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  • Pablitus - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Hope they include Windows Phone support!
  • JeffFlanagan - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    IOS and Android. Win Phone support would be a bad investment since Win Phone is a tiny segment of the smart phone market.
  • JeffFlanagan - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    You probably want to look into Microsoft Band / Microsoft Health.

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/9002/microsoft-band-...
  • Laxaa - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    I think feels kind of wrong that they turn to Kickstarter again for this product. They raised a lot of capital last year, and surely they could have just sold it through their own website because I don't see what seperates this kickstarter from a regular pre-order.

    As for the watch itself, it doesn't look that good and I think the screen is too small(it doesn't need the bezel inside the bezel) The rest looks good, though.
  • xilience - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    I couldn't agree more. I don't understand why they are using kickstarter at all for this. They could have accepted pre-orders themselves and kept 100% of the money. Very strange.
  • Samus - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    They're basically using Kickstarter as a pre-order platform. They claim they are a very small company, but the honest truth is they could get a loan to pre-produce these.

    The thing is, Kickstarter is probably taking a smaller percentage than it would otherwise be to get a high interest short-term loan for 5 million dollars.
  • Laxaa - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    True. And the Kickistarter will also create a lot more "free buzz" for the product as well. The original Pebble was one of the most successful Kickstarters of all time and this one has almost surpassed it in less than 24 hours. Saying that your company has two of the most successful Kickstarters will probably do wonders for marketing.
  • sonicmerlin - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Jesus they're already at $10 million.
  • xerandin - Wednesday, March 4, 2015 - link

    That's the point. Kickstarter is looked on with positivity for the most part, while pre-ordering has gained a bit of infamy due to poorly made video games. Not wholly applicable to a device like this, but not NOT wholly applicable either...

    At any rate, I believe Kickstarter was the best way to go for them strategically.
  • Daniel Egger - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    Pebble itself says the old display is also e-paper. Not sure what a "memory LCD" is supposed to be in comparison but I was always under the impression that the main difference between LCD and e-paper is that the LCD needs current to keep the crystals in their state while e-paper only needs current to change state.

    All other features than the color display and voice recognition are also supposed to come to the older Pebbles via firmware update.
  • Brandon Chester - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    The pebble uses a Sharp memory LCD which is considered a type of e-paper display.
  • phoenix_rizzen - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    You're confusing e-paper (an LCD-based technology) and e-ink.

    e-ink displays only use power to change state. Meaning, it takes power to display a page of text initially. Once it's displayed, there's 0 power usage. When you flip pages on an e-reader, it uses power to update the pixels ... and then uses 0 power to continue displaying the new page. However, it takes a bit of time to update pixels, so it's not good for animations. Don't know the specifics of how each pixel works, but there's basically a tiny droplet of "ink" that moves from the front of the pixel to the back to flip between "black" and "white" (or "on" and "off").

    e-paper displays are a variant of LCD where each pixel has a tiny bit of "memory" that holds the contents of the pixel. Instead of refreshing the entire display multiple times per second (Hz), it only needs a tiny little bit of power to keep the memory covered. You get a much smoother/faster refresh than e-ink, but nowhere near the power usage of a full-blown LCD. It's kind of in the middle, best of both worlds.
  • Daniel Egger - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link

    According to Wikipedia e-paper and e-ink are synonyms but you might certainly be right.

    I'm still confused as to why Brendan claims the old one uses memory LCD (when the homepage clearly states e-paper) while the new one uses color e-paper.

    The display of the Pebble can only be refreshed row-wise so the behaviour is not too far away from an ereader.
  • Brandon Chester - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Because the old one is a Sharp memory LCD, this has been confirmed through teardowns. There is no information about the display manufacturer for the Pebble Time and so I just classified it as e-paper. If Wikipedia states that e-ink and e-paper are synonyms it is incorrect.
  • CharonPDX - Sunday, March 1, 2015 - link

    The problem is that neither term (e-paper or e-ink) has a technical, defined-by-a-standards-body definition. So any company can use the terms to mean anything they want.

    To the layman, the two terms are synonymous. However, most companies use e-ink exclusively to refer to the "only uses power when changing" technology that is not at all based on LCD, while Sharp uses e-paper to refer to their memory LCD.

    If you go by the definition "a reflective display technology that uses extremely low power compared to other display technologies," then both qualify.
  • xerandin - Wednesday, March 4, 2015 - link

    CharonPDX said:

    "The problem is that neither term...has a technical, defined-by-a-standards-body definition."

    DING DING DING. This man is the winner.
  • sascha - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Doubt it will sell well, doesn't look appealing enough for $199.
  • sonicmerlin - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link

    Lol it's currently at $10 million.
  • Vinny DePaul - Sunday, March 1, 2015 - link

    Hmm, the phone doesn't look good. It looks like a toy.

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