Modern Mythologies

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[modernmythologies]

Some Thoughts on the Pebble 2, Pebble Time 2, and the Pebble Core

Pebble’s latest Kickstarter campaign wrapped up on June 30th, with over 66,000 backers and securing $12.8 million in financing. This time, the company introduced three new devices: the Pebble Time 2, the Pebble 2, and the Pebble Core. Together, these devices speak to a newfound (hardware) focus on health that compliments the Pebble Health platform; yet, at the same time, they evince a (much needed but nevertheless surprising) backtracking apropos of the much-lauded smartstrap initiative the company introduced just last year with the Pebble Time. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that they've made a lot of progress in a (comparatively) short period of time, especially with the release of Pebble OS 4.0 on August 30th (I'll go into Pebble OS 4 in more detail in a later post).

In many ways, 2015’s Pebble Time was a misstep.

In many ways, 2015’s Pebble Time was a misstep. The original Pebble was conceived as a simple augmentation of the smart phone’s communicative functions, with a specific focus on offloading nofications to the user’s wrist in order to receive them instantly and discretely. Thus, it seemed like a natural enough next step to evolve the watch’s communications functionality by introducing Timeline for glancable calendar events and other time-sensitive information, and enabling voice-recognition for replies and interaction with the user-interface.

Although Timeline is a great idea, it still has a lot of untapped potential. And while quick access to time-sensitive information from calendars and other apps (ESPN for real-time sports scores stands out here) is extremely useful, notifications that take over the entire screen and don’t disappear until you hit the back button leaves a glaring privacy issue created by Pebble’s most stand-out feature: the always-on, low-power e-paper display. This may, perhaps, start to change with the introduction of the Pebble Time 2's larger screen, and Pebble OS 4's ability to display 'pop-up' event reminders on the watch face (it remains to be seen whether notifications will be able to make use of this 'pop-up' interface element).

Most importantly, Pebble missed the plot last year, with the Time. The Apple Watch, introduced to the world (but not released) at the end of 2014 (not long before Pebble stated its Kickstarter campaign) emphasized the its capacity as an integrated fitness wearable (with integration into the emerging Apple Health platform), which quickly became a necessary part of the smartwatch feature-set. Of course, Pebble caught up relatively quickly with the introduction of Pebble Health in December 2015, which also brought automatic sleep tracking made possible by its long battery life, but Pebble Health also made it much more obvious that a heart rate monitor was missing.

The Pebble 2 and the Time 2 seek, foremost, to remedy this oversight.

Consequently, the heart rate monitor built into both the Time 2 and the Pebble 2 was pretty much inevitable, even if it has simultaneously obliterated any commerical viability that the TYLT VÜ Pulse hoped to have. Between-the-lines, It is not impossible to read these hardware additions as a tacit admission that the smart strap idea was mostly a bad one.it is not impossible to read the introduction of a built-in heart rate monitor (along with the GPS capabilities of the Pebble Core) as a tacit admission that the smart strap idea was mostly a bad one, or at least misguided as far as Pebble’s implementation was concerned. The Pebble Core, moreover, is a more elegant solution than a smartstrap with GPS functionality (especially given how ugly the GPS smartstrap contender is). Meanwhile, the Pebble 2 really improves upon the Classic Pebble’s design by swapping its plastic front for a glass one, yet still nodding to Pebble’s iconic beginnings in a way that feels fresh. It’s a good fit for the lower end “Sport” tier, and is in line with, but sleeker than, some recent fitness wearables.

With the introduction of the Core and built-in heart rate monitoring, that really leaves the Pageré FitPay as the only truly useful smartstrap. But, really, NFC should also be built into a watch like the Pebble and it no doubt will be at some point in the not-to-distant future, if Pebble lasts that long.

[modernmythologies]

"Innovation"

There has been a lot of speculation in recent months about iPhone hardware "innovation" (or lack thereof). Ever since Apple's Q4 earnings intimated (however subtlety) that it had reached so-called "peak iPhone", the solution proposed by analysts and armchair analysts alike (assuming there is a difference) has increasingly become louder and more united: Apple needs to "innovate" in hardware. Nobody can provide any evidence that novel hardware changes drive sales, but everyone seems certain that it will.

Apparently, the Retina display, TouchID, 3D Touch, the motion coprocessor, True Tone, and Apple’s yearly camera upgrades (that most recently introduced Live Photos) were not extraordinary hardware innovations that set the tone for required smartphone features.

While Samsung experiments with wacky curved screens and bendable displays that lend very little practical value to their devices, Apple continues to show not stagnation but disciplined restraint and focus in the iPhone's core design, introducing features that enhance the user experience and otherwise lay the foundation for input methods that extend the repertoire of user interactions.

The principles behind this focused design were (once again) in evidence at last month's WWDC keynote; they were especially noticeable against the background of the watchOS 3 introduction in the sense that the two devices -- iPhone and Apple Watch -- now complement each other in a much more obvious way.

The principles behind this focused design were (once again) in evidence at last month's WWDC keynote, especially against the background of the watchOS 3 introduction.

