
Pebble 4.0 Apps and Firmware Released - PetitPrince
https://blog.getpebble.com/2016/08/30/fw4-0/
======
ohthehugemanate
Kudos to Pebble for being the one smartwatch producer who understands their
product. A smartwatch is about checking the time, notifications, and other
simple information at a glance. It should not require focused attention, it
should not require much maintenance (daily charge, anyone?), and it should not
be physically obtrusive. It's job is to be a seamless part of the fabric of
your daily life.

I loved my pebble, but when it died I decided to try something else, one of
the fancier watches. I bought the samsung gear because it has the longest
battery life of the non-pebble market (2 days), it's waterproof, and it looks
unobtrusive. It's fine, if you disable wifi, turn the screen brightness down,
and disable most of the builtins. But then I basically have a pebble with a
shitty battery.

My next watch will be a pebble, because they understand the point of a smart
watch.

~~~
ozkan
I do charge my Pebble Time Round daily, and it's not waterproof :/

Yet I still backed the Pebble v2.

~~~
organsnyder
The PTR is a bit of a different beast: they sacrificed battery life and water
resistance for styling. The result is (IMHO) the best-looking smartwatch
available. I've been drooling over the PTR ever since it came out (I have an
OG Steel). When they announced the "limited-edition" polished gold model
during their Kickstarter campaign, I jumped at it, even though it will
effectively a previous-generation model (I also got a Pebble 2 to use as a
"beater" watch).

I think that Pebble understands better than most that, to many people, a watch
is a piece of jewelry more than it is a gadget or piece of equipment—hence why
very expensive watches often have _less_ functionality and reliability than a
$10 quartz Casio. IMHO, the PTR and OG Steel are the only two smartwatches on
the market that really appeal to this demographic.

I think that Pebble's challenge is that the traditional watch market seems to
be shrinking—most of the people I know that wear an Apple Watch or Android
Wear are people that wouldn't otherwise be wearing watches, and are more
interested in the gadget aspect. Regardless of hardware, I don't think that
Pebble will ever be able to compete in that market; Pebble support will always
be an afterthought for app developers, compared to the ease of the native
Apple and Android SDKs. In my experience, Pebble is already falling behind
here—the quantity and quality of apps isn't that great (though perhaps I'm
missing out on some good apps because my Steel is too old?). They do seem to
realize this, and seem to be actively trying to build a larger developer
community.

Also problematic for attracting developers: the Pebble app store has no built-
in payment facilities, and developers must resort to clunky third-party
solutions (such as KiezelPay) to sell paid apps and watch faces. This might
not be Pebble's fault, though—I'm guessing that they're restricted by the
requirements placed on them by Apple (and perhaps Google) to be in their
stores.

------
spike021
I'm really disappointed with Pebble.

I had a Pebble Steel (the original Steel) and it was great for a while. But
when they introduced version 3.0 (I think?), which brought on the new
interface I pretty much stopped wearing it. I'm not a heavy calendar user,
except when it comes to work. The 3.0 update was based on the idea that users
love using the calendar to schedule their days.

That one primary change took away from the simplistic interface that the
earlier versions had and made the Pebble more of a chore to keep up with. I
didn't want to be bombarded with notifications about tasks/meetings at work,
and I certainly didn't want them showing up in the main day view. But then
that single today view was mostly unused and empty.

It's pretty unfortunate, IMO. I enjoyed using it up till then. I guess I could
give it another chance but at this point the Original Steel has likely reached
its end of life, at least with respect to new updates.

~~~
taneq
I don't mind 3.0 (although the timeline doesn't really do anything for me), I
just hate the way their "privacy" policy makes something that should be
personal and trustworthy (a wrist watch) into a Trojan horse to vacuum every
scrap of personal information for them to later sell on.

~~~
kylec
Wait, what? Do you have more context? I hadn't heard about this.

~~~
bigiain
Not sure what taneq was referring to - but I was _very_ unpleasantly surprised
the first time I got the "Pebble Health This Week" email showing me my sleep
and step tracking for the last week _from their cloud service_.

That's 100% not something I'd ever intentionally sign up to "share" \- which
means they either opted me in without consent, or used a dark pattern to trick
me into consenting to something I wouldn't have if it'd been clear it meant my
watch/app was going to send all my activity/movement data to "someone" with no
way for me to know what they were gonna use it for or who they were gonna
share it with.

I didn't cancel my Kickstarter pledge (my third, I've got the original and the
Time) - but I _very_ seriously considered it (and still might just flip it on
eBay when it arrives)...

