Smartwatches are awesome! Smartwatches look kinda dumb a lot of the time! They don’t have to though, and the Pebble Steel is proof. The improved look isn’t quite enough to make it the perfect smartwatch, but it goes a long, long way.
During the time I spent with the Pebble Steel, it basically just melted into my life, in the best possible way. Not having to be self-conscious about how it looked or worry about charging it nightly basically let me treat it just like I would my normal wristwatch (I wear a wristwatch.) With things like the Qualcomm Toq, I’d find myself removing the watch just often enough that it never became The Norm. But after using the Pebble for almost a week, I’m finally all the way in. When my phone buzzes, I look at my wrist whether or not I’m wearing the Pebble. And nine out of 10 times I am.
Pebble does have some new tricks to go along with the Steel, and they can all be found in the Pebble App Store. Currently iOS only (though coming soon to Android), it lets you install apps and watchfaces right from your phone, whereas previously you had to do some moderately annoying hacker-type garbage to download watch faces from third party sites and side-load them onto the watch.
That’s great, since getting custom watchfaces and little wrist-apps is fun, but for the most part Pebble apps (so far) lean toward the more gimmicky side of smartwatch-itude that’s you’re better off avoiding. Shake your wrist with the Yelp app to find a random restaurant nearby! Use Foursquare to check into places on your wrist instead of your phone! Snake! Flappy Bird rip-offs! OK, sure. But also: whatever.
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It’s puuuuurty. The Pebble Steel’s main goal is just to look more respectable than the nerd-toy it is, and it pulls that off wonderfully. Between the two bands included, it’s easy to find the setup that works for you. And on top of that, the nice-looking metal body is compatible with just about any other 22mm bands as well. The world is your oyster.
The Pebble generally does not waste its time trying to do a whole bunch of questionably useful stuff. The Pebble does not have a camera. It does not have a microphone. It does not even have a touchscreen. And for the most part it’s better off for it. The Pebble knows what its job is — showing you notifications on your wrist — and mostly concerns itself with that. Yeah, you can download some games on there or whatever if that’s the kind of thing you’re into now that the Pebble App Store has launched, but it’s not founded around the premise of having to have its own app ecosystem. The Pebble Steel just works and looks good doing it.
The battery life is measured in days, pretty much a must for any smartwatch worth its salt. The listed life is 5-7 days, and we managed roughly four days. Less than the target, but I was using it a lot. Five days with more moderate use seems reasonable. It’s not enough to go on a trip without a charger or anything, but it’s good enough to get you by without having to worry about your watch dying constantly. Just don’t lose the proprietary magnetic charger.
Also it’s waterproof to 5 ATM. Not something to actively appreciate every day, but handy!
No Like
Most of my quibbles with the Pebble are small, but they’re magnified all the more considering everything around them is so stupid simple and good. You can’t customise how long a notification stays on the screen, for instance. Notifications auto-dismiss after a while, but it takes a little too long, and it’s really annoying to be going to glance at the time and finding you have to press a button to get an email out of the way first. It’d be nice to have a customisation option there.
Case in point: I was walking back to the office on lunch eating a piece of pizza and a few emails came in, but I figured I’d look at them later. Then, a few minutes when I wanted to know what time it was, the screen was clogged with so many notifications that the time wasn’t even visible on screen, and to see it I’d have to dismiss my notifications with a button press from my pizza hand. And it’s hands-full situations like this where the Pebble commits the cardinal smartwatch sin of being a bad watch watch.
Motorola Moto 360
75
Price: from $229
Like
“Wear it with a suit” pretty.
Great iOS and Android performance.
Simple mission.
Don’t Like
No notification customisation.
No fitness applications.
Outdated feature-set.
For all that’s great about being a stripped down product, the less is more mentality falls short when it comes to fitness applications. Yes, the Pebble can leech off your phone GPS to track runs or whatever, but that’s it. OK, so maybe that’s not what the Pebble is for, but with rumours of a health-centric iWatch on the horizon, and moreandmore fitness trackers that are taking cues from vanilla smartwatches, it feels a more like a deficiency now than it did when the OG plastic Pebble launched. If you don’t care about fitness tracking, great. But if you do, it’s hard to throw $229 at a device that only covers one half of the wrist-device equation.
Which brings us to the greater point: The Pebble Steel is essentially old. It’s just a new version of one of the first products in the smartwatch boom about two years ago, and things are moving fast. Though the Pebble still holds up, it seems inevitable that there’s something better around the bend, and dropping a bunch of money on what’s basically old hardware in a quickly evolving field feels dangerous, both to do and to recommend.
The new Pebble app for iOS — the one with the app store in it — is crap right now. Laggy, freeze-y. That’s almost certain to get better with updates, but for now it’s a big bummer. Also it’s not on Android. But that’s coming! Either way, 99.99 per cent of what makes the Pebble great has nothing to do with Pebble apps.
Should You Buy It?
If you want a smartwatch that doesn’t look terrible and you want it right now, then sure. The Pebble Steel is pretty much the only option out there that combines the best notifications-on-your-wrist-ness of a smartwatch, the style of a legitimate piece of jewelry, and none of the (stupid) extra bells that make the idea of a wrist-mounted screen look like some expensive toy for a Dick Tracy wannabe.
Also it really is a great smartwatch. It shows you stuff on your wrist and looks good, which is apparently a surprisingly hard thing to pull off.
But $US250 for even the best, prettiest smartwatch out there is a bit of a gamble considering what may be coming down the pipe. If you’re an Apple kid, it probably pays to wait and see how the whole iWatch thing shakes out. If you’re not, there will probably be a Google watch too. Also there’s going to be a Pebble 2 someday, and it will (probably) have a Steel version from the get-go. There’s not a whole more you need in a smartwatch than what the Pebble Steel already offers except fitness tracking stuff. But that one missing piece can hurt.
So at the moment, the Pebble Steel is the best, prettiest smartwatch for your money. But it’s also new bod on a gadget that’s in imminent danger of falling way behind the curve.
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