the fractal designed toine R4 case gets featured on the wow build logs of the
week section more than any other case click now to learn more about it I've
been curious about the pebble since launch and very recently I bit the
bullet I bought one and it arrived in this eco-friendly packaging that is
completely recyclable and really doesn't contain a whole lot so once you open it
up all you're going to find is the Pebble smart watch and in my case I
chose regrettably the orange color so coupled with the sort of cheap feeling
rubber strap and the uh bright color and plastic construction it really does feel
kind of like a child's toy as opposed to a serious tool that I spent $150 on uh
but don't worry it's available in six different colors of which orange is
probably the most ridiculous and then it comes with a magnetic charging cable it
does not come with an AC adapter though so you'll have to plug it into one that
you already own pick one up at the store or plug it into a computer now the
magnetic charging cable I'll show you guys how it works here so it just Clips
onto the to the Smartwatch like that boom not too strong not too weak um is a
bit of a double-edged sword so as much as I hate micro USB and it can just go
eat a turd because I hate it and it's fragile um this is not necessarily
optimal either because it comes with one uh if you ever need a replacement one
you're probably going to have to order it online and as we discovered when we
tried to do the unboxing the other day if you don't have it you can't just run
around and find a replacement one very very easily you have to go and actually
find that cable so I recommend not losing it however I do love that it's
magnetic and it's not going to break so with that out of the way let's get into
the physicality of the pebble so I did mention it's a little bit cheesy don't
worry there are things you can do so you could order a different color you can
get aftermarket watch faces for it you can get aftermarket watch straps from
any store that carries standard replaceable watch straps so you can
actually customize it to your heart's content but you don't have to out of the
box on the left hand side there is one button this turns the backl on and also
serves as a back button when you're navigating through the menus on the
right hand side you've got up and down within the menus as well as confirm
these up and down ones if you're not inside the menus will rotate through your different clock faces that are
available it comes with three ones by default but you can totally download all
the different clock faces you want and take advantage of that awesome
upgradeable functionality that it has I do want to very briefly show you guys
the kinds of options that are in the menu so music control is a big one
forward back and play pause this is one that I find myself using a ton because
when you have your headphones connected to your phone and it's in your pocket
what's more convenient bloop bloop on your wrist or pulling out your phone and
manually selecting a track do undoing your lock screen absolutely fantastic
I'd say it's worth the cost of admission just for that set alarms watches you've
got some settings in here Bluetooth display yeah nothing else in here that's
really that interesting the music Control is awesome however there's a
great deal of customizability and we'll get into that more in just a moment here
so the first thing you're going to download when you get a pebble is the pebble app which has one button one
button only so you press connect and as long as Bluetooth is enabled on your
phone it is going to walk you through a very simple menu it was easy to set up
the pebble also offers excellent compatibility so there's a few issues
with some Samsung smartphones but unlike the Galaxy Gear it is pretty much
universally compatible with any Android phone rather than being locked down to
particular vendor aside from Twitter notifications showing up on the
Smartwatch I had everything going within about five or 10 minutes um more on that
in a moment you've also got settings up here so this allows you to configure
what you want it to notify you about so calls SMS mess messages calendar it
supports Facebook as well as Google Hangouts the one thing that I'd say oh
emails of course the one thing I'd say is really essential and it doesn't support is Twitter but don't worry
there's a way around that music you can actually tell it which of your music
apps you want it to control so not just locked into something like a default
music app and that is pretty much it guys so that's where we get into other
apps so you can get like free caddy which tells you how far away you are
from the hole on like thousands of different golf courses run keeper which
keeps track of your runs no not in your pants like out out on the street you go
for runs it tells you like how fast you went and cool stuff like that and then
Pebble Notifier this is an essential app so what you can do is you can tell it
okay exclude the selected ones include only the selected ones and this is how I
was able to get t Twitter working and there's a bunch of settings in there for that as well it's really well documented
not only pebble's own software but also the third party stuff that's available
so kudos to them for making that happen so let's get into my actual experience
with the Smartwatch first of all charge is supposed to last anywhere from 5 to 7
Days by torture testing it and using it a ton I was able to wear it down in 2
days which is still better than the day that Samsung estimates for something
like the Galaxy Gear the Galaxy Gear doesn't even have its display on most of
the time because it's no le display and that is a huge advantage of pebble's
implementation of an e in display because that means even if you don't go
through the complicated gesture of going exactly like this to check the time
you'll be able to check the time from any angle and from any place as long as
you can see physically your wrist next up is the backlight the way that that's
implemented is actually really smart you can either press the backlight button here the ergonomics of which are
terrible because there's a bunch of buttons over here so it's hard to brace
yourself or you can just give a little flick of your wrist and the backl is
illuminated allowing you to easily see the display in the dark it only stays on
for about a second though now let's talk about the time savings because you know
what it's not that much on a on an individual by individual basis so I just
sent myself a text message and let's wait for that to come through and
basically what it does is it doesn't so much um you know save me 10 minutes
every time I get a text but it allows me to read this message and go okay well
Brandon's just like sending me random text messages I can scroll through it
and then I can just decide no I'm not going to deal with that now I can deal with it in a batch later I find it makes
me get disrupted and distracted less
more than anything else so I'm not constantly bringing out my phone to
check things which can burn time I can bring it out once in a while do
everything and then put it away it's also great for when you don't have
access to your phone like when you're at work for example you could leave it in
your pants pocket if you change into a lab code or something and then you could
know if there's something urgent that you have to deal with without carrying
your phone around if your work has a policy against it or when you're playing
sports or whatever else so I was on a badminton court my parents called to say
that they didn't have the car seat we had to come get the baby before he went
to bed I would not have gotten that message in time if I hadn't been wearing
the Pebbles so I do find it enhances my life it does make it better is it $150
worth um I guess it's entirely up to you the functionality of it isn't perfect
like it doesn't have as much functionality as the gear for example
once these not ifications go away they're they're gone they're just gone
longer messages you can't scroll through them all you can't scroll through them
all the way like emails will get will get cut off whereas text messages and
tweets are generally speaking okay you obviously can't reply in any way whereas
Galaxy Gear you can use S Voice to do a reply if you really want to but of
course Galaxy Gear costs more than twice as much at least here in Canada so in
conclusion guys I am with Kane from Tech
Syndicate who is the one who convinced me to pick up a pebble is it worth $150
$ for me I would say so yes it enhances
my life it makes it better in a way that quite frankly a phone upgrade probably
wouldn't even do because we're actually adding functionality instead of just
making it a little bit faster or a little bit higher resolution or whatever the case may be is the pebble the best
implementation ever up until now probably not in the future definitely
not there'll be better stuff but for now I really like it you're probably going
to see this living on my wrist for the next little while leave a like on this
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