Hasta La Gadget!

Sony’s first go at the smartwatch mostly went unnoticed – a lot of people, myself included, had to be reminded of its existence when the Pebble made big waves for its huge Kickstarter funding success. But Sony’s not letting its early mover advantage go to waste, nor is it letting the SmartWatch brand die on the vine: Today it unveiled the SmartWatch 2, a successor to its original that improves specs and functionality in a number of ways.

The Sony SmartWatch 2 has competition from the aforementioned Pebble, and from fellow Kickstarter success MetaWatch Strata, which is another smartwatch category incumbent. If fact, so is Pebble, which means that this entire generation of devices is actually not the first, but may well be the first with the chance to actually gain some traction with the wider consumer market. Accordingly, a tale of the tape is definitely in order.

Platform support

Both the Pebble and the MetaWatch win this round, as they support both iOS and Android, while the SmartWatch 2 only works with Android phones. Sony has improved on the previous generation thanks to opening up support for any Android phones, instead of just Xperia devices, which makes this about 1000x more useful. And while the other devices support iPhone, there are limits put in place by the platform that make using smartwatches with iOS far less useful, though many of those are on track to change with iOS 7, which, for example, brings support for third-party app notifications to Pebble.

Battery

Battery life is going to be key to any kind of wide smartwatch adoption, and both Pebble and MetaWatch highlighted their multi-day power capabilities ahead of their device launches. Pebble says it can keep the watch powered for over a week on a single charge, and MetaWatch says its Strata will run for 5 to 7 days on a single charge – in practice, I’ve found both to be at the low end of their estimates, and the Pebble slightly under on some cycles.

Sony’s new watch makes some specific claims about its battery life, as well as making the biggest claim of all: The SmartWatch 2 has the “longest battery time for a smartwatch,” Sony says in its press release, a stat which it says has been verified by Strategy Analytics as of June 21, 2013. But the listed battery time expectations fall under those listed by its competitors; Sony claims 5 to 6 days with low usage, and 3 to 4 days with “typical” use. Testing standards may differ, but it looks like this will be right in the same general area as the competition when it comes to battery life overall, so don’t expect anyone to have a real distinct edge here.

Connectivity

The Pebble uses Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, as well as 4.0 Low Energy (LE) to connect to your device, which gives it some extra notification magic on iOS, while the MetaWatch Strata has Bluetooth 4.0 only. Sony’s SmartWatch 2 uses Bluetooth 3.0, which is interesting since it also claims the longest battery life without Bluetooth LE and with a much larger, color screen. The SmartWatch 2 also offers NFC, a trick neither of its competitors has, which does little beyond simplify the pairing process. Still, it’s an added convenience for users with NFC in their smartphones, and shouldn’t be discounted.

Display

SmartWatch 2 is the only one in the crop with a color display, boasting a 1.6-inch 220 x 176 pixel screen. The Pebble has a 144 x 168, 1.26-inch display, and the MetaWatch Strata has a 96×96-inch screen, which is 1.16-inches. The screens are all close, but there are key differences that users will want to consider. Both the Strata and the Pebble offer a nightlight LED for illumination, but lack any backlighting. This helps with power, but the Sony SmartWatch 2 with its colour display will be more legible in dark environments.

The MetaWatch Strata uses a reflective surface as the base for its screen, which results in it being virtually unreadable in certain lighting conditions, but the Pebble is mostly very legible, though the environmental light level detector is hit or miss. Sony claims that its colour display will be sunlight-readable, but generally speaking an e-ink screen like the one in the Pebble should fare better in that kind of environment.

Water resistance

The SmartWatch 2 is “splash-proof,” but that basically seems to mean you can wear it in a light rain shower or while washing your hands. Sony says not to wear it while showering, bathing, swimming, diving, snorkeling, fishing or doing “water related work.” Also, it notes that the watchband it ships with is neither water- nor splashproof. Basically, you can get it wet – but don’t get it wet.

