This is Lloydie being all comfy and snoozy and wondering why I keep pointing my phone at her. Made with Giffer on my iPhone which is a pretty nifty little app for making animated gifs.

And here’s a non-animated picture of her doing an impression of Bruce Forsyth, just because it made me chuckle.
And that’s it – just gratuitous cockatiel photography! I did warn you in the title..

After more than a week of Pebble ownership it’s definitely as awesome as I hoped it would be pending the inclusion of further apps and watch-faces.  Having already covered the basics of that initial moment of acquiring the watch and first use (I should note that the Pebble support team did respond to my premature pleas of anguish via email and had found the blog post to ascertain that I was in fact okay and happy with my Pebble).

On battery life – mine’s been happily running non-stop since I charged it overnight from Sunday to Monday.  So that’s almost a full week of use, I did have a strange screen issue where the display had become scrambled in the middle of the week.  I wondered if that might be a flat battery, but it wasn’t as I shut down and switched on the watch and it’s been normal ever since.  So that’s pretty impressive stuff in my book!

Having your phone constantly connected via Bluetooth inevitable rinses the battery more than it would if you didn’t (well, duh!).  Generally I have my phone plugged in in the car as part of my music/navigation set up anyway, and will often have it plugged in at work or at home.  If you’re going to be out and about for extended periods without the opportunity to charge then you are going to struggle (as, in fairness, you would without the Pebble connection for many Smartphones).

It’s easy enough just to pop Bluetooth off on your phone for a spell, your Pebble will retain the time quite happily – obviously you will miss out on notifications or music control but you will have a functioning timepiece which is of course the primary function.  With festival season upon us too it’s good to know it will comfortable go a long weekend on a single charge, indeed, if you disabled Bluetooth on the watch too in the settings I’m assuming you’d extend the battery life a bit on the watch too.

91 Dub watch face – retro-tastic.

I’ve definitely preferred the text-based watch faces and the Wordsquare one I chose for my previous post wins, I also rather like this one – called ’91 Dub’ it has a deliciously retro vibe that reminds me of the first watches I regularly encountered at school.  The drawback of the word-based faces is the lack of accuracy as it rounds time to five minutes (fine for day to day, less so if you’re timing a pizza cooking in the oven!).  That’s where switchability of watch faces is rather useful.

On notifications, texts and iMessages worked right away for me, subsequently tweaking my notification settings on my iPhone seems to have also enabled email notifications on my Pebble too.  In both cases the sender, subject (for emails) and body text is displayed on the screen and is scrollable.  It’s understandably truncated for larger messages.  I’m not sure how I managed to activate email notifications, but my primary account has banners enabled on my phone which seems to translate through to the watch.

Other notifying apps like Facebook or Twitter don’t pass through to the watch (which is probably a good thing considering frequency!).  In future firmware updates it would be nice to be able to choose which notifications to receive on the watch itself, with a list of those available selectable through the settings menu.  It’s a nice-to-have really though rather than a deal breaker – but at the moment it seems you have an all-or-nothing option (the VIP option in iPhones is good here – you could disable notifications for all emails except those you deem important).

Missed call!

Considering the primary function of a mobile phone is, well, a phone I receive a tragically small number of calls.  In an age where text-based communication seems to be preferred (I prefer it too, admittedly) – the only calls I’ve had have mostly been from blocked numbers, the one I received from a contact in my address book displayed the number initially then resolved the name of the contact from my phone, as well as the type of number I’d classified in my contacts, and remains as a flag if you miss the call.

Once firmware tweaks kick in (a battery life status option somewhere would be useful – although I’m now comfortable that I could have a weekly charge cycle) and additional apps and watch-faces start to filter through and the Smartphone app evolves to cope with this extra functionality then the watch could continue to throw in a few new surprises, but as it stands it’s a robust bit of kit both in terms of hardware and software and well worth the money and wait for it.

My colleague Ade picked his up last week too so I will be comparing notes with him when he’s back in the office next week, but he’s certainly not sent me loads of messages asking for support so I’m going to assume he’s been having a similarly happy time with his Pebble!

After almost a year since I first backed the Kickstarter campaign, I finally have my Pebble watch on my wrist.  It’s been a long wait, and it’s worth it, just about!

It was the middle of March when I got the long-awaited “Confirm your address, please” email, at the end of March came the shipping notification – although being on a slow boat from Singapore gave a lead time of two weeks – despite getting a tracking code that the receiving Royal Mail system understood, it would only give me information upon delivery – which is, well, kinda useless!

