14 DAY TRIAL // As far as smartwatches go, Samsung has done its best to make sure that the Galaxy Gear is the most heavily advertised, but nothing can take away the fact that the real forerunner was the Pebble. The Pebble that is now reaching Amazon.
That's actually the piece of news today: the Pebble smartwatch is reaching Amazon, where it will be priced at $149 / €149. Well, the exact price tag is of $148.99 / €148.99, or €109.46.
Smartwatches might be the new fad for a while. Since smartphones, tablets and even high-tech eyewear have lost their novelty, watches are taking their turn.
Pebble is just, shall we say, the one where everything started. Electronic watches of various types were made before of course, but none with the level of sophistication as this.
After all, to be a smartwatch, a watch actually needs an operating system not unlike that of a smartphone, and the Pebble definitely has that.
The OS is based on FreeRTOS and can communicate with both Android devices and iOS products from Apple (even the iOS 7 notification center is supported, thanks to the newly released SDK 2.0).
That's actually its greatest advantage. For all that, the Samsung Galaxy gear has more refined capabilities, it's only compatible with less than a handful of phones, all of them also belonging to Samsung.
Pebble will work with all of them though, via Bluetooth 2.1 wireless technology, but supports Bluetooth 4.0 too (Bluetooth Low Energy).
Which is to say, the hardware can handle 4.0, but the software hasn't implemented it yet, and won't until more phones have it too.
Water resistance is part of the feature set, and the battery life is said to be of about seven days, or that's what it was back in April 2012. And since no changes have been made to the hardware since then, no major ones anyway, we can be reasonably sure it's the same now.
For those who want to know just how water-resistant it is, the rating is of around 5 on the IPX scale, meaning that it can be submerged to 50 m / 165 feet. Swimmers have actually tested it in both fresh water and salt water.