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Living With the Pebble Time Smartwatch
For the past several weeks, I’ve been living with the Pebble Time, the new smartwatch from the company that practically invented the genre. Almost a 0.25 inches thick and 1.5 inches square, the Pebble Time ($200) is significantly smaller and less boxy than the 2013 original, but its plastic case still falls on the bulky side and its thick-bezeled display seems to riff on 1970s digital watches.
Its pricier twin, the Pebble Time Steel ($250 to $300), shares the same chunky dimensions, but it sports a more-luxurious-looking “marine grade” stainless steel case and comes with a selection of metal and leather bands.
While Apple, LG, and Samsung strive to cram telephony, mapping, photos, biometric sensors, and other smartphone apps into their tiny wrist-bound form factors, the Pebble Time keeps things simple. Its main mission is to alert you about e-mails, texts, and other app notifications fielded by your smartphone. It does this quite well using a simple interface that can be traversed via a button push or two (it lacks a touch screen). The watch is also rugged, with a claimed water resistance of 100 feet. Our testers will confirm that claim and others over the next few weeks before we add this model to our smartwatch Ratings.
But the display is not always easy to read and the relatively thick case can easily snag on a desktop edge or wall corner. What’s more, the charger only comes with a USB connector. If you want to plug it into a wall instead of a computer, you’ll have to lay down an extra $5 to $10 for an aftermarket AC adapter—or use the one from your smartphone.
Despite these flaws, I like the Pebble Time. Here are more details:
Key Features
Display. The Pebble Time boasts of an “always on color e-paper display with LED backlight,” which sounds more impressive than it is. The screen itself—only 0.8 × 0.9 inches—provides a so-so resolution of 182 pixels per inch. That only allows for a cartoonish selection of watch faces. The display is quite easy to see in sunlight, but nearly illegible under the subdued lighting conditions you frequently encounter indoors. The backlight button on the Time’s left side does little to brighten things. And the color is nothing close to the dynamic hues you’ll find on an Apple or other LCD-based smartwatch. The dull tint is reminiscent of a comic book with pages that have been bleached by the sun.
Comfort. Despite the occasional shock of inadvertently scraping the bulky case against a wall (no scratches) or snagging it on a door handle, I found the Pebble Time quite comfortable to wear. Putting it on and taking it off was a simple task, too, compared to my Apple Watch Sport, which has a funky “tuck under” design. The pliable silicon band can be pulled and stretched with ease through the conventional watch buckle, and secured firmly.
Interface. You control the Time via three buttons on its right side and the backlight button on the left side, which brings you back to the main watch face when you’re done with a sub menu or get into trouble. The top and bottom buttons are for scrolling, the center button is for selecting a menu item or message. This system is quite intuitive, and makes scrolling through new and old messages and calendar appointments quite easy—at least for right-handed users. My colleague Joyce Ward, a lefty, reported having a difficult time pushing the buttons with her left hand when the Time was on her right wrist.
Notifications. Almost immediately after downloading and activating the Pebble Time app on your smartphone, it begins herding many of the apps on you phone into its notification system. If anything happens on Facebook, eBay, your calendar, and other apps, the Time vibrates to tell you to look at its screen. You can reply to e-mails and texts by selecting one of nine canned responses on the watch, send an emoji, or dictate your own response via the Time’s microphone. The Pebble Time’s dictation feature correctly interpreted most of my utterances, though it had trouble with some names, such as Kerry.
You can read e-mails, text messages, calendar appointments, and weather forecasts in full.
Notification from other apps show much less info beyond subject line or the sender. But that’s often enough to let you decide whether you want to open the app on your phone, which you can do by pushing the select button on the watch.
Having my wrist vibrate 4 to 6 times an hour wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be, which is why the vibration “mute” in the Time’s settings menu is a welome feature. There’s also a Do Not Disturb feature to silence alerts during meetings or after hours.
Battery. The Pebble Time has a claimed battery life of up to 7 days, and I got something close to that when syncing only my calendar and e-mail accounts to it. But when Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Dunkin Donuts, and other accounts were added to the mix, the Time died in about three days. The frequent updates also took their toll on the battery of LG G3 to which it was paired. The Pebble Time Steel promises a battery life of up to 10 days.
Other apps. The Time Pebble also includes a stopwatch/timer, and it works with tracking apps from Jawbone, Fitocracy, Runkeeper, and Misfit, which I did not try. The Time can also remotely launch and control music apps such as Pandora and iHeartRadio on your phone, which I did try and quickly regretted. The Pandora app started launching itself unexpectedly at high volume when paired to the watch, so I had to pull the plug. You can also download simple games—many of them free—from the Get Apps store (within the Pebble Time phone app). These include Virtual Dice, which use the Time’s accelerometer. But I didn’t think twisting my wrist to throw a pair of virtual dice was worth the risk of carpal tunnel.
I did, however, find a pretty good aftermarket watch face there by David Rodriquez Rincon. The YWeather watch face attractively presented the data I most often wanted to see on my Time: date, time, weather, Bluetooth pairing status, and battery level.
Supported phones. The Pebble Time works with iOS 8 on the iPhone 4s and above and with all Android 4.0+ phones.
Case colors. The plastic Pebble Time is available in black, red and white, with matching silicone wristbands. The Pebble Time Steel comes in three stainless steel finishes: silver, black, and gold. The choice of wristband, leather or steel, determines the price.
Bottom line: The Pebble Time’s crude styling and visually challenged display may put off smartwatch shoppers drawn to the sleeker, more advanced, and versatile designs from Apple, Samsung, and others. But the genius of its intuitive, more focused take on what really works on a tiny screen might be the smartest approach to smartwatch design yet.
Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright © 2006-2015 Consumers Union of U.S.
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