The Pebble offers water resistance to up to 5 ATM, in both salt- and freshwater, which means you can take it swimming, or run in the rain. Pebble says not to use the watch in hot water, or while diving. The Strata likewise is rated to 5 ATM, or a submersion death of 165 feet. Both the existing devices win out in this category, for sure.

Apps

The Pebble has an API that’s being used by developers to build apps, but apps are coming relatively slowly, and offer fairly limited functionality. No doubt we’ll see more, but out of the box, the Pebble offers little beyond watch faces, notifications, and controls for your on-device music playback. MetaWatch does notifications, but email, calendar, Facebook and Twitter are still “coming soon” and there’s no word on third-party apps. The Strata does do music controls, and has weather, stock and calendar widgets, as well as an out-of-range alert so you don’t leave your phone behind.

The SmartWatch 2 offers call handling on the device (as does the Pebble) as well as a call log, notifications for calls, email, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and more. It does music remote functions, and offers calendar, weather, runtastic and new events aggregation. That’s out of the box, and there’s more planned. You can also remotely snap photos from your SmartWatch, control presentations and more using SmartWatch applications created by developers. Sony might have the edge in terms of app features, if only because it has more clout to convince and sign up developers.

Charging

It’s a small thing, but really important: the SmartWatch 2 uses micro USB to charge, while both the Pebble and the MetaWatch Strata use proprietary cables. That means added expense should you lose the single cable they ship with, and just general inconvenience. Sony definitely comes out ahead here.

Bottom Line

I don’t know if any of these smartwatches will be the one to break the mass market; more than likely, they won’t. But they show an evolution, and Sony’s at least trying to do better than the last time out, and has also clearly learned from the progress of its upstart rivals at Pebble and MetaWatch. Anyone other than early adopters might still want to hold off until OEMs devote and platform makers make more of an effort to actually support smartwatches, but at this point at least you won’t be in for an entirely frustrating experience if you pick one up.

Pebble’s smartwatch might have launched with limited capabilities, but the list of things it can do keeps growing. Now that the company has released firmware version 1.11, you can add a few more features to that list. The update brings notification and set time UI changes, multiple notification viewing, the wearer’s current speed measured by RunKeeper, swaps the music app’s next and previous buttons and squashes a few bugs. It also installs the Simplicity watchface on the device that’s sure to make minimalists happy. Sadly, there’s nary a hint of a new game in sight so you’ll have to make do with Tetris and Snake whenever the mood for smartwatch gaming strikes. To get version 1.11, launch your Pebble smartphone app and tap “check for FW update.”

David Fishman contributed to this report.

Filed under: Misc, Wearables

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Source: Pebble

Smartwatches are all the rage, and judging by the turnout and level of enthusiasm at the recent year one meetup for Pebble Kickstarter backers in San Francisco, there’s at least a passionate niche audience for the things. So it isn’t surprising to see them continue to pop up on Kickstarter. A new one called Agent has a few unique tricks, however, which its creators believe set it above the competition.

What the Agent has that others don’t is a combination of power management features and wireless charging. It has not one but two processors, for instance, one with higher performance capabilities and one extremely low-power variant to handle simple background tasks. There’s a new Sharp Memory Display that combines the advantages of both a traditional LCD and e-ink black and white, which is very power conscious, as well as wireless Qi induction charging with an included pad. Since it’s based on the widely-accepted Qi standard, however, it should work with charging pads from a variety of manufacturers.

