Subjective sensations after a month of using Pebble Watch

Part one. Lyrical

Are SmartWatch needed at all? I have a laptop for working in the office, an iPad for surfing and working on the go, a Kindle for reading and an iPhone for music, podcasts, calls, etc., FitBit as a fitness tracker. Why do I need another gadget with incomprehensible functionality? What can he give me something that he can not give me, for example, the iPhone?

The second question - if you buy a Smart Watch, which ones? Do I need a color screen? Do I need a heart rate monitor? Do I need the ability to read messages or is it enough just a notification icon, and can the message itself be read on the phone?



Having studied all the offers on the market and looking at different models from friends, I came to a certain understanding of my needs:

• the ability to control music played on the phone (switching tracks, volume, play / stop)
• the ability to display a wide variety of notifications so that you do not have to constantly pull out the phone (SMS, PushOver, phone calls, etc.). This is especially true for the winter, when the smart is somewhere deep in the bowels of clothing.
• a fitness tracker with step counting so that you do not have to carry / charge two devices (I had FitBit), and the plus is very convenient that you can just quickly glance at your hand to understand how many stops you need to go through to meet the norm.
• alarm clock
• the calendar
• the weather on the street at the moment, and especially the temperature and the presence of rain within the next 3-4 hours
• exchange rates from the Moscow exchange (related to the type of activity, you need to monitor the state of the currency market at some points in order to quickly change the internal sales rate)
• more or less presentable appearance (glass, metal)
• at least three days on a single battery
• the presence of an open SDK for self-development of applications. Ideally, to use this SDK you do not need to study the 500-page documentation.

What is absolutely drumming for me:

• ability to watch video
• ability to type messages
• high resolution color screen
• the possibility of drawing hearts and transmitting my heart rate to the second half (hello Apple Watch)
• integrated camera

Then a couple of controversial points. I'll start from afar. Look at the smartphone or tablet lying on the table. What do you see after three minutes of not using it? That's right - you see nothing. The screen fades and turns black without displaying any information. Why this is done is understandable: so that the battery lasts at least a day. Now the YotaPhone has appeared on the market with a second screen on electronic ink and I think this is really cool. Not according to the technological component, that someone sawed the second screen into a smartphone, namely by user expirience. You do not need to interact with the device to receive information.

In watches, this is doubly important. How does a watch with a regular color screen work? Either you need to knock on them, or press a button, or turn your hand at a certain angle.

Firstly, it bothers very quickly, the concept of “look at the clock” disappears, the sense of time goes away. The second point - everyone sees when you look at the watch, because the watch lights up quite brightly at the moment of interaction with them. In some cases, such as in meetings, this will be a sign of bad taste. The third moment - it annoys me: I raised my hand to lean on the door jamb - the clock flashed off, I slightly moved my hand - the clock flashed out.

Part two. Problem of choice

In fact, there was practically no problem of choice. The only watches that were and are on the market at this time that satisfy my needs were the Pebble Watch. There was some doubt about the appropriateness of the purchase, since not one observer in the reviews showed particular admiration: well, yes ... you can wear it ... but it seems to be a useless toy.



Well, a toy, so a toy, I thought. Adult uncles also sometimes want to have fun. As a result, exchanging 9,000 rubles. I got a pebble watch steel with a conditionally leather black strap and charging in addition to the box with the watch.

I agree with many reviews - the strap could be made better, it does not look presentable. The problem is complicated by the non-standard fastening of the trident-shaped strap, so you won’t be able to go and change it to the nearest watch store. I tried to cut a regular 22 mm wide strap, but ended up throwing it into the bin. Perhaps the hands are growing out of the wrong place.

As a result, a strap on Etsy.com made of genuine leather was ordered . The watch on the hand began to look completely different. You can easily put on a jacket or suit, but it also looks pretty good with jeans.



If the appearance of the watch is not so important to you, you can buy ordinary pebble, which are delivered in a plastic case and have exactly the same technical stuffing as pebble steel

Part three. Technical

Briefly go over the main points of the start of using the watch. Unfortunately, the watch is not officially delivered to Russia and does not support the Russian language “out of the box”. Instead of Russian letters in messages, phone calls, etc. squares are shown. The problem is solved by creating custom firmware on pebblebits.com . Plus, this custom firmware slightly modifies the native application for managing the music and makes a couple of improvements.

You need to install a proprietary application on your smartphone. After that, you have your own pebble app store, in which you can install applications on your watch, as well as the opportunity to pick up a developer account (I'll tell you why I need it later).

All this has already been described a hundred times in various reviews, so I will not dwell on this.

