pebble - page 2

Pebble today added three new additions to its popular smartwatch lineup, but they’re not the all-new Android Wear competitors you may have been hoping for. Instead, they’re actually original Pebbles with fancy new paint jobs — and they’re only available for a limited time.

When Pebble’s last iOS update essentially bricked the smart watch, leaving it capable of only (shock horror) telling the time, we knew that something needed to be done in a hurry.

Fortunately Pebble realized that too, since the company has rushed out a new update for its official iOS app — fixing the bug users had complained about which stopped the Pebble from connecting to an iPhone via Bluetooth.

Pebble Notes, a new iPhone app written by a student for students, puts important information on your wrist by sending your notes to your Pebble.

So many of us rely on the notes we’ve created and stored on our smartphones to get us through the day. We use them to make shopping lists for the supermarket, jot down passwords and codes we’ll need later on, and to help us remember other important information — such as answers for exams.

But if we leave our iPhone at home, they’re no good to us — unless you have Pebble Notes.

If you have a Pebble watch, don’t download the Pebble 2.1 update. It could very well brick your smart watch.

So, I finally broke down and bought a Pebble Smart Watch the other day. Just rolled into Best Buy and looked at both the FitBit Force fitness tracker and the Pebble. At just $20 more than the Force, I figured I’d get a fun geeky gadget that would do more than tell the time and count my steps.

What I got for my $150 was a geeky gadget that tells me the time and passes notifications–usually–from my iPhone. And that’s about it, really.

LAS VEGAS — Not to be confused with “Blue Steel” from Zoolander, the Pebble smartwatch brand is branching out into the more premium, classic world of timepieces with Pebble Steel.

Announced today at CES, Pebble’s new watch has the same OS current owners know, but the physical materials have been upgraded from plastic to CNC-machined stainless steel. With a new developer SDK and its own app store on the near horizon, Pebble is leading the smartwatch race. But does it have what it takes to make the smartwatch cool?

The creators of the incredibly popular Pebble smartwatch, which came alive in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign last year, said yesterday that they will be bringing “something special” to this year’s International CES in Las Vegas.

Pebble has rolled out a new update to its hugely popular smartwatch, finally adding a Do Not Disturb mode, multiple alarms, better performance on iOS, and numerous new features and improvements. 

Developers are making some pretty awesome apps for the Pebble smartwatch, but Chrono could be one of the most significant to date — at least for its creator, Rick Ucker.

Ucker built the simple app to propose to his now fiancée, who bought him the $150 smartwatch for his birthday.

If you’ve been meaning to treat yourself to a Pebble smartwatch and you haven’t already blown all of your savings on other Black Friday deals, then you might be interested to know that you can now get $20 off the device for one day only.

Today Pebble announced full support for iOS 7’s Notification Center and low-energy Bluetooth 4.0. In the past, you could only get push notifications from a limited number of iOS apps related to messaging, like Messages and Mail. Now, thanks to iOS 7, all third-party apps can send notifications directly to the Pebble with ease.

Any apps that you’ve enabled banner notifications for in iOS 7 will automatically push updates to the Pebble watch. But that’s not all; Pebble has announced some interesting partners and new tools for developers to make better apps on the platform.

Something big is coming from Pebble, makers of everyone’s favorite e-ink smartwatch. We’re just not entirely sure what it is yet. But we have an idea, and it has to do with Pebble apps developers.

A Google smartwatch powered by Android with built-in Google Now is in the late stages of development, according to people familiar with the matter, who have been speaking to The Wall Street Journal. Google is now in talks with Asian suppliers, which could begin mass producing the device “within months.”

For iOS users, the Pebble Smartwatch has largely existed as an exercise in frustration. While Android users can tie the Pebble Smartwatch into their smartphone’s central nervous system in all kinds of ways, the feature set of the e-ink proto-iWatch has been comparatively worse.

Case in point? Pebble Smartwatch owners who have an iPhone in their pocket couldn’t even get email notifications on the face of their watch. That’s a big deal: getting notified of new emails is seemingly one of the big things you’d want a second screen on your wrist to do. Luckily, that’s being rectified.

Pebble has announced that its popular smartwatch has now surpassed 275,000 pre-orders, and more than 93,000 of them have been shipped since to over 150 countries since January.

The accompanying app for Android and iOS has been downloaded more than a million times, and the company has vowed to continue improving its development platform and give third-party app makers deeper access to the watch’s technology.

I know — if you see another @&#%$ post about a smartphone watch, you’re going to run screaming though the streets tearing out your hair. But bear with me, because this one’s different — and it’s got more tech packed into it than an entire region of Best Buys.

With so much success on Kickstarter, the Pebble smartwatch hasn’t been easy to get hold of if you weren’t an early backer. But you’ll soon be able to pick one up at Best Buy. The retailer just added the device to its website with a $150 price tag, though it doesn’t yet have a release date.

The Pebble smartwatch has just received a new software update that makes a number of improvements to notifications, tweaks the device’s user interface, and fixes numerous bugs. It also adds a new watch face called Simplicity.

The Pebble smartwatch was a runaway success on Kickstarter, and backers have been receiving units in the mail for the past several months. Nearly 70,000 Pebbles have been shipped, and today the watch’s SDK has been updated to allow two-way communication between the Pebble and mobile apps. Pebble is encouraging devs to create “watchapps” that can “send and receive data from a connected smartphone app.”

Apps were previously restricted to the Pebble’s basic functions, but now nearly every facet of the watch can be controlled with (and control) a third-party iOS or Android app.

The RunKeeper apps for Android and iOS have today been updated to add a number of new features, the biggest of which is support for the Pebble smartwatch. Users can now see all kinds of data, such as their pace and the distance they’ve ran, with a quick glance at their wrist while they’re on the go.

As the CEO of Square, and co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey has quickly become one of Silicon Valley’s most admired CEOs. His Square payment system is quickly changing the way consumers buy things, and it’s making businesses and consumers interact on a more personal level.

Square’s goal is to make payments quicker and easier for both business and consumers, so the company has an intense interest in wearable tech. When asked in a recent interview whether he thinks Google Glass is an interesting product, Dorsey answered that he doesn’t see much value in Google Glass right now, but he’s intrigued by devices that wrap around the wrist – like Apple’s rumored iWatch – because they feel more natural.

When asked whether he’s looked into Google Glass, Dorsey had the following to say:

Pebble has updated its Bluetooth smartwatch OS with several notable additions and bug fixes. Battery life has been improved, and push notifications requesting permission to pair appear less frequently on iOS devices. Developers now have access to the SDK for creating custom watchfaces.

Crowd-funding site Kickstarter can be a fantastic way to make your dream Apple accessory, like the Pebble E-Watch, a reality, and now it’s even easier than ever to help fund and keep track of new projects, thanks to the arrival of the official Kickstarter app for iPhone.