The "smart watch pioneer" Pebble launched another round of crowdfunding in Kickstarter with the third generation product Pebble Time, which raised more than 20 million dollars, setting another amazing record. What is the magic of this watch that makes people flock to it?

 Pebble Time

Pebble Time Steel

Pebble： Pioneer of smart watch

As early as April 2012, the founding team of Pebble showed Pebble on KickStarter through a cool video and many beautiful design drawings. Compared with ordinary watches, the biggest feature of Pebble is that it can pair with iPhone and Android phones to display notification information such as incoming calls, SMS messages, etc. Within a few days, the entrepreneurial team received more than 85000 orders and more than 10 million dollars of support funds, making Pebble the most successful financing project since KickStarter was founded. At that time, there were few smart watches available.

At the opening of CES 2014. The new Pebble Steel is released, which mainly improves the shell and is made of all metal, which is more fashionable than the previous one. (Yes, the second generation is called Pebble Steel, and the third generation metal version is called Pebble Time Steel. Note the difference)

(The middle is the first generation Pebble, and the left and right are the second generation Pebble Steel)

At present, the original Chinese version of pebble is crowdfunding at the lowest price of 599 yuan in JD. The Chinese version solves the problem of Chinese display, and adds Chinese software such as public comments and 365 calendars.

Appearance: a little beautiful

Pebble Time is made of polycarbonate, commonly known as plastic, while Pebble Time Steel is made of stainless steel. Although the screen size of both is 1.25 inches, the frame of Time Steel is narrower than that of Time, and it is more harmonious as a whole. In contrast, Time still has the temperament of "toy".

Time Steel is 1mm thicker than Time, up to 10.5mm, which is not thin, but within the normal range. In contrast, Time Steel has larger battery capacity and heavier machine. There is a return button on the left side of both, and the three buttons on the right side are up, confirm, and return. Yes, this guy doesn't support touch.

It is worth mentioning that they all use 22mm standard watchbands, which can be shared with ordinary watches of the same size. Compared with the previous generation, which exposed the charging port on the left side of the case, Time placed the charging port on the back of the watch, which greatly improved the aesthetics and made it possible for the watch strap with software functions. At present, Pebble officially provides 1 million dollars to support developers to develop "smart watchbands".

Screen: black and white to color

(Screen effect demonstration of official website publicity)

Compared with the black and white screens of the previous two generations of Pebble, the biggest highlight of Pebble Time is the use of color Display screen, which can display 64 colors, with a refresh rate of 30fps per second. It should be noted that although this screen is often called "e-paper E-paper", the screen it uses is not the E-Ink e-ink screen used by the Kindle. E-paper is a general term for ultra-low power LCD screens in the industry. Although it is outshone by ordinary LCD and OLED screens with tens of millions of colors, Memory LCD only consumes power when the content displayed on the screen changes, which is more suitable for wearable devices that require high power consumption.

Domestic WeLoop small black watch The same black and white screen technology is used.

Display principle of E-ink screen: E-ink screen is composed of many e-inks, which can be seen as capsules. There are liquid charges in each capsule, of which positive charges are colored white and negative charges are colored black. When we apply positive and negative voltages on one side, the charged liquid will be attracted and repelled respectively, so that the pixels will display white and black (this is , please keep an eye on it for 10 seconds).

Sharp memory liquid crystal used by Pebble Time belongs to a kind of The secret of power saving is that if the display does not need to change, the power consumption of the screen is 0.

Hardware: new microphone

In addition to the built-in accelerometer, compass, Bluetooth 4.0 and ambient light sensor, Pebble Time also adds a microphone, which can record memos on the watch. The watch supports 50 meter waterproof, and the processor and memory are improved compared with the previous generation.

Thanks to the electronic paper screen and a single sensor, the Pebble Time has an amazing 7 days' endurance, while the Steel version has a 10 days' endurance, which is much higher than the hourly endurance of Apple Watch and Android Wear.

System: notice centered

With the release of Pebble Time, there is also a new Time Line operating system.

The new system desalinates the concept of application and integrates all messages into the form of a timeline, that is, messages are arranged from near to far in time, much like microblogging or Twitter. The system is also divided into three modules: present, past and future. If you are a user of the old Pebble, you will also get the push of system updates in the near future.

Its official application has been launched And apples Stores.

Android applications can set applications that allow push notifications.

Pebble Time has thousands of dials and applications to choose from, and even Tetris and WeChat. Just download and set them on the official app.

summary

To attract early users, Pebble Time is pre selling on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter at a price of 159 dollars (about 995 yuan). At present, the $159 preemptive version has been sold out, and there are still some $179 (about 1120 yuan) versions on the site. Eventually, the price of Pebble Time will be the same as that of the previous generation of Pebble Steel, which is $199 (about 1246 yuan). It is expected to be delivered to users in May and June this year.

Compared with Apple Watch and Android Wear, Pebble has taken the edge and made great success by doing less and better the functions of watches. To date, Pebble has sold more than 1 million watches, more than all Android Wear devices combined. Its advantage is to integrate into your life, rather than being forced to change your lifestyle for the sake of a smart watch. As the "notification center" of mobile phones, Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel can undoubtedly impress many geeks and digital product enthusiasts. Although it has sold millions of units and is a standard "rich second generation", the Pebble official still low-key said that this is just a watch (with a notification function).

Attachment: Pebble's crowdfunding promotional video