Of course, I checked it anyway and discovered a delivery attempt had indeed been made – it was small enough to fit through the letter box, but it required a signature and – annoyingly – a customs payment plus associated Royal Mail fleecery totalling a smidge over £25.  So it was off to the collection office armed with cash to retrieve my prize.

I resisted the urge to open it immediately, instead I took it to work and did so at my desk.  The box is neat, but minimalistic – there’s a URL to visit, a watch and a charge cable – nothing else, no instructions or anything else.  Emblazoned on the back panel is ‘Kickstarter Edition’ along with the serial number to indicate it was one of the original batch thanks to the Kickstarter campaign.

I had assumed it would come with some charge in it as seems to be normal for devices these days, but it wouldn’t power on (achieved by pressing any button for 2 seconds).  A quick google search didn’t find any other users reporting similar issues, so naturally tried pressing the buttons for longer to no avail.

A little worried, plugged it into the USB port on my PC at work and opted to let it get some juice.  Still no response to the buttons, oh no – I’ve got a duff!  A little panicked I fired off a support email via the Pebble website and sent them a Tweet to ask for advice – their overwhelmed status is confirmed because as I type I’ve had no response to either of them!

Sure enough, around half an hour later – still connected to the charger – the watch had indeed powered up and was asking to be paired with something!  The process to connect to my iPhone 5 was absolutely fine, I enabled notifications in the iPhone’s bluetooth profile for the Pebble, and duly fired open the Pebble app to connect and copy some watch faces over, to be immediately asked to update the Pebble’s firmware to the latest version which went without a hitch.

The watch has three faces by default – an analog face, a simplistic digital one and ‘fuzzy time’ which gives you the time in ‘language’ rather than numbers, for example – if it’s 9:53am it will say “Five to ten” – quite nifty.  My favourite watch face is ‘Wordsquare’ which operates on a similar principle to fuzzy time, but does it by highlighting the words to give you the easy-read version of the time.  Not one for people who crave precision.

As well as telling the time in a myriad of funky ways, the watch also picks up your phone’s music that is currently playing, it will display id3 tag info in its’ music app and enable you play/pause or skip backward or forward through whatever playlist/album you have playing.  Fairly rudimentary, but clever nonetheless – potentially useful for times when your phone might be stowed in a bag and you want to skip a track or stop your music playing or as a remote control when using a docking speaker system.

Perhaps the most exciting feature is the coupling with your phone’s principal functions – ie, phone calls and text messaging.  If a call is received it is displayed on the watch with the caller id and the option to either answer or hang up, whereas text messages are displayed along with sender’s name on the watch itself.  Alerts are signalled via a fairly robust vibration from the watch unit, it doesn’t make any sounds.

Currently the only other function is an alarm which also is restricted to vibrations (unless you opt to download the game ‘Snake’ from the Pebble app on your phone! The novelty of this wore off quite quickly for me though, despite loving the game on my old Nokia phones!)  In the future there should be further applications which you can deploy via the Smartphone app you use to connect to the watch, so it could be pretty exciting.

As for the watch itself, the build quality looks solid and well constructed – it is, by definition, plasticky and the buttons a bit clunky but it works nicely and I’m pleased with the finish.  The strap is sturdy, comfortable and has a nice rubberised finish which is better than I was expecting.

Whilst charging I didn’t find a means of determining how full the battery is, which seems a bit daft.  I’ve not had it long enough to accurately judge battery life – only having one charging lead could be a challenge, they are bespoke designs held to the watch by magnets to enable the water resistant nature of the Pebble to remain intact – a nifty design but of course unique and as such if you wanted one for work, home, car etc then you’ll need to buy them from Pebble.

All in all, worth the wait – clearly Pebble was a victim of its’ own success and the way the manufacturing, shipping and communications has been conducted is symptomatic of a small company taking on a gigantic task and – frankly – struggling a bit.  But it’s resulted in a product to be proud of, which I’m sure will probably be amongst the pioneers in a slew of ‘smart’ wearable technology which is quite exciting for a geek like me.

Recommended if you’re not in a hurry to get your hands on one – those Kickstarter backers who opted for anything other than a black watch are still waiting for theirs to arrive, so heaven only knows how long it will take them to fulfill their pre-orders they’re now taking over on their website.