So this review of the Apple Watch ends with the reviewer saying that it’s useful for him “to track my fitness and check the time and important notifications from the apps I care about most.” Turns out that’s the exact use case for me and the Pebble. I check the time on it. I have step counting and sleep tracking via Misfit – they don’t really integrate well with Apple Health but I don’t actually use Apple Health, and the Misfit watch app works much better than Morpheuz as a standalone tracker. Notifications to the arm without pulling out the phone are also handy, to the point where I’m actively considering changing my two-factor authentication at work to SMS rather than Duo Mobile because then I’d have two-factor authentication ON MY ARM.
Ultimately, this is where smartwatches will become a thing: you just have to get them into enough people’s hands to figure out what the use case is. Apple threw a bunch of stuff at the wall – things like sending your heartbeat or tiny sketches smacks of Samsung’s feature-itis for its own sake – but their user base is big enough that enough people will roll the dice, and they can iterate from there for the second generation. As for me, I do have one customization that I wouldn’t have had on an Apple Watch: my primary watch face during the day tells time with Swatch Beats, which is a nice throwback to 1999 and a memento mori of booms past.
$80 to inoculate against a $400 purchase turns out to have been money well spent, even if I do wish I could have copped the gray one instead. But this one also works just as well with the Moto X, which is handy (in fact it works slightly better, as I can pick and choose apps to notify me and reply with emoji to certain forms of messaging…not completely useless, which sounds like damning with faint praise but isn’t). And in the end…it’s a watch. You don’t stare at a watch for hours on end, you look at it for a specific piece of information (like day or date, for instance). Viewed in that light, the Pebble is about dead solid perfect for what I need, and kind of an inspiring notion: a small company that had an idea and brought it to market without just selling out to Apple or Google or Microsoft, and with crowdfunding no less. Well done. Would that more of this industry was like that.