~~~
taneq
Dark patterns:

1) They accept your order without even a mention of the T&C, EULA or privacy
policy (at least as far as the checkout, I'm not putting my card number in to
check for a popup during the payment process).

2) When you receive the product and go to install the app, in tiny print below
the signup form they declare that by signing up, you accept the T&C. (This
text is visible here:
[https://youtu.be/GAYL034-j0I?t=1m19s](https://youtu.be/GAYL034-j0I?t=1m19s))

3) By accepting the T&C, you agree to the privacy policy linked from within
the T&C.

In my book, this is not acceptable behaviour.

------
alec
I recently got a Pebble Time Round and love it. Never wanted a watch before.

Few watches provide vibrating alarms, but Pebble's helps keep me on track
during the day without disturbing everyone around me with beeps. I wrote a
tiny app to vibrate at different points of a meeting so I know how much time
is left without boorishly checking a clock, and the development experience was
smooth.

With the Android Light Flow app, I can control which contacts for which apps
can send notifications, which helps keep me aware of things I need to be aware
of without being a firehose of alerts.

------
NDizzle
Starting with the firmware released in July it caused my iphone to lock up for
seconds at a time in any other application. It took me a long time to narrow
it down to the pebble app, but that was definitely the culprit.

Before I figured out that it was the pebble, I thought it was bluetooth itself
- because when I turned off the bluetooth, the phone acted normally. Which
sucked because I use about 6 bluetooth devices with my phone. Two cars,
headphones, and indoor/outdoor home entertainment systems.

6+ with always the latest iOS if any of you pebble people are reading this.
It's been a nightmare for the past two months, what was otherwise an absolute
brilliant experience up until that point. This is a pebble time kickstarter
edition.

~~~
wvenable
The bluetooth stack on iOS isn't terribly stable. I used to blame the Pebble
for it's disconnects until I discovered that it corresponds with the whole
stack going out.

I've never had a problem with my phone locking up and neither has my wife but
some people seem to have constant problems and some none at all. Bluetooth has
never struck me as a particularly stable technology in general.

Pebble has been working on going full Bluetooth LE and dropping the regular
Bluetooth connection. I'm not sure what the progress is on this (or if they
abandoned it) but it would probably improve stability and battery life.

------
dstaley
I loved my Pebble, but Android Wear offers such a superior experience when it
comes to notification management. The only thing I use my watch for is
processing incoming notifications (such as liking a tweet, archiving an email,
replying to a Slack message, etc.) The 4.0 release notes hint at the power of
the Android notification system, and it baffles me that Pebble still doesnt
fully integrate with it.

I'm afraid that Android Wear watches will improve on the battery life and
outdoor visibility front faster than Pebble will improve on the software
front.

~~~
mixedCase
I highly doubt Android Wear will improve on battery life to compete with the
Pebbles short of a huge scientific breakthrough.

A full charge of the Pebble Time lasted me 5-6 days.

~~~
e_y_
They can increase battery life by making the watch bigger and heavier. Don't
laugh -- okay, do laugh, but it's surprising what people will put up with. We
used to think that 6" phones were ridiculous.

~~~
tdkl
It's ridiculous because they were making them thinner too.

------
ivoras
I somehow think that Pebble is underutilized because of a bad price-
performance point, which they are attempting to make up for by positioning it
as a high-end watch, not a modern smartwatch.

Related to this, are there any other low-end (in terms of hardware; I'm
thinking something cheap and Chinese) smart watches, which allow uploading
custom apps to the watch itself?

~~~
yangshuo215
I think this is a very interesting idea since now some of the heavy users
really want to keep their data to themselves. There might be a market for
these

------
TeMPOraL
Just downloaded the update. It managed to crash the first time round (also
really first time Pebble watch crashing on me). I'm guessing the watchface
wasn't updated to work properly with the new timeline preview ("Glances") -
I'll debug it if it crashes again.

So far I'm very happy they've updated the Pebble Health watchapp - it's
finally usable now (and quite nice), as it display daily stats for last week
in nice bar graphs. Also I have an impression that Timeline is a bit more
responsive/faster now.

I'm pretty happy with what Pebble is doing (though Health interface on the
mobile app could use some further rework to provide more/better information).
Can't wait for the Time 2 watches to start shipping!