With every passing year, Apple uses iOS as an opportunity to ask, "what is an iPhone?" And every year, Apple's (software) answer gets more refined. Because the company is so adept at ignoring the increasingly louder chorus of voices representative of Wall Street's answer, Apple's software updates continue to be exciting and purposeful refinements. If we're being truly honest with ourselves, the iPhone has changed very little from one iteration to the next (hardware iterations, to oversimplify, happening every two years): the iPhone 3G/S was not that much of a departure from the original, the 5 not excessively different in style from the 4. The 6 shook things up quite a bit, but it was still recognizably an iPhone. What immediately comes to mind here is the way in which the iMac exterior design seemed to settle-in once Apple really nailed it with the iMac G5 in 2004. Other than build materials and a thinness that makes your kitchen utensils jealous, the design is unchanged in its fundamentals. Let it be said that what is missed in the hubbub surrounding the iPhone's alleged "boring" design is that there is a lot more to hardware design than its exterior. Nevertheless, the place where the truly tangible change happens -- and which, year after year is never boring, to the extent, for argument's sake, that anything Apple does is actually "boring" -- is in iOS updates.

With every passing year, Apple uses iOS as an opportunity to ask, "what is an iPhone?" And every year, Apple's (software) answer gets more refined.

With the iMessage revamp, alongside a new emphasis on VOIP calling in the phone app, Apple seems to be putting a renewed emphasis on the phone as a communications device. The majority of these communications no longer take place over traditional voice channels and so iMessage provides the user with myriad ways to convey meaning over text: from animated speech bubbles, to handwritten messages, to opening up the iMessage app to developers.

In the messages space, Apple is skating to where the puck is going. It's fair to say that Apple has positioned the new iMessage around emerging trends in instant messaging, from Facebook’s Messenger to Whats App, with even a bit of Snapchat thrown into the mix. Coupled with the new VOIP API, which vastly improves the calling experience, for both incoming and outgoing calls, the iPhone has renewed emphasis as a communications hub: the centre of your digital communication.

"Breakthrough internet communicator", indeed.

How the Apple Watch and iPhone now complement each other

When we consider this in the context of watchOS's original design aims, apparent in watchOS 1 and 2's obsessive focus on wrist-based, intimate communication involving sharing of heartbeats, taps, tiny drawings, and a dedicated button to launch into communication with favourite contacts, I can't help but wonder whether the rethinking of the watchOS evident in watchOS 3 involved 'offloading' -- or at any rate de-emphasizing -- these ideas around intimate and personal communication into the Messages app where they belong, and where they can ultimately better serve the watch in its function as a conduit for quick interactions and replies. In this sense, the bold, if somewhat -- at least in hindsight -- misguided, ideas around personal communication that underpinned the first two iterations of watchOS, were not entirely discarded; rather, they were reworked and extended into iOS 10. An opportunity presented itself between the release of the Apple Watch in April 2015 and the (beta) release of watchOS 3 to reconsider the iPhone and the Apple Watch not as two separate devices, but as functioning together, the former as a tool for personal communication, while the latter is relieved of this burden in order to focus on what it does best--keeping us connected to location- and time-sensitive information around us, in the here and now.

Apple has simplified the entire communications experience with the watch, making it function much more effectively as a companion to the iPhone.

But wasn't the iPhone always, first and foremost, a communications device? Wasn't that the whole point of a phone, that erstwhile one-trick-pony from which the iPhone derives its name? If Apple had to "reconsider" the iPhone as a tool for personal communication, it was perhaps because what is most obvious sometimes is the hardest to bring back into the foreground and to contemplate in itself. The failure of the watch to catch on as a communications device was perhaps the necessary catalyst, the background against which the role of digital communication could be foregrounded and considered as such, on its own terms.

And yet, watchOS 3's newfound focus on apps, which, in the form of dock-based glances, has actually made it better at quick-reply based communications from message notifications. Scribble, even in beta 1, is fast and reliable and works across the entire platform: whether you receive notifications from Messages, Facebook Messenger, Whats App, etc. scribble makes quick replies easy and fast, especially in those (frequent, in my experience) times when the canned replies don't give you what you are looking for. Even in the beta, even on so-called "old hardware", it really works. Apple has simplified the entire communications experience with the watch, making it function much more effectively as a companion to the iPhone, the information conduit to the phone's communication hub.

The final question here is whether the repurposing of the Apple Watch's hardware 'communications' button will be one area where Apple focuses its redesign efforts with the inevitable 2nd generation of the device. Apple has always been a company that places great emphasis on hardware and software integration and given that the software has shifted away from the original hardware vision, it's possible that the next hardware revision might then reflect this change in the design itself.

On the other hand, the use of the hardware button to quickly launch the dock still makes sense, if not even more sense than its function in the first two versions of watchOS, and nothing too drastic has changed in terms of its purpose: it remains first and foremost a shortcut button; only the specific shortcut that it directs the user to has changed.

And so the next chapter of Apple "innovation" begins, as it so often has in the post-Macworld expo era, with the software that will power the company’s devices, both old(ish) and new, for the next year.

