Pebble is dead and hardware buttons are going with it

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/27/16936922/pebble-smartwatch-hardware-button-physical-controls

by allenleein • 8 years ago

107 86 8 years ago

Maybe for screen equipped wearables we'll see buttons disappear. Though I doubt keyboards on laptops and game controller buttons will be replaced any time soon. Consider the move from tablets to laptops and paper in schools.

PaulBGD_• 8 years ago

I just bought a Pebble 2 SE and it's absolutely phenomenal. I'm hoping over the next few months an open source OS comes out, otherwise I'll have to look for a worse alternative.

floatboth• 8 years ago

https://rebble.io will eventually become usable. But honestly even the stock firmware is fine. Like, it still runs any applications you want.

Fnoord3• 8 years ago

There's 2 main alternatives for smartwatch OS:

For Pebble there is Rebble [1] and for touchscreen smartwatches there is AsteroidOS [2]. You wanna look at the first although most functions of the stock firmware should remain working. They'll for sure stay running till June 2018.

As for the subject (I skimmed through the article), I think its true. I own a Pebble 2 as well and I'd love to buy a smartwatch with similar features (7 days battery life, music control, customisable watchface, stepcounter, calendar, alarms, Google Drive app, workout app, 2FA app, to-do list app, and 4 hardware buttons or some inventive way to be easily usable during sports (the scrollwheels don't cut it)). I haven't found any (nevermind the price of the Pebble being very competitive). Mind you, I did find some devices which were very good at some of these features.

[1] https://rebble.io

[2] https://asteroidos.org/about/

asciimo• 8 years ago

Battery life keeps me from buying a successor to my pebble. The Samsung Gear watches are alluring except for daily charging.

lettergram• 8 years ago

God I miss my Pebble (had a Pebble Time 2)... I took it off when it was bought and haven't put it back on (pull of the bandaid).

It was pretty much better than any of my friends watches. We used to trade to try them out. I hate the iWatch because the bettery died all the time and I hate the touch screen (I love dials too). The android wear was a bit more my style, but again battery life sucked and I didn't like it wasn't eInk.

Honestly, give me an option to pay double for a pebble and I would. The Pebble Time 2 was the best watch I've ever owned bar none.

SyneRyder• 8 years ago

Wait, you had a Pebble Time 2? And you didn't wear it?!!

The Time 2 is legendary with Pebble fans, as it was cancelled and never sold commercially, and Kickstarter backers were given refunds. Only a handful went out to employees & reviewers:

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/12/7/13864804/p...

I still use my Pebble Time Steel and love it, and I'm not sure what I'll move to next. The Fitbit Ionic is meant to be the successor (and it has hardware buttons too, despite what the Verge article says). But it doesn't have a microphone, and I use that a lot on my Pebble. It's useful for dictating SMS replies when I'm out running, or for setting quick reminder alarms with Snowy (Pebble's version of Alexa / Siri).

dTal• 8 years ago

I took it off when it was bought and haven't put it back on (pull of the bandaid).

That seems needlessly masochistic. I was bought a Pebble Time Steel for Christmas just after the FitBit buyout. I use it with Gadgetbridge, never even touched the official app. It's wonderful, and the hardware shows no signs of slowing down.

Fnoord3• 8 years ago

The hardware will run for a long time. Consider that you recharge once a week. That's about 208 recharges in 4 years. Or 416 recharges in 8 years. That's the lifetime I expect a normal watch to last while the batteries either had to be replaced or it was "self-winding".

jstanley• 8 years ago

I took it off when it was bought and haven't put it back on

I don't think I understand this.

If it was such a great watch why did you not wear it? Why did you take it off immediately after it was bought?

jonasvp• 8 years ago

Judging from context I would guess he/she meant: "I took _the watch_ off when _the company_ was bought"

dingo_bat• 8 years ago

Classic verge bullshit where they assume everything apple does is innovative and "the future". If you look at the general market you will find things like note8, which adds a hardware button, pixel2 which adds a hardware squeeze detector, gear s3 which adds a physical circular wheel.

I promise you verge will soon publish an article indignantly explaining how every touchscreen needs a notch on the top that looks ugly and obscures viewing area.

