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| Photo: Wired.com |
LAS VEGAS — Pebble is finally shipping the first batch of its much-hyped e-paper watches. No, really.
The company announced today at CES that it will send the first batch of 15,000 watches to its faithful customers on Jan. 23. The other 70,000 Kickstarted units will ship “later.” Sometime after that, Pebble will start taking orders from folks who didn’t back the original Kickstarter campaign but want one of the cool smartphone-connected watches.
Pebble has pushed back the shipping date several times, most recently in December, when it went all Grinch on us and watches wouldn’t ship before Christmas. When we asked Pebble’s head of operations Rahul Bhagat what he would have done differently, he said the company wouldn’t have raised people’s expectations quite so high. It’s a bit late for that, though.
Pebble originally set out to Kickstart $100,000 to produce 1,000 smartwatches. It wound up getting orders for 85,000 units while raising more than $10 million from more than 68,000 backers. Because of high demand and additional funding, Bhagat says Pebble could make the watches waterproof, responsive to ambient light, and Bluetooth 4.0-capable. They also have a magnetometer.
Pebble designed the smartwatch’s hardware so it could download updates wirelessly, like most smartphones these days.
“We’ve future-proofed it,” Bhagat said. “We’ll be able to create a good ecosystem for apps on the Pebble,” that could include sports and healthcare apps. IfThisThenThat integration is coming soon, allowing Pebblers to get personalized notifications about music and the weather.
Pebble comes in red, orange, gray, black and white. The clear model displayed above will be given away as part of a social media sweepstakes to one lucky winner, who can flip it upside down to admire the watch’s innards.
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The whole family of Pebble smart-watches. Photo: Daniela Hernandez/Wired
Peek inside the Pebble. Photo: Daniela Hernandez/Wired
Source: wired.com
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