Hasta La Gadget!

The year of 2013 wasn’t exactly the year of the smartwatch, although we did see some valiant efforts from Samsung in the Galaxy Gear, but come 2014 that might be an entirely different story. According to the IDC and their strategy analysts, they believe that 2014 could be the year of the smartwatch in which we can expect that smartwatch sales to grow by a whopping 500%! The report states, “According to our Wearable Device Ecosystems (WDE) service, global smartwatch sales will grow almost +500% in 2014. We expect technology heavyweights — such as Samsung, Apple, Sony, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Google — to expand the market significantly in coming years. The United States, Western Europe, China and developed Asia will be the leading territories to target for volume and value.”

As it stands there are numerous companies who have been rumored to be getting into the smartwatch business themselves. These companies includes Nokia, LG, Sony (again), and how could we forget the tech giants such as Apple and Google as well. So far the smartwatches we’ve seen are somewhat clunky and all pretty much offer the same features as the next, such as alerting the wearer of incoming calls and text messages, displaying time, using it as a fitness accessory, and etc., so it it will be interesting to see what companies such as Apple and Google have to offer in the wearable tech department that will set themselves apart from the competition.

Analysts Expect Smartwatch Sales To Grow To 500% In 2014 original content from Ubergizmo.

It seems like everyone is rushing to get its own smartwatch onto the market. Samsung has its Galaxy Gear that is compatible with certain Android devices. Sony has its own … Continue reading

Today, Pebble announced its app store and we are very happy about this news, this will make the process of finding and installing the applications more friendly for new users. When I tried the Pebble, I found it a little complicated to find good applications easily.

Right now, there are many places where you can download Pebble apps and watch faces besides within the Pebble app, the Google Play store and the Apple App store. PebbleBarn and MyPebbleFaces.com are the most popular third party app and face stores and they are recommended on the Pebble Support Center.

The Pebble App Store will go live early next year alongside the SDK 2.0 that was announced a month ago. According to the company, the app store will include 7 categories for Daily, Remotes, Games, Notifications, Tools & Utilities, Sports & Fitness and Watchfaces.  In each category, users will find a selection of the best apps.

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Pebble App Store Announced original content from Ubergizmo.

Pebble today revealed a new project aimed at education in which it will donate over 4,000 smartwatches to higher ed schools including Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Virginia Tech and many more. The donation is worth over $600,000, according to Pebble’s own estimates, but it’s clearly designed to make sure Pebble and the Pebble SDK are in the hands of the next generation of top-tier developers before they ever even hit the job market.

Now that Pebble has released its official app creation SDK, and unlocked many of the dormant features of the platform, it needs developers to get on board and start pumping out creations that really show off the potential of wrist-worn computing to push the Pebble’s appeal beyond the early adopter and gadget loving crowd who’ve already purchased one, and into the mainstream. Software sells hardware, and developers build software. In school, they’re often more willing and able to experiment with platforms that don’t necessarily have a proven ability to pay the bills, hence why it’s a good idea to give these things away to engineering students as development hardware.

Pebble only recently hit the tipping point in terms of having stock on hand in stores and online, but current inventory levels seems strong, and there’s also a sale on right now offering a $10 discount on new units. As 9to5Mac’s Seth Weintraub noted on Twitter, this sale and education donation could be taken as evidence that the company is looking to offload stock ahead of some kind of refresh.

Pebble donating watches blog.getpebble.com/2013/12/16/peb… + Big $90 Sale 9to5toys.com/2013/12/15/peb… +CES = Update coming soon—
Seth Weintraub (@llsethj) December 16, 2013

Pebble is also offering a special discount through its institutional partners to anyone who wants to order a personal device through them, it notes in its announcement today, which could also be taken as an indication that it’s offloading on-hand stock. This is a key time to watch the wearable computing manufacturer, since at the very least it’s clear it’s through the frenzy and supply catch-up process that it faced while Kickstarting the project and quenching initial demand.

The Pebble smartwatch is a device that has been quite popular in the gadget world for several months now, and its developers continue to roll out updates that help improve the product on a regular basis. If you’ve been forced to turn off your Pebble when you would prefer not to receive notifications, then you won’t need to after downloading the new PebbleOS v1.14 update as it features a Do Not Disturb mode that blocks updates from being shown on the Pebble for a set amount of time. (more…)

Pebble Update Brings New Features, Better iOS Device Connectivity original content from Ubergizmo.