iPhone Compatible 'Pebble' Wristwatch Tallies Nearly $4 Million in Kickstarter Presales
Kickstarter is a popular place for wild ideas to gain some traction, but sometimes an idea clicks with so many people it's possible to wonder why no one thought of it before. Such is the case with the Pebble digital wristwatch.
It uses an e-paper display, similar to the screen on the Amazon Kindle, and connects to the iPhone (and Android devices) via Bluetooth. Pebble uses vibrating alerts to tell the wearer of incoming calls, emails, calendar alerts, Facebook and Twitter messages, weather alerts and more. It also has an extensive SDK for developers and its own "Pebble watchapp store". It will also be waterproof enough to swim with, but it will not be a dive watch.
The company behind the watch even has experience with smart watches. Pebble has been making a BlackBerry-compatible watch called the inPulse, and is a graduate of the Y Combinator startup incubator. It has now received pledges for $3.8 million from 26,500 backers on Kickstarter for a watch that will retail somewhere around $150 when it goes on sale this fall.
An article by Bloomberg notes that Kickstarter wasn't Pebble's first choice for raising funds. He tried to raise money via traditional venture capital firms, but "few investors were interested in betting on a hardware startup, or dealing with the headaches that often come with manufacturing goods." However, Kickstarter seems to have worked out very well. The watch is the most funded Kickstarter project ever.
Pebble told
MacRumors that it's treating Kickstarter as a discounted pre-order mechanism, and once the funding period closes in a month it will continue taking orders on its website. US buyers can preorder a Jet Black Pebble watch via Kickstarter for $115, while foreign buyers will pay slightly more to cover shipping.
Update: Pebble has now passed the $4 million mark.
Popular Stories
Game emulator apps have come and gone since Apple announced App Store support for them on April 5, but now popular game emulator Delta from developer Riley Testut is available for download. Testut is known as the developer behind GBA4iOS, an open-source emulator that was available for a brief time more than a decade ago. GBA4iOS led to Delta, an emulator that has been available outside of...
The first approved Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator for the iPhone and iPad was made available on the App Store today following Apple's rule change. The emulator is called Bimmy, and it was developed by Tom Salvo. On the App Store, Bimmy is described as a tool for testing and playing public domain/"homebrew" games created for the NES, but the app allows you to load ROMs for any...
Last September, Apple's iPhone 15 Pro models debuted with a new customizable Action button, offering faster access to a handful of functions, as well as the ability to assign Shortcuts. Apple is poised to include the feature on all upcoming iPhone 16 models, so we asked iPhone 15 Pro users what their experience has been with the additional button so far. The Action button replaces the switch ...
A decade ago, developer Riley Testut released the GBA4iOS emulator for iOS, and since it was against the rules at the time, Apple put a stop to downloads. Emulators have been a violation of the App Store rules for years, but that changed on April 5 when Apple suddenly reversed course and said that it was allowing retro game emulators on the App Store. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel ...
iOS 18 is expected to be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history. Below, we recap rumored features and changes for the iPhone. iOS 18 is rumored to include new generative AI features for Siri and many apps, and Apple plans to add RCS support to the Messages app for an improved texting experience between iPhones and Android devices. The update is also expected to introduce a more...
Top Rated Comments
I think he was talking about the phone.
----------
I always have bluetooth on during the weekends when I am home driving around, battery lasts the same.
I have bluetooth on all the time (paired to my headset). Has barely impacted battery life (I'd say 2-3% thru the whole day). I would of thought that this watch would use the BT 4.0 built-in to the 4S which would draw even less power.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Somehow this just sprang to my mind when I saw this ugly thing. :mad:
I was talking about the battery of your iPhone.
----------
Yes, precisely so. If it were BT 4.0, I'd be a happy camper.