ElKoji• 8 years ago

The author purposely ignores Garmin, who is one of the biggest player in Smart watches, after Apple and among Samsung and Fitbit. They make a strong case of buttons over touch screens, mostly because athletes prefer them, buttons are easy to operate without looking at the screen and the only way when the screen is wet, something that is meant to happen even if you don’t swim at all. But he even ignores the fact that Fitbit themselves always use a combination of touch screen and buttons, including their newest watch The Ionic. I hate when a headline is fabricated this way.

tallanvor2• 8 years ago

I sort of consider real fitness watches, like the Garmin line to be in a different category from smartwatches. My Fenix 3, especially when paired with a chest strap feels like an actual tool for me, whereas the smartwatches I've seen and tried were more like toys.

I don't think I can ever switch back to a touchscreen watch until there's one that still has the physical buttons, but also lets you disable the touchscreen functionality during workouts - beyond the difficulty getting the touches to register, sweat has enough minerals that the screen sill start registering false touches, which can wreak havoc during a workout when it starts pausing things!

And, of course, with my Fenix 3, I normally charge it less than once a week unless I need to use GPS on it. Touchscreen smartwatches simply don't get that type of battery life.

scarface742• 8 years ago

Capacitive touch screens don't work well if your hands are sweaty. I couldn't understand for the life of me why Garmin ever introduced a capacitive touch screen watch.

I thought my old Garmin GPS watch was amazing when I first got it around 2010.

edraferi• 8 years ago

See also: FitBit Blaze, which also has real buttons

DoofusOfDeath• 8 years ago

The author purposely ignores Garmin, who is one of the biggest player in Smart watches, after Apple and among Samsung and Fitbit.

How did you conclude that it was intentional?

ulisesrmzroche• 8 years ago

What’s the proof athletes prefer Garmin over Apple?

ballenarosada• 8 years ago

Op says that athletes prefer hardware buttons

TechLeadVic• 8 years ago

Use a Casio G-Shock with bluetooth if you want control your music. 2 year battery time too.

gravypod2• 8 years ago

I've never heard of these. Do you have any links to store pages? Everything I find seems to be crazy expensive/discontinued.

shakna• 8 years ago

Casio watches tend to be "crazy expensive", or more than everyone else anyway.

So far as I can see G-Shocks range from $200-$1100 [0], which is about normal for a Casio. The one with bluetooth, the G'MIX, is around $350, [1] which sounds about right for them (their famous calculator watch is 50+, even though its fairly basic).

[0] https://www.bevilles.com.au/watches/g-shock

[1] https://www.bevilles.com.au/casio-g-shock-bluetooth-g-mix-se...

scarface742• 8 years ago

I lost the ability to just plug in my headphones and skip between songs on my iPod while drifting off to sleep on planes.

Where has he been for the last 10 years? You've always been able to use headphone buttons to skip between songs on iPhones/iPod touches.

My wife just started teaching fitness classss. She uses this to control music while she is teaching:

https://www.amazon.com/Satechi-Bluetooth-Button-iPhone-Samsu...

microtonal2• 8 years ago

Small footnote: the iPod Touch comes with Earpods without controls.

WhyNotHugo• 8 years ago

If the intention is to skip songs and change volume when listening to music, can't you just use the buttons on your headphones?

I understand that there may be value for hardware buttons, but the example given by the author is a pretty much covered by simple headphone buttons.

jakobegger• 8 years ago

Not if you have Airpods...

djsumdog• 8 years ago

I still have a Pebble Steel. I hope the services get open sourced, because if not, it will never work with another phone after the cut-off in July. It's one of the huge disadvantages of how we distribute software today; the bastardization of the Linux software repository into these stupid non-mirrorable/non-free app stores.

It's also sad no phone has slide-out keyboards any more. I'm sure there are several people who would take the thickness trade-off. If a major manufacture produced a physical keyboard phone, there probably would be demand. One of the earliest HTC android devices, after the Evo 4G, was a version with a slide out keyboard. Now the only option seems to be BlueBerries.

icebraining2• 8 years ago

No argument regarding the app stores, but for Android you can (usually?) make a backup of the APK and then move it to another device.

Alternatively: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/nodomain.freeyourgadget.gadg...

ocdtrekkie5• 8 years ago

Funny story: I did this a lot when I had Android, but offloaded the APKs to my computer for storage purposes. This became a lot buggier and irritating when Android switched USB handling from mass storage (like a flash drive) to MTP (like a digital camera). I once tried to talk to Dianne Hackborn about this difficulty at Google I/O, and the moment I mentioned 'APK file', she said Google 'didn't support piracy' and walked off.