Part Four Collective

There are three types of applications in watches: watchapp, watchface and applications working in the background. Watchapp and watchface is essentially the same application and differs only in that the watchface is pushed into a separate menu item and deprived of the ability to listen to events from the buttons. According to the idea of ​​the authors, watchface is like dials that are always on and display information, and watchapp is an application that interacts with the user through buttons and is launched occasionally to perform a specific function (for example, music control). The application working in the background does not manifest itself in any way, but simply collects and processes any data either from the clock sensors (for example, accelerometer indicators for fitness applications).

On the Internet you can find a bunch of articles like the 25 best applications for Pebble that describe the potential features of the watch, right up to the launch of Doom (http://forums.getpebble.com/discussion/5113/watch-face-sdk-2-0-doom- 2-1-available-now). For me, such reviews are of dubious value, so I will describe the applications used not from the point of view of technical capabilities (look, cool, a three-dimensional ball to spin), but from the point of view of satisfying my needs, which I described above.

The choice of the dial. Pebble comes with three pre-installed watchface none of which I didn't like. For me, the idea of ​​trying to play an analog dial with arrows on Pebble is doubtful. Therefore, having tried several options, I settled on YWeather .



What this watchface can do:

• showing time, date, day of the week
• display of local temperature on the street (determined by GPS), weather conditions (rain, snow, overcast, clear), wind strength and direction
• sunrise and sunset times (relevant for travel planning)
• weather forecast for the next 3 days
• "Beating" by vibration of every hour. With seeming simplicity - for me it is a killer feature. You have a sense of time. You don’t have the feeling “wow, the day passed, but I didn’t notice”. We can say that every hour you bring a certain intermediate result and understand: whether you are doing business or doing nonsense. In general, words do not explain - you need to try.

Music - surprisingly, I practically do not use it. I somehow don’t need to watch which track is playing, but I can also switch tracks and adjust the volume with a Bluetooth headset. The only thing is convenient when you use wired headphones that are connected to a phone hidden somewhere in the bowels of clothing.

Alarm clock - nowhere easier - set the time - they begin to vibrate at this time. In principle, it’s convenient when you need to put yourself some kind of reminder. I don’t use it for morning awakening, since it is inconvenient to sleep with the clock on my hand, and they don’t have any dynamics at all - just vibration. It is possible to create several alarms, but there is no way to schedule alarms by day of the week.

Notifications- A standard application, where all SMSs from the phone are poured, notifications, etc. It is configured very flexibly on the phone. In fact, you just need to specify a certain type of notification on the phone and it will automatically come to Pebble. There is one inconvenience - you can adjust the font size in the application, but the problem is that with a small font you need to look pretty closely at the screen - you don’t particularly read in the car or on the go. And with a large font, extremely little information is placed on the screen and you have to scroll up and down with the buttons - also on the go is not very convenient.

You can’t reply to a message, even with prepared phrases (applies only to iPhone, on Android it seems you can play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.wearable.app ).

With an incoming call, the name of the person from the address book or the number of the caller is displayed. The buttons can answer or reject the call. During a call, the call duration is shown. In general, it’s quite convenient when you are driving in a car, and the phone is “somewhere”.

Misfit - fitness tracker + sleep monitor in one bottle. It has several screens with statistics and allows you to synchronize with the proprietary application on the iPhone. I only use step counting throughout the day. All this fitness socialism - choose a partner and compete with him who takes the most steps - somehow does not turn me on, but acquaintances say that this stimulates them to fitness exploits.



Pebble-Cal is a regular calendar. Allows buttons to drive back and forth months.



RucurrencyI did not find any Russian currency, so I wrote my own RuCurrency application, which anyone can install for themselves from the Pebble App Store. The application displays the current exchange rates of currencies from the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange, updating the information every 20 minutes.
https://apps.getpebble.com/applications/5480c6b5d581a106f200006d

Perhaps later, in an article on Habr, I will describe my experience in creating this simple application.

Part Five About future...

At the moment, watch manufacturers are trying to find the place of SmartWatch in the general ecosystem of devices. While most manufacturers perceive the watch as a mini-smartphone with a strap, which is fastened on the hand.

But the watch has a number of features not available to the smartphone:

1. The watch is in contact with your hand and skin. What does this mean? This means that the watch can interact with you through vibration, tapping, tingling, rotational movements, etc. A clock through these interactions can tell you a ton of information by analogy with the alphabet for the blind .

A clock can give you a certain [limited] amount of information not through the screen, but through tactile sensations.

2. The watch is always in sight. You do not need to climb into their pocket, press a button to turn on the screen. They should always be included. This is an information space for rapidly changing information.

It is the understanding by manufacturers of the special functionality of the watch and the disclosure of this potential that will make the watch the indispensable gadget that will answer in the affirmative to the question “Do SmartWatch really need?”