The original Pebble Watch launched on Kickstarter about 3 years ago, and after selling over 1 million watches, the company is back on Kickstarter with Pebble Time, a thinner version of the watch with an always-on color e-Paper display, a new “timeline” user interface, a microphone for voice recognition, and 7 days of battery life.
The complete Pebble Time specifications are not available, but the company still listed some key features:
- MCU – Cortex M4
- Always-on, daylight readable 64 colors e-Paper display with backlight (no touchscreen)
- Six-axis gyrosope
- Microphone for dictation
- 3x tactile buttons
- Bluetooth for connectivity with mobile devices
- Up to 7 day battery life
- Compatible with any standard 22mm watch band
- Water resistant and durable
- Silent vibrating alarms
- Language and international character support (Chinese coming soon)
The new Timeline interface focuses on past, present and future events such as basketball score, current steps, and weather forecast, and the three buttons are used for this purpose. The watch can pair via Bluetooth to devices running iOS 8 or greater and Android 4.0+ phones and tablets.
SDK and tools will also be available for the Pebble Time, built on the work done forthe original Pebble watch with some new and upcoming features:
- C SDK for apps and watchfaces running natively on the watch,
- Online development environment: www.cloudpebble.net
- New emulator that can be used on CloudPebble or locally
- APIs for accelerometer, compass, bluetooth messaging, background tasks, GPS and HTTP request, etc
- (NEW) Color APIs to support the 64 colors of the new Pebble Time screen
- (NEW) Support for PNG and APNG
- (NEW) Timeline APIs to push information from the web into the user’s timeline (no watch or phone apps required)
- (NEW) UI framework to create beautiful applications that take advantage of color and animations
- (Later in 2015) Voice to text APIs: add voice recognition to your apps
- (Later in 2015) Smart accessory port for hardware hackers.
- (Later in 2015) Bluetooth Low Energy API. Use Pebble to control BLE-enabled objects.
The new Pebble Time has already beaten a few Kickstarter records raising $500,000 in 17 minutes, $1 million in 49 minutes, and the pledges now amount to over 7.3 million dollars with 30 days to go. The company went for a massive 30,000 early bird rewards for the watch, and it’s still available for $179 since “only” around 20,000 watches went so far, after which you’d have to pledge $199. Price includes shipping worldwide, and delivery is scheduled for May 2015.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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You’d think they made enough money the first time not to need kickstarter as a marketing tool/negative-interest loan again.
Wonder if we’ll get tablets or phones with colour e-ink. LCD’s are just so awful in daylight.
Microphone looks to be only for dictation, not for speech recognition or voice control.
Damn! Up to 10-million dollars on Kickstarter already!
@Harley
You’re right, but since they can do dictation, speech recognition works, and a voice to text API is coming later in 2015, so apps will also be able to handle voice commands.
Pebble SDK 3.0 preview released – http://developer.getpebble.com/sdk/whats-new/
Close to $15 million now, and they’ve added the Pebble Time Steel for $250, as well as smartstraps
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-time-awesome-smartwatch-no-compromises/posts/1151421
The campaign is now finished, and they’ve raised a massive $20,338,986 from over 70,000 backers.