Pebble, one of the progenitors of the smartwatch and an all-time great Kickstarter success story, is back with a new product – and it’s breaking even more Kickstarter records along the way.
The Pebble Time is Pebble’s first colour display smartwatch. It reached its initial goal of $500,000 in just 17 minutes. It then went on to hit the magic $1 million mark in under half an hour. Pretty remarkable stuff.
We all thought it was pretty impressive when the original Pebble smartwatch hit $1m within 27 hours but this… this is something else. Now at the time of writing this article this new campaign has roughly 40,000 backers who’ve pledged a whopping $8.5m.
The Time still uses an e-ink display rather than LCD, only this time that e-ink is coloured. Choosing e-ink over LCD means that whilst it’s not quite capable of rendering the same quality of image or video or the like, it is a lot more battery efficient. Pebble claims that the Time will last up to seven days on a single charge rather than the standard 24 hours(ish) that you would get on a device like the Motorola Moto 360.
The Time also now has a built-in microphone to register voice commands, and is fully compatible with the entire 65,000+ library of existing Pebble apps.
Aesthetically we’re not as big a fan of it as we are the gorgeous Pebble Steel, but the choice of various interchangeable straps is exciting.
Why exactly a company which has been a runaway success in the wearable is taking to a crowdfunding medium to launch its new product is beyond us, and certainly raises some ethical questions, but apparently it’s not bothering anyone else too much – there’s less than 40 of the $1,690 ten-watch packages left, for example.
Pebble estimates that the Time will be ready to ship by May of this year, so hopefully we’ll be able to get our hands on one sooner rather than later.
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