Hasta La Gadget!

Pebble has just updated its smart watch, complete with a much-improved interface and new watchfaces. But the exciting thing here is the addition of a game you likely remember from the days when your cell phone’s screen wasn’t much different from the Pebble’s itself – Snake.

The interface changes include a menu that now puts your selected watchface at the end of a sequence of pushes of the back button no matter where you are, and the up and down buttons on the right-hand side now switch between watch faces, so you don’t have to dig through a menu to find them. Pebble also revealed in a Kickstarter update last week that it has made improvements behind the scenes to improve the text rendering engine with this firmware, laying the groundwork for its upcoming SDK.

Pebble has also improved ambient light detection on the smart watch, which is good news since the auto-backlighting feature has been one of the device’s major flaws since launch. Hard to tell so far just how much of an improvement firmware 1.9 provides in that area, but it would be hard not to improve at this point.

The Snake game is the highlight of the show, since it’s our first hint of how apps other than watches might work on the Pebble. Controls are fiddly as you might expect, but it is most definitely Snake, running on your wrist, and it’s meant more as a tech demo of what kind of limited capabilities will be available to developers in the first version of the SDK. I’m not likely to sink great hunks of time into playing it, but I’m glad it’s there. The Snake game sits in the Pebble’s main menu, and installs from the Watchfaces section of the iOS/Android app, so it’s clear the company will have to do yet more interface optimization when it’s ready to ship a proper app library.

For those of you who have received your Pebble E-Paper watches, and for those of you who are about the get it soon, here’s some great news for you. Pebble is planning on releasing its Watchface SDK to developers during the 2nd week of April. This SDK will allow developers to create their own watchfaces for the Kickstarter prodigy. Pebble has seen some extraordinary watchfaces released by the Pebble developer community, like a watchface that lets you play “Snake”, so by releasing this SDK and garnering more developer support, Pebble can be brought to the next level.

Pebble says that the watchface SDK is still a work-in-progress, and that it’s mostly just a “proof of concept”. It wants developers to note that the watchface SDK will not allow them access “to the accelerometer (or magnetometer), or communication between watchfaces and smartphones (among other deficiencies).” There’s a good possibility that 99% of the APIs in the SDK will change “as we move towards a full blown SDK”.

Pebble also plans on releasing a firmware update next week as well. The firmware version, 1.9, helps improve user experience. Your watchfaces are now at the bottom of the stack, meaning if you keep pressing the back button, you will find your way back to your watchface. Also, by pressing the up and down buttons on the right side of your Pebble watch, you can alternate between the watchfaces you have installed. There are also “under-the-hood” changes that allows developers to more easily and quickly display text on the watches.

The new watchface SDK will open a new chapter for Pebble E-Watches. Pebble provided a few examples of watchfaces developed through the SDK, including a watchface that tells time in Dutch, a watchface with a dragon that blinks every minute, and a watchface that shows Mario (from Super Mario) grabbing a coin every minute.

Over 40,000 Pebbles E-Paper watches have been made so far, and over 85% of Kickstarter backers who ordered the long strap version of the watch will receive their watches next week. Pebble is making good progress in getting its watches out to all of its 70,000-ish backers. If you haven’t ordered the watch yet, you can pre-order it now through Pebble’s website for $150.

[via Pebble]

New Watchfaces coming to Pebble soon is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

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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Earlier today, iFixit posted up their teardown walkthrough of the Pebble smartwatch, and noted that the device didn’t support Bluetooth 4.0 — only Bluetooth 2.1. However, there seemed to be some confusion between the specific chips used in the watch, as Pebble has responded to the teardown, saying that Bluetooth 4.0 is indeed supported.

The confusion seems to be warranted, though, as Pebble notes that while the chip used in the Pebble smartwatch doesn’t normally support Bluetooth 4.0, the company had the firmware of a different chip flashed on the ones used in the watch in order to support Bluetooth 4.0. The situation is definitely a little confusing, but Pebble says that this was done to speed up orders.

Pebble posted on Reddit the details of the situation, and note that the Pebble features a PAN1316 chip from Panasonic that uses Texas Instruments components. The chips that TI sent to Panasonic were labeled CC2560, which doesn’t support Bluetooth 4.0. However, Pebble had Panasonic simply flash the firmware of a CC2564 in order to get the latest Bluetooth support.

However, while the smartwatch does, in fact, come with Bluetooth 4.0 support, Pebble hasn’t yet switched it on in the watch’s operating system, but it seems they’ll be doing that sometime in the future, most likely with an update. It’s unclear why they’re holding back 4.0 support, but it could be a number of reasons at this point.

Pebble says smartwatch includes Bluetooth 4.0, despite iFixit’s claim is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The Pebble smartwatch was all the rage on Kickstarter, and we eventually got our grubby little hands on the thing at CES back in January, with our full review being posted up last month. The amazing folks over at iFixit have also ended up getting their hands on the device, but they went about it in a different manner, completely tearing it apart to see what’s inside.

Since the watch doesn’t have any visible screws anywhere, you have to pry the outer shell apart, and there’s certainly no lack of adhesive holding the device together. iFixit even notes that you won’t be able to take it apart without compromising the glass display. Once it’s pried off, however, you get an all-access pass to the components inside.

By removing the lone ribbon cable that makes its way through the device, you can get better access to the internals that are deep down below the e-ink display. The ribbon cable alone houses all four buttons, three LEDs, and the Bluetooth antenna, which makes it nearly impossible to replace an individual component, according to iFixit.

In the end, iFixit noticed a few key points when tearing apart the little device. First off, it’s pretty much impossible to open up the Pebble smartwatch without busting the glass display, since the watch is held to together with strong adhesive to make it waterproof. Also, the low power consumption of the device decreases the frequency that you’ll have to charge it, which increases the life of the battery in the long run, with a possible life of 10 years, according to iFixit’s estimates.

Pebble smartwatch gets torn down, not much to it is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.