[modernmythologies]

OK Brian Fung, I’ll take the bait:

Pebble is giving the pink slip to roughly a quarter of its workforce, in a sign that all is not well at the smartwatch maker. The layoffs come at a tough time for the wearables industry, whose fitness trackers and other connected devices haven’t been selling as well as early enthusiasts may have hoped, analysts say.

Earlier this month, Pebble cut the price of its Pebble Time and Time Round watches by $50, foreshadowing a similar move by Apple this week to also lower the price of its Apple Watch by $50. It’s unclear whether the price cuts will spur consumers to buy more devices.

This is categorically the wrong way of looking at both the layoffs and Apple’s recent price drop. It’s like when, in September 2007 Apple dropped the price of the original iPhone by $200 (the iPhone was announced in January and released in June 2007). Early adopters were pissed, but nobody assumed that the price drop must have been because the iPhone wasn’t selling. In fact, up to that point, the whole discourse was around how Apple was crazy to think they could charge $600 for a phone. Apple went on to sell 6 million iPhones in its first year which is almost as many Apple Watches in just under a year since its release, by most accounts. Apparently technology writers find that insignificant.

It’s true that the whole smartwatch thing — and god how I loathe the word — hasn’t really been ‘nailed’ (whatever that might mean), particularly, at least in the rose coloured glasses of hindsight, how Apple allegedly ‘nailed’ the iPhone on the first go around. Which I guess you could argue, to the extent that people like to argue pretty much any point of view whether justified or not, they kind of did, but at the same time consumer expectations for a cellular phone were pretty low compared to how, with the Apple Watch in particular, the expectation seems to be that it will do something totally mind-bogglingly, expectation-defyingly magical.

The reality is that the original iPhone was clunky: it worked only with EDGE, which is laughably slow (and watching it render a webpage in mobile safari seemed to put the whole WWDC 2008 audience on… edge), it had no App Store, and was thus extremely limited to the functionality Apple built into it: Email, Safari, iTunes, Calendar, etc. Probably its most ‘life-changing’ feature was the one that people seemed to understand the least, or at least were the least enthused about: the iPhone as a “breakthrough internet communicator”, a major upgrade from the “baby internet”. In 2016 the iPhone is barely a phone. But there is little doubt that it is a breakthrough internet communicator, up to and including iMessage which has all but replaced SMS with internet-based messaging.

So Apple re-invented the phone in 2007. But did they manage to re-invent the watch in 2015? You would be crazy to suggest that the Apple Watch doesn't redefine the (digital) watch. This redefinition largely goes unnoticed because it’s a watch; it’s designed for quick interactions.

Watches are the polar opposite of phones: the less time you spend fiddling with them, the better the watch.

What largely annoys me about these articles — and I’ve read quite a few since the recent Apple Watch price drop — is in the first place the assumption that ‘success’ is somehow measured in hundreds of millions of units sold (instead of, say, a more modest but still decent millions) and, furthermore, that if a product isn’t totally revolutionizing your life in unfathomable ways then it isn’t worthy of sustaining a market or of even existing. It seems stubbornly blind to the fact that watches aren’t phones. In fact, they are almost the polar opposite: the less time you spend fiddling with it, the better the watch; whereas the phone demands to be the centre of (your) attention. This doesn’t mean that watches can’t be smart, it just means they have to be focused. And if there is anything truly disappointing about the Apple Watch, given the wide range of opinions I’ve read on the subject, it’s that a company known for its focus could release something so decidedly unfocused. I’m not suggesting it is necessarily true that the Apple Watch is an unfocused product, but that’s what people tend to be saying about it. From where I’m standing there are at least two things that are true: (a) technology journalists are trying really, really hard to find an Apple misstep somewhere to fit the “Apple Will Fail Without Steve Jobs” narrative that refuses to die; (b) technology enthusiasts who put away their watches when they started using mobile phones don’t understand the first thing about watches.

In terms of Pebble, let’s just put something in perspective.

Pebble is such a small company that “a quarter of its workforce” is 40 people, which is barely a ripple within a ripple within the Pacific Ocean (viewed from Mars) in comparison to the kinds of layoffs that happen at normal companies.

To the extent that we can include Yahoo under the rubric of ‘normal company’, their February 2016 round of layoffs, 15% of their workforce, resulted in 1,600 job losses. In 2014, Microsoft laid off a veritable town of employees: 18,000 to be exact, with more following in 2015 and 2016 (Ironically, of course, Yammer was some kind of community-building thing or whatever, but I digress).

It is certainly not a foregone conclusion that Pebble will be around a few years from now. They have been slow to develop a comprehensive vision for the smartwatch outside of notifications and watch faces.

In the big scheme of things, Pebble’s layoffs barely achieve that status of a hamlet. It’s like if in 1976 Steve Wozniak had a huge falling out with that other Steve because Woz just used his shitty steampunk watch to time travel to 1998 and noticed that Steve refused to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of the Apple II team at the iMac introduction and then, back in 1976 Business Insider (don’t ask how they managed to invent clickbait in 1976, but it probably had something to do with a Sports Almanac) reported that Apple had ‘parted ways’ half of its workforce — Ron was out of the picture at this point, of course… or maybe, because we are talking about a dystopic timeline, he never got a chance to enter the picture. Dun dun dun.

