People love to fit their iPod nanos with a super sweet watch band. With its nice watch face and music on the fly, it’s a very attractive piece to add to your Apple nerdware. The Nano “iWatch” could be improved when it comes to its wrist functionality though. Pebble Technology from Palo Alto, California, is not only improving wrist technology but incorporating our smartphones with the Pebble watch, “it’s infinitely customizable, with beautiful downloadable watch faces and useful internet-connected apps.” Pebble connects to our iPhones via Bluetooth and sends information through silent vibrations for incoming calls, emails, messages, and more.
Pebble can easily be customized by adding apps (via the iPhone Pebble app) to be used for cyclists, runners, controlling music, a golf rangefinder and infinitely more apps via the SDK that they have also developed. The Pebble also has customizeable watch faces (much like the iPod nano) to fit each owner’s unique style. The watch will also come in 4 colors - arctic white, jet black, cherry red and one to be voted on my Kickstarter backers.
Video after the break.
The type of alerts the Pebble can grab for the iPhone are:
- Incoming Caller ID
- Email (Gmail or any IMAP email account)
- Calendar Alerts
- Facebook Messages
- Weather Alerts
- Silent vibrating alarm and timer
- if this then that notifications
The pledge options start at $115 and go up to $1250, either of these amounts will reserve you a Pebble and possibly more. Pebble started a Kickstarter project a few days ago and just today it has received over $100,000 in 2 hours and over $286,000 since inception. There are 37 days to go and this project is already a winner. (The project has already raised $60,000 in the short time it took me to write this article.) If you want to know more and become a backer, please checkout the Kickstarter project page.
Apple could take some notes from these guys, as they have come up with a great solution for a real “iWatch”. The Nano and the iPhone could work together in the near future in the way that the Pebble works with our smartphones.
UPDATE: Since this post was published yesterday, the Pebble is now at $850,000 and could surpass $1,000,000 in funding today. Amazing!