That day I learned backing up your own apps was 'piracy'.

RainaRelanah5• 8 years ago

One of the earliest HTC android devices, after the Evo 4G, was a version with a slide out keyboard.

The first Android phone (let alone the first HTC Android) was the HTC Dream, with a physical keyboard. Back in those days Android didn't even have a software keyboard -- you had to use the physical keyboard.

By the time the Evo 4g came out, hardware keyboards were already considered second class citizens. The Evo Shift 4g had a worse screen, worse camera, and a worse CPU than the Evo 4g despite being released a year later.

Thankfully a few companies have picked up the UMPC market, with products like the GPD Win and the Gemini PDA. I don't need a hardware keyboard on my phone, but I do need a portable device with one for emergency SSH sessions while on the road.

ocdtrekkie5• 8 years ago

I continue to retain the belief that hardware vendors intentionally killed keyboard sliders by making them worse phones than their non-keyboard counterparts, then claiming they didn't need to build them because nobody wanted them. They sat a full year behind in hardware specs in most cases.

stmw• 8 years ago

Does on touchscreens help with driving more engagement metrics and/or advertising screen time?

RainaRelanah5• 8 years ago

I doubt it. It's more about consumer perception. Hardware buttons aren't futuristic, touchscreens are. And smart watches are largely a futuristic niche product. Pre-purchase consumers want better specs and often neglect the practicality of those decisions (battery life of OLED panels and touchscreens, usability of a 1 inch touchscreen interface, etc).

ignobleParting10• 8 years ago

Pebble was a terrible device, and riddled with horrble design decisions.

From the word “go” you knew Pebble was trying to lock you in, register and count you as a user, log demographic information about you, and tether that information to unique device identifiers.

You could not simply use Pebble as a watch, if so desired. Pebble enforced specific behaviors onto the user.

For example, you couldn’t just like the looks of the watch, buy it, take it out of the box, wear it, and use it to tell time. No.

Open the box, and the watch directs you to an internet connection, so it can phone home to the mothership. Really? Really?

To me, that reeks of exploitation, and the goal was never to provide people with a good watch that does stuff. Open the box, and push people around. Make them clap their hands and sing along.

Sorry guys. You made serious mistakes. People notice. Good riddance.

_jn• 8 years ago

Turning off Bluetooth and uninstalling the app (or stopping it from running in the background) after the initial update worked just fine when I tried it.

Not sure why you’d want that, though.

The vast majority of users will buy a smartwatch expecting it to be smart, so giving them instructions for how to enable those features seems logical to me.

lock you in

Wait, how?

demographic information

...which is optional?

ignobleParting10• 8 years ago

  after the initial update

See, there’s your problem.

  Wait, how?

The decision to ship the watch in an inoperable state is coercive.

  optional?

Still, this is a dark pattern. Forcing the conversation represents an inductive stance. Going in blind, the user has to judge whether they should yes-to-death (at their own risk) a lengthy sequence of interview questions, to explore further, or attempt to reject the possibly optional activities, and feel the tug of a leash later on. The preferred behavior is obvious. Do you defy the preference? What ramifications will that have?

Unboxing it, you find there are strings attached, puppeting your actions.

RainaRelanah5• 8 years ago

I am extremely skeptical that this is the reason Pebble failed. Most consumers are not privacy oriented, and all of the major competitors in the market require the same activation process that Pebble "forced" onto users. If you wanted a watch that doesn't forcefully tether you to a phone, you didn't want a smartwatch.

ignobleParting10• 8 years ago

That’s funny, because I’M a consumer, and I’m TELLING you that’s what I want in a smart watch. I guess I just don’t exist. Hilariously, neither does the Pebble.

wvenable10• 8 years ago

It's a smartwatch -- the watch didn't have a full OS installed when you first turn it on. It's meant to be paired with a phone. If you just want a watch without smart features then just get a watch. This complaint is ridiculous and nobody who owned a Pebble would take it seriously.

Pebble failed because they needed better marketing, took VC money so they needed to grow fast, and focused on unnecessary hardware addons that nobody wanted (smart straps).