Sorry, I really hate that fucking watch.

It is certainly not a foregone conclusion that Pebble will be around a few years from now, but their ‘problems’ (for lack of a better word) have less to do with “time running out for smartwatches” than it does Pebble being slow to develop a comprehensive vision for the smartwatch outside of notifications and watch faces. One notable area that they underestimated was in health tracking, but they are catching up in that area pretty fast. Probably not fast enough, but fast nonetheless. Their software, however, still needs work to get it to a point that the ordinary consumer can feel comfortable setting up and customizing the watch: it remains the ‘desktop linux’ of the smartwatch; the smartwatch for computer nerds. This isn’t a problem if you are a computer nerd, of course, but it is a problem if you want to sell watches.

[modernmythologies]

A woman who posted a photo of her prize-winning Tim Hortons cup on Facebook is speaking out after someone spotted the security number on the rim and claimed the $100 prize ahead of her.

And she says she can’t believe one of her 900 Facebook friends would do that to her.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

[modernmythologies]

John Gruber:

It seems very reasonable to me that iOS should check for a trusted Touch ID sensor. But, if the sensor can’t be trusted, clearly the whole phone should not be bricked — it should simply disable Touch ID and Apple Pay. And, obviously, it should inform the user why. Putting up an alert that just says “Error 53” is almost comically bad.

At first I was going to say, “yes, but…” and follow that “but” up with what I assumed to be Apple’s intention of protecting email accounts and other private documents — especially in the enterprise space — from intrusion. However, in the time it took to post the link I was like, “duh! the passcode has always been an — unavoidable — backup to the TouchID sensor.” And so I truly began to understand Gruber’s point (I can be a bit slow — but better late than never, right?). So now I say, “Yeah. WTF Apple?” 

But then again, I wouldn’t ordinarily trust some random repair shop with my Touch ID. Maybe that makes me a sucker. Or at least it did until Error 53 restored the balance. Now you guys are suckers for trying to save a few bucks.

[modernmythologies]

I’m going to tell you why we will not see an OS X tablet within two years — in fact, I’m going to tell you why we will never see an OS X tablet — but first let me just outline the reasoning behind why Dennis Sellers thinks there will be an OS X tablet within two years:

1. Annual tablet shipments are declining. 2. [Even though?] the iPad Pro was pitched by Apple as a laptop replacement. Therefore, 3. “A Mac tablet…could re-invigorate sales for Apple.”

If you’re feeling a little lost as far as the logic of this argument goes, take some solace in the fact that you’re among friends. Truth be told you are aboard the train of thought of a guy who spends way too much time reading Apple blogs, most of which are more concerned with pumping out content than worthwhile thoughts, but who’s keeping track? Everyone’s got a deadline. There are so many assumptions between the lines here that it’s difficult to know where to begin. So let’s do the boring thing and begin at the beginning.

You’ll notice that I added the words “Even Though” followed by a question mark in square brackets to statement number two. This is because the only way I could make any sense out of the logic of the article is if the decline in annual tablet sales — I neglected to mention that Sellers points out that the quantification of this decline has reached “double digits for the first time on record in 2015”, that is, coinciding with the first year, or rather, taking into account the period between when the iPad Pro was released and Apple’s Q1 earnings report, coinciding with the first 2 months of the iPad Pro’s availability — anyway, the only way I could make any sense out of this logic is if there was a more firmly established link between the decline of tablet shipments and the iPad Pro’s release. We might call those little words I added in those seemingly innocuous square brackets, “Insidious Assumption #1”. You can do that if you want. You have my permission.

I’m not going to waste all that much time pointing out the obvious, but let me just get it out of the way: there is, emphatically, no connection between the decline in tablet shipments and the release of the iPad Pro. I mean this in a very specific sense, so don’t pull out your fucking business graphs on me just yet or whatever. My specific sense is this: Apple did not release the iPad Pro in November in order affect Q1 tablet sales numbers. For one thing, if they really wanted to affect holiday tablet sales so badly — and I don’t think Apple cares half as much about that kind of boring shit as Wall Street and its idiotic ‘analysts’ — they might have shipped it sooner, so that more apps could be designed more carefully for the iPad Pro. Hell, if we’re going to go this far down the rabbit hole of speculating on ways Apple coulda shoulda woulda made the iPad Pro more compelling in the first few months of its life, we could even add that a version of iOS more finely tuned to the iPad Pro’s 13” screen wouldn’t have been remiss. Oh, and then there’s the fact that it’s called the iPad Pro, not the iPad Great Christmas Gift for the Gadget Lover In Your Life to Help Increase Our Q1 Results. The list goes on.

Apple makes devices for people, not for technology fetishists.

We might pause here to recall that the original iPad ran a quaint little version of iOS 3 (iOS 3.2) whose only (visually) distinctive feature was the ability to change the background picture in Springboard. It didn’t even have iOS 4’s sorry excuse for multitasking. If memory serves, and do correct me if I’m wrong, iOS 3.2 was only available for the iPad and was released not long before iOS 4, which in turn took a little while longer than its iPhone variant to find its way onto the iPad with iOS 4.2.1.

