Last year I pledged to the Kickstarter campaign for the Pebble watch, almost without thinking. You see, I'd written on the topic of watch computing before, and how I think it's an almost natural progression for the interface to portable personal storage and computing power. I was pretty excited to see someone start down the path of that integration innovation, so I "threw my money at them". Last week my watch arrived, and now that I've had a chance to play with it, I wanted to write up this simple review and first impression.
The watch build feels pretty crappy. I've gotten more satisfaction from old-style calculator watches from the 80's. I used to own (probably in a drawer somewhere) a watch that could control my TV with IR, and it had a more solid-feeling build than the Pebble. (Ah, the dorm days of changing the lobby TV from ESPN to MTV while the jocks were all huddled around a game...) It's not really that the Pebble feels fragile, but its plastic body and rubber watch band have more the feeling of a dime store timepiece than something that you'd spend money on for its technological features.