~~~
jefffan241
I had the same issue and rebooting my watch (not hard reset, just reboot
[press and hold the back and select (middle button)] for 10 seconds until the
pebble logo shows) fixed the problem. Just in case anyone else has this.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yes, reboot seems to fix the problem in some cases. My watch didn't crash
again after the reboot earlier today.

------
untog
I really hope Pebble is able to stick around for a while. I got an original
Pebble and stopped wearing it after a couple of months, but picked up a Pebble
Time Round on a whim and have been wearing it solidly.

I know it doesn't have all the features of an Android Wear or Apple Watch, but
it does most of what I need (notifications and music control) and looks
absolutely fantastic - I receive compliments on the watch even before people
find out it's a smartwatch, and they're usually blown away when they find out
what it can do.

The recent health additions make sense - while they don't blow me away,
getting a step tracker for free is no bad thing.

------
petra
With regards to smartwatches , the Chinese have done a great job at reducing
the prices(as always).

But the software isn't great(unless it's wear). So I'm curious - why does
nobody release a decent smartwatch is , that supports apps, and can run well
on a cheap($50) watch ?

At that price point, many new users might be interested.

~~~
therealasdf
The problem with smartwatches today is it's still unclear what type of apps
they should run. So you might be able to create super smartwatch that's just
as powerful as a smartphone but is that what people want?

~~~
pjmlp
I was into smartwatches back in their early 80 and 90's versions.

There is nothing interesting on this third wave for me personally versus what
was already possible.

I see it as a solution the vendors are looking for, to sort out the
increasingly stagnant sales of smartphones and tablets.

Specially in the countries where people don't switch their phones every two
years, which is the majority of the world actually.

------
was_boring
Do any of these smart watches allow for extended swimming? Most of my workout
is swimming laps for an hour a day.

~~~
robbiep
Besides fitness tracking, what's the benefit you find for wearing a watch inn
the pool? I used to wear my polar in the pool with my strap, but when I got a
Garmin a few years ago it couldn't reliably track my heart rate anyway, and
the GPS went wacky from being on the end of my arm when I was out on ocean
swims.

You want to know the time when you're swimming?

~~~
tdkl
Stroke count, pool lap times, if devices has indoor swimming support. Of
course this is moot for casual swimmers.

Regarding outdoor swimming support, the device has to support openwater
swimming, because then it contains algorithms to smooth out the GPS signal (it
goes off when arm goes inside water). Other option is putting the device below
the swimming cap, or a swimming bouy that you drag with you.

Heart rate is a different beast. Your Polar worked below water because it used
their own proprietary signal that can be recorded under water. Garmin uses
ANT+ which doesn't work there.

They do have a special HR belt called HR Swim (and HR TRI for outside
swimming), that pairs to device, then records HR on its own while swimming.
After workout it uploads the recording to the watch which combines both data
together. Only top triathlon devices support those.

~~~
robbiep
I wasn't aware devices had stroke count or lap count capacity

------
ozkatz
Their continuos lack of support for RTL languages is making me sad. It's 2016.

------
diego_moita
Meh, no API for direct access to Bluetooth (they promised for the end of last
year on the Pebble Time Kickstarter).

I still use a lot my Pebble because, unlike almost everything else, you can
swim and sleep with it (because has enough battery life). But the Samsung Gear
Fit 2 does look tempting and is the only non-Pebble that can also do both.

~~~
taneq
There's libpebble2 which pretty comprehensively covers the basic features if
you want to talk to the watch yourself
([https://github.com/pebble/libpebble2/](https://github.com/pebble/libpebble2/))
- or is that not what you meant?

~~~
diego_moita
It comes very close, but still misses.

But I was dreaming about a little more, such as rssi measurements from the
Pebble itself or scannig Bluetooth tokens proximity.