The 1st generation iPad, of course, which I owned up until the spring following the release of the iPad Air 2 when I finally upgraded, was hardly the technological heavyweight that the iPad Pro is (I love understatement, by the way). At a technological level, it really was basically just a giant iPhone 4. But it’s big screen, of course, allowed for a number of new use-case possibilities. Thus, even here we see the release of a new computing paradigm in hardware first, with software catching up a little while later.

Of course, the past is not always a sure indicator of the future, but I will say that when the iPad Pro was announced at Apple’s September event, it immediately struck me as a (long) play for the future of iOS and the iPad. In other words, if I’m accusing Dennis Sellers of anything in this response to his article, it is of having a lack of imagination. (Sorry Dennis, I'm sure you're a really nice guy. Our disagreement is purely philosophical.)

Among what are arguably the many things that Apple pitched the iPad Pro as, the first thing was definitely not as a laptop replacement. That came later. On the contrary, the iPad Pro was introduced by Phil Shiller with the question, “Why make an iPad with a bigger display?” His answer was that the iPad had been, from the beginning, “a magical piece of glass you hold in your hands” that can “do things that a notebook can’t do”. Specific functions that were emphasized included watching TV shows and movies that are “more cinematic”, playing games that are “more immersive”, and being able to use a “full size software keyboard” that can, of course, be magically transformed into a piano keyboard (with the right software, of course, and which you definitely can’t do on a notebook — believe me, I tried in an early version of Garageband years before the original iPad). All-in-all, the iPad Pro has, incredibly, more pixels than a 15” Retina MacBook Pro.

The point here is that although the iPad Pro was touted later on by Tim Cook as a laptop replacement (at least for him), and that the Smart Connector allows for a laptop-like experience in the form of, primarily (at least for now), the attachment of a keyboard without the limitations of bluetooth (battery, on/off switch), the iPad Pro is nevertheless at this point in time a leap in hardware capability that allows for the future potential of iOS (or perhaps whatever iOS might become in terms of the possibility of an iPad-specific fork of the software). It doesn’t, then, make a lot of sense to think in terms of shoe-horning OS X into a tablet when a devices such as the iPad Pro (and possibility the rumoured iPad Air 3 and beyond) seem to be consciously positioned by Apple as paving the way toward an entirely new computing paradigm. 

With the new multi-tasking capabilities of iOS 9, the iPad is starting to come into its own as a desktop-class computing device. There are no doubt annoyances or at any rate weird design decisions, chief among them is, of course, the ‘drawer’ of apps that are accessed from the split-screen mode and which are a giant pain in the ass to scroll through and seem to have no organization whatsoever. I’m willing to bet, however, that, like the multitasking screen in iOS 8 that had evolved into something that made more sense by iOS 9 — up to and including the ability to access handoff apps from somewhere other than the lock screen — that this ‘drawer’ is a kind of placeholder, a stopgap that is ‘good enough’ until a truly fluid and viable way of interacting with this apps is re-thought and developed. The same might also be said of the sharesheet interface, which has allowed for an entirely new and extremely useful way for apps to interact with and share data between one another but which still needs some time to develop.

OS X is obviously not going anywhere any time soon, but iOS is where the future of Apple’s operating system lies and the iPad Pro is the hardware that allows for this transition. The desire for, let us call it, instant functionality-gratification that this OS X/iPad hybrid seems to indicate views the iPad Pro as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Moreover, there is obviously no guarantee that putting OS X on an iPad is going to magically increase the sales or desirability of the device. I am still one of those people who is firmly in the “nobody upgrades their iPads every year” camp. I know a number of people who are still using an iPad 2, but I also see a wide range of generations of the device used by commuters everyday on the subway. Sure, that’s anecdotal at best and all those other disclaimers that I feel obliged to add, but it seems to me undeniable that the devices are still out there and being used, which means that eventually people may want to upgrade.

On the other hand, for those inclined toward this desire for an ultra-portable version of OS X, there is always the MacBook Air.

[modernmythologies]

The Toronto Star:

The problem for their users is that some of these apps may not be accurate. A recent University of Toronto study of pedometer apps Runtastic, Moves and Accupedo suggests “the most commonly downloaded smartphone applications are neither valid nor consistent in measuring step counts.

What confused me about this article is that I’ve been using Runtastic for years and have yet to discover its alleged “pedometer” functionality. It turns out, Runtastic has a separate pedometer app, not a functionality built into its main app. It’s hardly how the (main) app is used or what it is known for. A better study might have involved the step count capabilities of HealthKit via Apple’s M7/M8/M9 motion coprocessor and Google Fit. I’m not saying it would necessarily yield more accurate results, but these are the systems that I suspect are relied on by users for health data such as step count.

[modernmythologies]

This smart ‘module’ (it’s not really a strap, after all) looks like a promising attempt to bring much desired heart rate monitoring to the Pebble Time/Steel via its ‘accessory port’. Since this port doubles as a charging port, TYLT has wisely opted to bundle Qi wireless charging into the package. I’ve never bothered with backing Kickstarter projects before (I bought my Pebble at Best Buy like a normal person), but I’ve backed this. I won’t go so far as saying its a great idea (a great idea would be Pebble building this basic health connectivity into the watch like every other smartwatch out there and that will probably happen sooner or later) but it’s the kind of thing I’d like to add to my Pebble (and, judging from the fact that as I write this the Kickstarter is at $73,199 out of its goal of $100,000 with 28 days still to go, so do quite a few other Pebble owners).

