Pebble Time review

Notifications and built-in features

The Pebble Times comes with a selection of pre-installed apps, which handle most of the basic functions you would expect of a smartwatch. The Notifications app is the most prevalent, ferrying all relevant notifications from phone to watch. You can choose to mute specific notifications on the watch alone if you don’t want your wrist to vibrate with every Twitter mention, for example.

The built-in music controller can skip tracks and adjust the volume from a wide selection of music apps, letting you keep your phone in your pocket whilst listening. Spotify users note: you need to turn on Device Broadcast Status in the Spotify app’s settings to see track names appear properly on your Pebble.

The Alarm function can be used for one-off or repeated wake-up calls, although heavy sleepers might not be stirred by the timid vibrations. There’s no speaker to fall back on.

Potentially the most useful built-in feature of the Pebble Time is that pin-hole microphone, allowing you to dictate replies to SMS, WhatsApp messages and more. We found the dictation was generally reliable, although you only get a six-second window to dictate your reply. Irritatingly, dictated replies show a ‘Failed’ warning even when they have been sent on our Android phone, making it impossible to know which replies have actually been issued without taking the phone out of your pocket, which rather defeats the object. Voice isn’t available for iOS users as yet, either. Both issues should be rectified soon but it’s disappointing at present.

Apps and watch faces

The Pebble app for smartphones hosts the app store, where you can download a huge variety of watchfaces and other apps for the device. Many of these are carried over from previous generation Pebbles, and so only serve up a black-and-white interface.

There’s literally a very healthy selection of apps to choose from, with fitness fanatics well served with apps from most of the major names, including RunKeeper, Runtastic, Strava and others. There’s a library of rudimentary games to pick from too, although those rigid buttons don’t really lend themselves to action-based games such as Flappy Bird.

We were also disappointed to find several apps failed to work on our Pebble Time. An app that’s meant to send directions from Google Maps on your phone to the smartwatch failed to deliver, as did another that promised to remotely start a Strava activity session. These might be early API/developer wrinkles that await the iron, but it still left us feeling flat.

On the plus side, the eight-app limit of previous Pebbles has been lifted, so you can squeeze in as many as the memory will take, we’ve been told that’s up to 50 but we’re just trying to confirm this now. Many apps also demand you download a companion app for the smartphone.

Conclusion

We’re largely enamoured with the Pebble Time. The design is respectable, the key features work reliably, the app store is well stocked and the battery life is beyond compare with most smartwatches.

A few software glitches leave it exasperatingly short of a five-star finish. We’re hopeful Pebble and app developers will winkle those out given time, but you do get the sense that Pebble felt the pressure of its self-imposed Kickstarter shipping deadline and pushed out a product that maybe could have benefitted from another few weeks of testing.

Would that stop us buying one now? Absolutely not. Even with the flaws, the Pebble Time is a superb, no-fuss smartwatch at an exceptionally good price. If Pebble can sort out the kinks, we’d happily revise our score upwards.