You have a cellphone, maybe a tablet. Sometimes you lug around a laptop. Do you really need one more gadget on you?
Yes, you do. You need a smart watch. At least, that’s what I learned after I got the Pebble, a US$150 (HK$1,164) watch that connects wirelessly to iPhones and Android smartphones to notify you of incoming calls, texts and emails.
The Pebble has a lot of rough edges, but it does a good job of demonstrating the potential of “wearable” computing. Apple has filed patents that demonstrate it’s working on a watch, and other “smart” watches are proliferating.
The Pebble has impeccable underdog credibility as the brain child of a 26-year-old Canadian entrepreneur who struggled to find money to make it until he posted his project on the fundraising site Kickstarter. There, it was a runaway success, raising more than US$10 million in less than a month from nearly 70,000 friends and complete strangers.
What’s great about the Pebble isn’t that it’s particularly smart on its own. Considering that it’s a watch with the processing power of a cellphone from 2008, it really doesn’t do much out of the box. In fact, it does less than many sports watches; you can set alarms, but it doesn’t come with a timer.
The watch qualifies as a “smart” device because you can download and install applications, such as a timer. So far, the apps are pretty rudimentary. Apart from the timer, the only app I bothered to install is one that walks you through a popular seven-minute workout routine.