Are there drawbacks? Absolutely. Aside from the obvious design drawbacks (speaking of smartstraps in general here for the moment), there is still the distinct possibility that this heart rate monitor is not going to have compatibility with the apps I like to use to track my fitness — Runtastic being the main one. Of course, the Vü Pulse is going to come with a companion iOS app and will pair with Apple's HealthKit, so I may be able to work around this. It’s also possible that Runtastic will be compatible with it — if the app can extract heart rate data in real time from HealthKit — or will build compatibility into it to coincide with its already-existing Pebble compatibility. All-in-all this is a minor quibble.

Interestingly, the kinds of design problems I discussed in my review of the Pebble Time/Steel, which I see as being an inevitable shortcoming of the accessory port model continue to stand; however, I’m willing to give it a try based on the convenience of not having to strap a second heart rate monitor to my arm or chest. On the other hand, this little module highlights the design decision Apple and others made in including a heart rate monitor at the hardware level: there is an inherent inconvenience to attaching a module to your watch, arm, chest, etc. that can get in the way when (as happens from time to time) you’d rather do anything else than exercise. I don’t plan to wear the Vü always attached to my watch — regardless of whether or not it will have a black/grey colour scheme. It is inherently ugly in a way that is entirely unavoidable and which I do not fault the creators for. I think they made all the right engineering decisions — the material allows it to be put on and removed relatively easily, the wireless charging mitigates the inconvenience of having the accessory/charging port occupied, and, I guess, for those philistines who gleefully destroy all of their devices' aesthetic qualities by inexplicably wrapping them in protective cocoons — what value are you hoping to derive from your device by avoiding all scratches or scuffs at the expense of screen quality, feeling and aesthetics? “But when I take my precious out of its protective wrapping it is PERFECT LOOKING!” “Uh. OK?” — they’ve got that angle covered, too.  But unless they were to make one out of the same material as my Gunmetal Pebble Time Steel, which would obviously be woefully impractical, I have no interest in permanently turning my watch into rubbery abomination — even then I’d still have to think about it.

That’s ultimately the compromise that the smartstrap/accessory port architecture forces users to accept. So much for no compromises — am I right, Pebble?

[modernmythologies]

My Time with the Pebble Time

At the end of the day it’s just a watch, and that suits me just fine. Actually, I think it is most of its appeal. I don’t think it feels flimsy or cheap (although that star animation when you change watch faces drives me nuts), the glass face is high quality (it survived a few days of work where I was seemingly incapable of not slamming it against steel shelves, appliances and almost anything within arms-length that looked capable of scratching the shit out of glass), and I honestly do not care if the aluminum bezel gets a bit scratched now and again (although it seems to have a suspiciously supernatural ability to self-heal).

If you must know, I bought it for the following reasons: I needed a watch; I didn’t want to get just any old watch; I couldn’t afford an Apple Watch; But I wanted better battery life anyway; I liked the idea of an always-on display (although this is becoming less and less of a necessity, truth be told); it was on sale at BestBuy (I would not have paid full price for it); I wanted notifications on my wrist and I live by my calendar so Timeline was appealing, too.

Is that enough to understand my point of view? What’s that? You want more? One of the strange things about Pebble, which leads me to suspect that right now they are straddling a very fine line and risk the possibility of not being all that successful in the long run (but who knows? this isn’t a prediction, it's a supposition and circumlocutory at that, indicating that I, too, am straddling a very fine line) is the sheer lack of any solid cohesion between software and hardware. I do recognize, however, that this could change at any time, provided Pebble doesn’t go bankrupt first.

Smartstrap? More Like… Dumb… crap.

Take, for example, the whole “smartstrap” idea. It’s not an entirely bad idea (although the jury is still out on whether it is a full-fledged ‘good idea’), intended to make up for some of the shortfalls or at any rate ‘strategic limitations’ of the shipping hardware (lack of a heart rate monitor being a glaring omission, but admittedly one that comes with battery-life constraints and a dramatic increase the price of the device). The problem as I see it is that Pebble seems to have made the inexplicable (but hopefully non-binding) decision to not take control of this hardware endeavour, opting instead to leave the creation of smartstraps (like its apps before it) to the user community.

A quick perusal of the section of Pebble’s message board devoted to smartstraps will no doubt suffice to show you what an intellectual wasteland it is. This thread is a literal cornucopia of dumb ideas that nobody in their right mind should care about. Who wants to walk around with solar panels strapped to their wrist? Or vigorously shake their wrists in order to generate enough kinetic energy to charge the battery for 0.01 x 10^-800,000 percentage points. And the battery of the Pebble is already downright superhuman compared to other smartwatches anyway. It’s not a problem in need of solving, people. So leaving smartstraps in the hands of hobbyists seems to be a recipe for obscure and stupid ideas that are the antithesis of marketability and usefulness. I’m not saying that Pebble should prohibit tinkerers from tinkering; I’m only saying that they should take the lead by producing decent, viable smartstraps that people might actually want to use.

