Pebble smart watch: an update
The Pebble team has been regularly updating backers with interesting tidbits about the whole process of taking the Pebble from a design concept and turning that into a shipped product. I must say that having never seen the inner-workings of a project such as this before (and expectantly waiting on my Pebble) that the process is somewhat frustrating, but only in a “first world problems” kind of way: and I mean that in the extreme literal sense of the phrase.
I am hanging out as much as the next guy for my Pebble, and the reason I am so anxiously waiting is because I am kept up to date with everything I need to know about the product except for the one important detail: a ship date. I do appreciate the sheer size of the task which the Pebble team have undertaken. Initially they were a team of five people who planned to produce around 1,000 watches. What happened on Kickstarter could’ve been predicted by nobody; some 80,000 people backed the project and the number of Pebbles required to be produced quickly sky-rocketed to over eighty times the number the team originally intended to produce. The team has had to take on new hires and change their entire approach to a full-scale mass-produced production model, which involved flying in and out of China to inspect construction factories for the Pebble itself and the producers of the parts therein.
Along the way we have seen a few advantages come from this: certain components are able to be upgraded “for free” — at no extra cost to the end-user — because of the bargaining power afforded such a volumous purchase. From that we have seen the Bluetooth upgraded to 4.0 spec from the originally-targetted 2.1, which frankly would have been a paltry solution for a product with such a huge market and userbase.
The first developer e-mail was sent out a few days ago to inform of the goals for the SDK release. I was surprised because so many phone app developers have already pledged support for Pebble, yet apparently no SDK has even been released yet. I kind of just assumed it had been. In any case I will probably download whatever is able to be downloaded as it becomes available. I am not particularly interested in developing anything — well, I have some ideas, but probably not the patience to execute them — I am just keen to see what actually comes out of all this and get a better overall ‘feel’ for the product and how it works.