Pebble Smart Watch Will Ship On January 23

The long-awaited Pebble e-paper smart watch is being showed off at CES 2013 today, and it’s finally going to start shipping to backers on January 23! Let Eric Migicovsky, CEO of Pebble show you through the Pebble here.

At its peak, Pebble will be making 15,000 devices per week. 85,000 Pebbles will ship to Kickstarter backers and tens of thousands to others who ordered after Kickstarter closed.

Eric spent time at the press conference actually talking through the details of the watch — telling us a few things we haven’t heard before.

The Pebble doesn’t actually have an “e-ink” display. It’s actually an sort of LCD display with a refresh rate of 30 frames per second to drive animations.

The watch only weighs 38.2 grams with a polycarbonate shell and hard coated lens on top of the face. The strap is 22-millimetre polyurethane and you can interchange the strap whenever you like with a leather or metal one.




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Images: Adam Hallett

It’s water resistant to five atmospheres, and that actually means you can use it swimming, sailing, doing the dishes or running through a rainstorm.

To keep it waterproof, Pebble had to figure out how to seal the device while still being able to charge it. To counter that, Pebble announced a little USB to magnetic charging cable that would clip on to the device to charge it.

The Pebble app will be supported on Android 2.3.3 and above and it will support any iOS device with iOS 5 or higher (iPhone 3GS and up and iPod Touch 3rd-Generation and up), but Eric said that it’s going to work better with iOS 6 because of the new Bluetooth profiles in the OS for better notifications.

Pebble is also building its own cloud as part of its account system. What it’s trying to do is build a platform that web developers can use to push notifications to the Pebble smart watch. That’s pretty impressive.




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Images: Adam Hallett

Every two to three weeks, the Pebble folks will post software and shipping update information to Kickstarter backers.

Pebble is designed to connect to your phone via Bluetooth 4.0, but Eric is promising that it will only affect your battery by between five and 10 per cent.


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