By the way, “Exhibit B”, if you’re keen on the whole courtroom metaphor, would undoubtedly be this fucking thread. 

Maybe there is a larger problem here (literally and figuratively). Maybe what the Pebble smartstrap forum is really indicative of is that smartstraps are, on the whole, a mostly terrible idea, rather than a not entirely bad one. Consider that almost any strap worth connecting to your watch will probably need its own battery power (almost certainly in the case of a decent heart rate monitor) and will be unavoidably bulky. Consider this monstrosity — and this is only for a (once again) almost entirely useless solar panel charger, which, thankfully proving that most people do have a little bit of sense when it comes to things they want on their wrists (unlike Woz, by the way, but we already knew he was a little bit crazy), did not achieve its Kickstarter goal. Of course, I’m not (again) suggesting that smartstraps are necessarily an entirely stupid idea. Undoubtedly there are legitimate uses for them, especially in the health space. Certainly, for instance, Apple is interested in their applicability, especially concerning the need for FCC approval and what not for some (medical) devices.

The problem here is that the smartstrap revolution will most likely require an integration of strap hardware and watch hardware at a more sophisticated level than merely the addition of an interface port and a random sample of basement dwelling mouth-breathers armed with soldering irons. 

Software? More Like… No Fair!

Maybe at this point it sounds to you like I’m shitting all over the Pebble Time. If you think this is the case, you seriously need to stop being so goddamn sensitive. It’s a watch, first of all, not Abraham fucking Lincoln. However, in the first place, the fact of the matter is that there are some pretty good watch faces for the Pebble Time and even some quality apps developed, largely, by its indie developer community. And so many of them are free, nearly free, or merely ask for a small donation. 

But there is also a lot of garbage. This is apparently to be expected of any app eco system — God (and by “God” I obviously mean “Tim Cook”, whose face will any day now replace the venerable Ben Franklin on your silly-looking $100 bills) knows there is a shitload of crap in the iOS App Store — but it took me longer than it might on the App Store to sift through the garbage. I think I finally settled on some quality stuff, but damned if I don’t crave a little more: an Amazon app, perhaps, to control my horrendously stupid idea —“horrendously stupid” only because I do this with the full knowledge that Amazon intends to eventually take over the world, raise their prices, and populate it with Amazon Dash buttons — full disclosure: I just made that up) to subscribe to all of my consumable household necessities; maybe a Plex controller that actually works properly or that doesn’t require a PhD in Computer-Human Interaction to figure out; an honest to goodness Transit app for proletariat like me who, as I already mentioned, can’t afford an Apple Watch (which, by the way, is the same price as an entry-level iPad Air 2 (!!!) in Canada thanks to our crappy dollar and some kind of futures-investment-releated witchcraft)… or a car for that matter. Seriously, there is not one transit app on the Pebble that actually works in Toronto so far as I could tell.

[Update: OK, there is one that I finally figured out how to use after deleting it, re-installing it and deleting it and re-installing it again (it’s a long story) but it only gives me the travel times from my current location for two pre-set destinations (work and home) and does not allow me to check when the next buses will arrive at the stop closest to me.]

To be fair, Pebble has been partnering with companies like Yelp, and ESPN to bring some native app experiences to the watch and I don’t see any reason why this shouldn’t continue. Let’s raise a glass to 2016 bringing in better apps and better...

iOS Integration

In case you’re wondering, this is where the “No Fair” of the former heading came from. The iOS integration is pretty terrible. It doesn’t entirely ruin the experience, at least for me, because at the heart of it I was looking for a watch with some basic connectivity to my phone; but after receiving a number of notifications — and culling my phone’s notifications so that only the important ones get pushed to my watch — I began to desire a way to make a quick reply to the occasional message without having to — gasp — denegrate myself by reaching into my pocket for my phone like some kind of 2014-era plebeian. Pebble is working on this, though, through a if not clever at least necessary and maybe a bit cumbersome workaround. 

Most of the iOS integration problems are, of course, not Pebble’s fault — in fact, my wish, which I’ve already dutifully filed with the “never going to fucking happen” department would be for Apple to create something maybe called CoreWatch for better integration with other smartwatches (if nothing else I’m sure the Apple Watch could compete on its own merits, without also factoring in its superior connectivity — but obviously this is a pipe dream so let’s leave it at that). 

On the other hand, given that the Pebble/iOS ecosystem is rife with “companion apps” called “Smartwatch Pro” (seriously, there are like 30,000 of them with the same name) that push some of the data from your phone like GPS, Twitter, Battery status, and the like, I don’t understand why the Pebble app itself can’t function in this way. Sure, it would not solve the problem of replying to iMessages and SMSs, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a Pebble-made solution for, say, turn-by-turn navigation or maybe even transit. Seriously, if there’s a reason why the Pebble app can’t function as a relay of some of the functionality of the iPhone, please let me know. I’m interested.

