Life With A Pebble Smartwatch

About 2 months back I received a Pebble smartwatch for winning the GUTS 2015 Hackathon. Since then I’ve worn the Pebble pretty much every day - so I thought I’d write a small post about my experience so far living with a smartwatch.

Before I received the smartwatch, I was already wearing a watch daily, it was a Rotary automatic skeleton watch (image here). Automatic watches recharge as you wear them so it was in my best interest to wear it daily. Thus the change over to a Pebble wasn’t particularly jarring in terms of “having something on my wrist”.

One of the first things I had to do with the Pebble was disable notifications at night. My phone constantly lives on silent (no vibrate), but by default the Pebble will vibrate (rather powerfully) at any time of day, for any notification. So I set up a quiet period of 12am to 10.30am where I won’t receive notifications to my watch. With this quiet period set up, I don’t have to worry about being woken up in the night by a spam email or facebook notification. I don’t wear my watch at night (just put it on my bedside table) so I haven’t tried out the Pebble as an alarm (although I imagine in a couple years I will be using a smartwatch as a silent alarm).

In daily life, the smartwatch has been GREAT. The ability to read texts and emails without having to whip out my phone from my pocket every 30 minutes means that I’m looking at my phone during the day far less. It lets me focus on whatever I’m working on while still alerting me that something might need my attention.

The only down side I’ve found is that I sometimes compulsively check new notifications, which can appear to others that I just URGENTLY need to check the time. This is probably just due to my own lack of discipline in waiting to look at new notifications.

So, there you go. Just a couple quick thoughts on my experience with the Pebble smartwatch. Perhaps in the future I will do a more extensive write-up, after some further use.