Remember when the Pebble smartwatch first launched? We don’t blame you if you can’t – January 2013 was an awfully long time ago, particularly in the world of wearable tech.
It can be hard to stay relevant, particularly when you’re a comparative minnow. The Apple Watch may have been announced last month, but Pebble isn’t just going to roll over and let it eat up its sizeable market share. Instead, it’s done its best to try and compete.
First of all there’s two new features inside the watch, and they’re big ones. You can now track both your sleep and your activity via your Pebble. This advance means that companies like Misfit and Jawbone can (and in fact are) use the Pebble as a platform for their software in lieu of them not producing a dedicated smartwatch of their own.
Pebble has done its utmost to make sure that these tracking features don’t completely ruin your device’s battery life when they run in the background, and they can be disabled should you not want them there.
Then there’s the other big news – a price drop. It’s a permanent one, too, which sees the original plastic-build Pebble smartwatch priced at £99 / ¬129 / $99. The Pebble Steel, meanwhile, is now £179 / ¬229 / $199. If you want to swap out the default leather strap for a matching brushed or matte stainless steel one it’ll cost you a further £20.
When you consider that the most expensive variant of the Apple Watch may cost over $1,000, all of a sudden the Pebble starts to look like rather good value…
