Hell.
Pebble made my favourite smart watches. They were somewhat open, and the company understood the nature of the technology better than any of the mainstream alternatives. Well, at least they used to get it, until they started moving towards turning them into glorified fitness trackers, which is probably why the company is now being purchased by Fitbit.
So, no more Pebble and, worse, no more support for those that own (or, technically, paid for the right to use) a Pebble. If it were an old fashioned watch I’d grumble a bit about reneging on warranties but it would not prevent me from being able to use it. Thanks to the cloud service model, the watch will eventually stop working at all:
“Active Pebble watches will work normally for now. Functionality or service quality may be reduced down the road. We don’t expect to release regular software updates or new Pebble features. “
Great. The most expensive watch I have ever owned has a shelf life of months, after which it will likely not even tell the time any more (this has already occurred on several occasions when it has crashed while I have not been on a viable network). On the bright side (though note the lack of promises):
“We’re also working to reduce Pebble’s reliance on cloud services, letting all Pebble models stay active long into the future.”
Given that nearly all the core Pebble software is already open source, I hope that this means they will open source the whole thing. This could make it better than it has ever been. Interesting – the value of the watch would be far greater without the cloud service on which it currently relies.
Address of the bookmark: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-2-time-2-and-core-an-entirely-new-3g-ultra/posts/1752929