The Agent is a refreshing change from other Kickstarter smartwatches in that it actually offers something new in terms of technical aspirations. The watch should get up to 7 days of battery life with its smart functions activated, or up to 30 days of standby in ‘watchface-only” mode. Even if that misses the mark by a bit, it should still beat the stated and actual battery life of existing devices like the Pebble. The gadget also features a 120HMz ARM Cortex-M4 processor, a 1.28-inch display, Bluetooth 4.0 (aka “Low Energy”), onboard motion and light sensors and an OS that allows developers to write apps for it using C# and Microsoft Visual Studio. It uses a Microsoft .NET runtime environment that Agent’s creators say will maximize memory and power efficiency, unlike with other smartwatches. The team says you’ll be able to start writing and emulating apps on the desktop as soon as the funding campaign is complete, which would be faster than the staged rollout of the Pebble SDK.

The creators of the Agent are Secret Labs, a team of engineers that has been building open-source products under the brand name Netduino since 2010, as well as smart home technologies, and House of Horology, a custom timepiece manufacturer that brings some real watch cred to the game. Early bird pledges get a pre-order for $129, where the final price is expected to come in at around $249 when the product ships late this year.

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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Get ready for a whole lot more Pebble. The smartwatch company just announced several software enhancements for the Pebble and a $15M Series A led by Charles River Ventures. Pebble is not going to sit around, scared of iWatch rumors. They’re plowing forward on their own accord and committed to providing the best platform possible for developers and consumers.

“We are pledging to support the developers hacking on Pebble,” stated Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky told me in an interview. “We want to make the Pebble the go-to place for developers.” And with that the company released its first SDK last month and is following it up today with several big improvements.

The cash injection will be used to increase the company’s software engineering team’s headcount and allow the company to scale to meet still-growing customer demand. CVS’ Partner George Zachery is joining Pebble’s board of directors, a move that excites Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky.

“George is the one that shared our vision of wearable computing,” Eric told me in a chat this morning. Several angels also participated in the round, but Eric indicated that Charles River Ventures funded the majority of the Series A. This round of funding joins the $375k the company previously received from four angel investors, including Paul Buchheit, a partner at Y Combinator, and Tim Draper of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. And don’t forget about the $10.3M Pebble raised on Kickstarter.

“The tremendous response we received from Kickstarter backers validated our belief in the value of a smartwatch as a wearable computer, but also in the value an open platform brings to truly personalizing the watch to their daily activities”, said Migicovsky, Pebble’s founder in a released statement today. “This new investment will help us build out the Pebble development ecosystem and deliver on Pebble’s extraordinary potential.”

Pebble is still working on fulfilling the 85,000 orders placed on Kickstater. To date 70,000 have reached early supporters. “It’s pretty crazy thinking there are 70,000 Pebbles out there,” Eric told me proudly. “Tens of thousands” of additional orders have been placed, Eric said.

The company is aiming for retail availability in four to six months.

Pebble also announced several software enhancements for its smartwatch today. The SDK, which the company appropriately calls the PebbleKit, enables third party apps to send and receive data from the smartwatch.

This two-way communication is a huge step forward for the smartwatch, allowing the watch to display a large variety of information including weather and sports scores or even act as a remote control for the phone itself. Until now, apps were limited to basic functions like just display a watch face or displaying a simple game of snake.

Pebble also released the Pebble Sports API, enabling developers to build GPS-enabled smartwatch apps similar to the RunKeeper app announced a couple of weeks back.

Since releasing its initial SDK back in April, Pebble states the kit was downloaded over 8,000 times, resulting in over 5,000 unique watchapps with 300,000 installs during the last month. Owners are clearly hungry for more Pebble features.

The Pebble was supposed to usher in a new era of productivity by strapping a communication device to our wrist, but the initial feature set was limited even with the first SDK release. However, Pebble is keeping at it and today’s funding announcement and software development release should result in a big harvest of fresh apps.

“Everyone is talking about wearable devices,” Eric explained. “We’re very happy that Pebble is a platform people can build on today.”

Wearables is the next big thing. There’s no denying that. Even if Apple skips the iWatch device, Google Glass and others are pushing forward the thought of wearable computing. But the Pebble is here today and developers have latched onto the platform, outing custom watch faces, games, and apps. With the Pebble, the future is here now.