There are still plenty of people buying out the remaining Pebble hardware. It was a good device and pretty good ecosystem.

TeMPOraL3• 8 years ago

and focused on unnecessary hardware addons that nobody wanted (smart straps).

Frankly, for me the "nobody wanted" part was the fitness focus - I initially got my Pebble precisely because they didn't try the sports angle like everyone else, but instead went for a hacker-friendly device and architecture. I'm not even sure if they put much resources into smartstraps - they just added and described a communication protocol. It wouldn't surprise me if this was just repackaging of a debugging functionality they needed.

It's hard for me to say where things went wrong. Maybe they just tried to grow too fast.

ignobleParting10• 8 years ago

If you’re selling me something, and you call it a “kind-of-thing” I want it to be an actual thing first and a “smart kind of thing” second.

Pebble was kind of not a thing. A little too smart for its own good.

iveqy• 8 years ago

Buttons on smartwatches isn't dead. There are just a bit more niche: https://www.kronaby.com/

Johnny5552• 8 years ago

Touchscreens are awful on a device that you might want to use in the rain... like a watch.

I have a Garmin sport watch with a touch screen (plus two physical buttons). If you're out in the rain and need to change modes on a run or bike ride, it's nearly impossible, you need to stop, bend over to shield the watch with your body, dry your finger on your shirt (assuming you have a dry spot), then then you can usually use the touchscreen.

Once it's set to the right mode, the 2 physical buttons work well, but anything that requires the touchscreen is nearly impossible without stopping what you're doing.

(at least that's the case with whatever touchscreen technology Garmin uses, maybe there's a better option for use in the rain)

wazoox2• 8 years ago

I've found that the touchscreen on my vivoactive works perfectly when wet and in light rain (not under the shower).

However to get it to work it's necessary that some metal part of the watch (either one of the buttons, or the charging contacts underneath) to be touched (either by the wrist, or another finger) while touching the screen.

Johnny5552• 8 years ago

You must have a different Vivoactive than me, I have the Vivoactive HR with no metal buttons. The charging contacts are on the back and recessed enough that they probably don't contact my wrist.

viperscape• 8 years ago

Older resistance style touchscreen s would work well here, this is where the capacitance screens fail easily.

Steltek2• 8 years ago

I believe resistive screens are also better for battery life, which you'd think would be critical for a watch.

igorkraw• 8 years ago

The thing is, I saw a touch screen attending the "embedded world" embedded technology conference in nuremberg a few years ago...multitouch included. Why is this not more common? Especially for "rugged" devices?

microtonal2• 8 years ago

Or with gloves on. This is one of the reasons why I still use my Garmin GPSMAP 62s with a heart rate sensor when I go for longer bike rides, despite having an Apple Watch (the others being: more detailed maps and being able to 'recharge' the GPS by swapping out two AA batteries).

Steltek2• 8 years ago

I commute by bike. I understand I'm not a huge market segment but I love my Pebble Time Steel. I'm definitely not looking for fitness tracking or an obvious fitness watch: who really wants to record every single minute of their _commute_ anyway? I just want a smartwatch that does smartwatch things with zero fuss while outside. I can read it in direct sunlight, interact with it in the snow with heavy gloves, and not worry about it when it's pouring rain.

I bought a spare PTS when FitBit bought Pebble. I was concerned there'd be no replacement when the time came to retire the current watch. So far, I'm unfortunately correct.

wvenable10• 8 years ago

I have a Gear S3 now (used to own a Pebble) and I rarely touch the screen to do anything (except to treat it as a big button). You can do most navigation with the buttons and the ring around the outside.

Between that and the always-on-display it's a good replacement for the Pebble.

HumanDrivenDev• 8 years ago

Watch hardware buttons come back in a mainstream product in 5-10 years, and be touted as a revolutionary new feature.

goldenkey• 8 years ago

I have touchscreen gloves - never had any problems even for the 5 years I spent in Buffalo.

I recommend Agloves because they have awesome customer support incase your gloves have knit issues. They sent me a pair of the thicker ones for free when I asked for help with a pair that had some stray threads.

Here is an amazon link: http://amzn.to/2Eg8MUc

wyclif• 8 years ago

This article explains part of my rationale why, later this week when I get my new MacBook Pro, I'm going to opt for the non-Touch Bar version.

Pebble is dead and hardware buttons are going with it

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