2016 could be an interesting year for the continued development of Pebble’s firmware — we’ve already seen the introduction of Pebble Health at the end of 2015, which is a pretty good start — but so far there seems to be some missed opportunities apropos of Pebble’s apparent insistence on leaving much of its core functionality to its developer community.

Did I mention that I use it as a music/podcast remote for my phone? That’s been super useful.

Breaking into the Mainstream?

The Pebble does what I want it to do; the always-on screen is a plus (although, again, I’m not sure how much it will ultimately matter) and so is the 5-7 day battery life. But is 2016 the year that Pebble breaks unambigiously into the mainstream? I think unless Pebble makes a radical change of direction with its software strategy, I doubt it. But with things like Timeline and Health, they’ve certainly started to lay an interesting foundation for the future. At least for the foreseeable future, the Pebble Time will remain a somewhat niche device for nerds and hobbyists and people like me who, I don’t even know what the fuck I am. Hell, every time I have it on, people ask me if it’s an Apple Watch. Obviously these people are insane not to know what a real Apple Watch looks like. Shame on them.

But I digress. Whatever I represent in terms of a ‘market’, it is undeniable that I have a nerdiness to me that allows me to feel my way through unfamiliar UI waters (even if it takes a few tries) and so, while the Pebble was not entirely stupidly annoying to set up, there were some app settings screens (accessed from the Pebble app itself) that were downright hieroglyphic and made me feel as though I were communicating with a strange and possibly malware-infected alien race. You have to fiddle with things (I never got the third-party Plex remote to work, even after setting up a dynamic domain name in order to use another app), you have to sometimes enter personal data into text boxes that look super sketchy, and sift through apps that look like malware. I’m not saying they are malware, but we are generally trained to see spelling mistakes and sketchy design as indicating ulterior motives. If some of the stuff I download and use on my Pebble had the same kind of landing page — spelling mistakes, weird icons — on the App store (or even the Mac App store for that matter) I would definitely shy away from it.

I am tempted to describe the app experience (including configuration) as the “desktop linux” of smartwatches. I am, of course, exaggerating but it is illustrative of the night and day difference between Apple’s approach to the smartwatch and Pebble’s. My time setting up the Pebble Time was time consuming to say the least, whereas, since Apple’s watch apps are essentially, largely built-in to the apps you use every day on your iPhone and the app and eco-system does not have to work with Android, there is not only a kind of (relative) ease to setting up the Apple Watch the way you want it with the apps you want, but an all-important (in my view) consistency to the user interface that controls the device.

In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky described Pebble watches as the Swatch of smartwatches:

At Pebble we’re very confident in being the Swatch of smartwatches; we’re operating in the realm of fun, creative, colourful, affordable, during [sic] and long-lasting watches. You don’t have to treat it as a priceless heirloom - you can beat it up, and you can take it for a swim.

This largely gives me faith that Migicovsky, however minimally, has at least the outline of a vision that suits the Pebble (which is definitely more than I can say of some CEOs). Once I had it set up the way I wanted, it felt to me, which is one of the things that works well for it, like the Timex or Casio digital watches I had as a kid. They were to me largely functional, but I also liked having this thing strapped to my wrist with all its modes and shit. They were not for me some kind of high-fashion accessory but they were an accessory that served and important function for me regardless.

This has never been more true of the Pebble now that it has a wonderfully understated and simple design — neither flashy nor ugly. Of course, at $199 it is hardly in Swatch territory just yet as concerns pricing, and it does make me feel oddly protective of the thing, even if I didn’t pay full price (thanks, Boxing Day). For $200 it should last for years (I’m not one that needs to upgrade every time something new comes out which will no doubt make future product reviews difficult), and already the ‘down’ button, which I apparently use a lot, has started to feel stiff and less ‘clicky’ (although it still works just fine… so far).

So do I expect big things in 2016? I’ll say that I’m interested in seeing where Pebble OS goes next and I’m interested in how the smartwatch might begin to appeal to a more mainstream audience — this appears to be one area where health tracking is leading the way but nevertheless, I don’t find myself seeing people wearing Fitbits everywhere like I see them using iPhones everywhere (this could also be because I am lazy and never go to the gym).

But ultimately, who knows what the future holds? There’s always the risk that Swatch might decide to become the Swatch of smartwatches. Just kidding. That’s one thing that’s never going to fucking happen. 

[modernmythologies]

Apple Watch 2 investigation: What's coming on the next version

The Apple Watch 2 rumour mill is bubbling under nicely and you can be sure that in a secret design lab somewhere in Cupertino, the next Apple Watch sits under lock and key. But if you were Tim Cook for a day, what would you demand from the next incarnation of the Apple Watch? Essential…

If I'm in the future I should be able to videoconference from my wrist. The next Watch has got to have a front-facing HD camera.

Whyyyyyy? Why does everyone[1] seem to want a fucking FaceTime camera on the Apple Watch? I can't think of a more unecessary, battery destroying feature... At any rate, you're not in the future. You're in the present. Deal with it.

[1] Sorry, I should have clarified. By "everyone" I mean clueless nerd commentators. I have faith (however naive) that the general population does not care about whether or not their prohibitively expensive Apple Watch has a FaceTime camera on it.