As a dedicated watch nerd, I felt that smartwatches were, on the whole, awful. A watch was a watch – if made correctly and correctly handled it’s a miracle of technology in its own right. The movement, the face, the metals, the design – all of these came together in a beautiful whole. There was nothing extraneous in a good watch, and most watch nerds know this.
So when watches like the Pebble, the Galaxy Gear, and the Omate came out, I was skeptical at best. Who needed these little wrist computers. Am I Dick Tracy in need of constant contact with base? I have enough screens in my face, I don’t need my watch to ping me with new emails.
I was wrong.
What changed? The Pebble got so much better. Before the Pebble could bring you text messages and had intermittent connectivity to your email account. I have a huge email box and I get about 400 emails a day. I needed more email notifications like I needed a hole in the head. In fact I turned off my notifications on my iPhone and even removed the unread badge from the mail icons. I just couldn’t handle the crush.
So a watch that reminded me that I had 1,000 unread emails was not something I wanted.
Then the new PebbleOS appeared in November. People raved. I almost didn’t upgrade. I had put the Pebble on my desk, uncharged, and figured it would join my SPOT watches and Palm Pilot watch in the box o’ dead smartwatches. Then, on a whim, I plugged it in and updated. I went to the Pebble app to find out how to add my email inboxes again and found nothing there – just a tutorial on how to update my notifications to make them appear on the Pebble. While I was busy grump using about how stupid wearables were, these guys had made some major changes.
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