Hands-on: Pebble gets a boost with lower price and new firmware - colemangingaid

Pebble hasn't flinched as it faces down Android Wear and the upcoming Apple Watch.

Instead, the smartwatch startup has shown its scrapper side with depress prices and further refinements to its software. The plastic Pebble now costs $99, while the metallic Pebble Steel costs $199—both perfect $50 from their daring prices. (Best Buy up is presently selling the Steel for $170.)

To coincide with the price cuts, Pebble is releasing its second firmware update in to a lesser degree a month, allowing the watch to go after fitness activity and admonisher sleep late the background. Betwixt the improved firmware and the lour prices, Pebble has become a solid smartwatch on the cheap.

Dormancy and close with Pebble

To psychometric test out Pebble's sleep monitoring features, I installed the new Misfit app, which also counts your steps and converts them into a general activity score. It's a little puzzling at first, as the app doesn't have a specific sleep mode that you charge, but that didn't stop Misfit from counting the hours as I snoozed. It seemed somewhat accurate, even adding a couple of more proceedings to my total in the break of the day as I caught a couple of extended Zs.

Mandibula's new Upfield app is also impressive in that information technology's really a watchface. That means you can quickly switch between Up and your former watchfaces by pressing the Pebble's side buttons, and it'll continue to count your stairs. IT can even discover when you've been sitting for too long, and remind you to walk around. The app includes a few dissimilar watch faces, which you can choose from the Pebble smartphone app.

Jared Newman

The Shmooze Up watchface has a step sideboard built in.

The only downside is that you can't give background signal privileges to more than one app at a clock time, so you'll need to switch if you have different step- and sleep-tracking services. But Pebble makes it fairly easy to substitution, throwing ascending an option screen when you prove to open a divergent background app. I haven't tested the impact on battery sprightliness with these background functions, but Pebble told BuzzFeed that they'll knock about a fractional-day soured the determine's 7-day complaint. (In my experience, nonetheless, the Pebble usually lasts three or four days, tops.)

Faster app access, finally

1 of my biggest earlier gripes with Pebble was how it put your third-party apps entirely the way of life at the bum of the chief launcher, making them needlessly unruly to access. A June firmware update alleviated the situation past letting you rearrange the launcher, but even moving your favorite apps to the top slot requires a few button presses to reaching them.

The latest update adds app shortcuts directly to the watchface screen out, accessed past pressing and belongings the top or bottom buttons. The first time you hold either release, you can choose which app you want to map, and you can e'er change it later through the Settings carte. I wish Pebble allowed for even more shortcuts, only at least now I can check the weather or vulnerable my Starbucks card in less time than it takes to get come out of the closet my telephone.

Jared Newman

Users can map app shortcuts to the spinning top and underside buttons on the take in's outside side of meat.

This microcode update is Pebble's second in fewer than two weeks. The previous update unlocked compass functionality and let users can notifications from both the lear and a paired iPhone simultaneously.

The updates and the price cuts make Pebble a untold more compelling smartwatch option, to the point that I'm tempted to upgrade from the plastic model to a Pebble Steel. There is, however, unmatched major caveat: No of the modern software improvements take over rolled dead set Android yet. If you're non exploitation an iPhone, you power want to hold off until Mechanical man support gets adequate to speed.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/435547/hands-on-pebble-gets-a-boost-with-lower-price-and-new-firmware.html

Posted by: colemangingaid.blogspot.com

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