect since I wasnt going to reply to emails on such a small screen - so had no expectations. + It shows notifications from my iPhone + It can control (play/pause/skip) the iPhone music app as well some music/radio apps (the last app that played sound on my phone) like Pandora/NPR radio. Thought this would be useless since I am not a huge music/radio person - however, finding it pretty convenient to play/pause NPR on my phone docked to the sound system + Lots of apps in the pebble app store - mostly free + App store is pretty well organized and easy to use - Bewildered by most of the available apps. haven't yet figured out which ones are useful - App descriptions are pretty sparse - especially the free apps. Can't complain when folks donate their apps for free :) However, cant make up my mind whether I need an app or not Fitness: - With the misfit app on the iphone and the pebble, works like a basic fitbit - gives steps, calories, sleep patterns. Does not have a heart rate monitor and the misfit app does not calculate stairs climbed. There might be other apps that do - just havent found them yet.

When my old Timex broke down, I bought a Pebble Steel on clearance as a replacement. I have had it for 6 months now and have found it to be very useful. So much so, that for Christmas I bought Pebble Times for my father, mother-in-law and father-in-law. I bought all three for less than the price of an Apple Watch. The best things about the Pebbles are: 1. They are very good at being a watch. You can get a watch face that is easy to read. It's always on, and the backlight is good. 2. The battery lasts long enough that it's not annoying. 5-7 days on a charge is doable. 3. The notifications are excellent. Your wrist is very sensitive compared to other places where you might carry a phone. I miss fewer meetings, calls and texts compared to just carrying a phone. 4. Surprisingly, the vibrating alarm is one of the most useful features. It's native to the watch, and not dependent on the phone. It's darned near impossible to sleep through, it doesn't wake my wife like my other alarms did, and it easily lets me set different weekday, weekend and individual alarms. 5. There are good watch faces that show the weather. I have found this to be more convenient than checking my phone, unless I need detailed information. 6. My phone battery lasts significantly longer. I don't have to power up the screen on the phone nearly as much. 7. Golf app. I was able to download a golf app. The watch lets you see yardages easily and discreetly. 8. The only real downside I see is that the menus can be hard to read as you become more nearsighted. I do not use the step counter, or the sleep function. I can't wear any watch when I play soccer, which is where most of my cardio comes from, and I find sleep tracking to be of dubious use. I do not miss a heart rate monitor, because I have not seen one that is very accurate during excercise. I track my heart rate taking my pulse while looking at my pebble with a second hand face.

Like any other item on the market the best approach is to believe part of what everyone says. The Pebble Time is a stylish and versatile wrist watch and is a vast improvement over the original Pebble, but does suffer (in my opinion) from having a smaller display, even though it is color e-paper. Older geeks like me still need reading glasses to read the display. That being said, I'm still enjoying many of the things it can do. I really haven't scratched the surface on all the apps that are available but, then again, I do have a life. I have put some of the apps and faces to work and I'm very happy with some (but not all) of them so far. On battery life - you will be able to go a solid 4 days without charging with average notification use (it does use a low power utility to keep bluetooth attachment to your phone, but it is still a power draw. You may also notice a slight to moderate decrease in battery life on your iPhone due to being constantly synced with your watch.). If you buy this watch expecting a week without charging then all you are doing with it is using it to tell time in daylight. After about 4 days of wearing I had concerns about possibly running out of power while out and not having a watch. It uses a device-specific charging cord (not a lightning or micro usb) and is not readily available as a timepiece while charging, so these facts may play into when to charge for you. While this may seem like "sour grapes" I do actually prefer buttons over a touchscreen. I could see the touchscreen being a distraction with potential unintended activations. Not an issue with the buttons - large enough and easy to use. All in all I'm happy with the Pebble Time. Give me a little larger display and this becomes a 5 star review.

I've owned an original model of the Pebble for about a year and a half, and really found it useful and enjoyable. I was thrilled when they offered the upgraded OS for free to users of old equipment. They would have been excused for saying it wasn't backward compatible, but they stated that they wanted to show their appreciation for the customers who supported them in the early days, so the timeline feature was made available to everybody. As much as I enjoyed the original configuration, the timeline feature took the device way over the top. I receive lots of emails, texts, and other notifications throughout the day. Being able to see them on my wrist is incredibly valuable for me. Being able to scroll through upcoming appointments, sunrise and sunset, weather, and other stuff is insanely useful. And being able to respond to texts, emails, and phone messages right from the watch is a huge bonus. It's nice to be able to check and respond to incoming messages during business meetings without the distraction of checking my phone. So, while my original Pebble was entirely satisfactory, I was lured by the color and the microphone offered by the Pebble Time. Plus, I wanted to show my support for a company that innovates their products and shows appreciation for their customers. My son has been talking about getting a Pebble, so I gave him my old one after buying a new one. Everybody's happy! I do agree that the colors could be more vibrant, but I knew that coming in. I just use customizable watch faces that allow me to pick colors that stand out. A lot of people say that the Pebble looks like a toy, but I actually like the way it looks - maybe it's a geek-chic thing or just different strokes for different folks, but I actually prefer it to the competition. (Not really a fan of the Steel or Round models, though.) And I actually like the button-oriented approach rather than a touch screen. I have fairly big fingers and can't see the practicality of using them to work with a tiny screen. Add to that the always-on nature of the Pebble and its long battery life and I'm happy to stick with the brand for the foreseeable future. For anybody that wants great functionality at a reasonable price, this is the way to go.