PebbleSmartwatchReview

Recently, we acquired a Pebble Smartwatch and took a closer look at it. The Pebble Smartwatch is a smartwatch that has been available on the market since 2013. Since then, countless Pebble Watch Apps for iOS and Android smartphones have been developed. The communication between the Pebble Smartwatch and the smartphone is currently enabled via Bluetooth.

Compared to the Apple Watch, it is relatively inexpensive at 99 US dollars, not only intended for iOS smartphones, and with its design, it targets a different niche.

Reason enough for us to scrape off the Wolfgang Petry friendship bracelets from our wrists to make room for the Pebble Watch. After conceptual familiarization, our Dice Decide App was set, and the technical implementation began.

Development Environment

We opted for the CloudPebble IDE – Pebble's in-house, cloud-based online editor for watch app development in the browser. This saved us from setting up the Pebble SDK and allowed us to get started right away.

SDK and Programming Language

The CloudPebble IDE was used with Pebble SDK version 2.0. This version also supports the PebbleKit JavaScript Framework, but we opted for good old C. The idea of implementing the app in pure C promised digital nostalgia and challenges alike.

Challenge

We often encountered issues where our watch app crashed or the entire Pebble Watch rebooted. It took a few console outputs before we realized that we had overwhelmed the "small" Pebble with too much data. Thus, we paid tribute to our digital nostalgia through memory management. This meant searching and cleaning the code for potential bottlenecks that caused memory leaks to free up space.

Addressing and reading the Pebble Accelerometer also took time. The focus here was on fine-tuning the correct sensitivity so that the accelerometer triggers at the right moment to achieve the desired user experience.

Conclusion

Our Dice Decide App allowed us to gain insights into smartwatch development from both a conceptual and technical perspective. We believe that smartwatches will bring new and exciting interaction possibilities. Therefore, we look forward to developing more watch apps and finally being able to test the upcoming Apple Watch.