The benefit of the Pebble was that you could get basic information (notifications, notes, time, alarms, etc) without having to reach for your phone. I found it perfect for meetings where I didn't want the client to feel like I was tight on time or rushing things, even if I had to.

It seems silly, but the multiple timers were especially useful for cooking large dinners.

Overall, the Pebble was great because it had fantastic battery life and provided information silently without you having to interrupt a conversation by reaching for a larger device.

>I found it perfect for meetings where I didn't want the client to feel like I was tight on time or rushing things, even if I had to.

Ah, this seems good. Socially acceptable information-checking. I'll keep this in mind as a use for smartwatches, even though I don't need it (yet?).

>It seems silly, but the multiple timers were especially useful for cooking large dinners.

You could also set the phone on a surface somewhere and have multiple timers on it, but I see how carrying them on your wrist makes them more convenient.

Thanks for writing this :)

The vibration is the key for me.

I first got the Pebble because I wanted to know who was calling or texting me while I was on my bike around town. Over the next few years the other features became part of my daily habits. Simple things like responding to texts with canned messages (e.g. 'Ten minutes away' or 'I'll call you in five') allowed me to take a relaxing ride without stressing about missing an important call or message.

My experience is similar to the days before I got a smartphone -- that 'pfft... I don't need that. I can do that when I get back to my desk.'

A subtle point here for me was that I found the vibration of the Pebble v.1 to still be rather loud and to draw the attention of anyone near me to my wrist. It's rarely mentioned, but I think the biggest feature upgrade when I moved on to the Apple Watch was how subtle the "tap" vibration was. It means that I am unfailingly aware of a notification, timer, or alarm firing, and a person I am in conversation with is never aware that it happened. The ability for it to deliver different patterns of taps is also nice, for instance, turn left or turn right are recognizably different tap patterns when using the watch for navigation.

> I found it perfect for meetings where I didn't want the client to feel like I was tight on time or rushing things, even if I had to.

It's funny to read that, because in my culture looking at your watch is a sign of "let's finish" or "I'm in a hurry", while briefly looking at the phone is perfectly acceptable.

But I admit, that people with smartwatches confuse me from time to time, when they look at their watch frequently and are not in a hurry :)

that's the beauty of the vibration. You don't need to look at your watch to get a fifteen minute warning (or whatever you've set it to). The buzz is silent to others, but enough that you'll recognize it.

In my experience, the only silent 'buzz' is from my apple watch - and that's probably because it's not a buzz. My pebble and martian watches both had loud, obnoxious vibrations that were no better in many quiet situations than a beep would have been.

Apple's decision to put so much work in to the 'taptic engine' was a smart one IMHO - wearing any other smart watch now feels like having a moto razr strapped to my wrist when it vibrates.

I bought an original Pebble and wore it 24/7 for a while, tracking my sleep. What I found amusing was that I didn't find the sleep tracking all that useful, nor the notifications and apps - but having a very small LED torch on my wrist which lit up with a wrist-flick was incredibly useful when quietly navigating a dark apartment at night!

If I were building my own smartwatch, I'd give it a bright gesture-activated LED light aimed at my fingers.

In general though, I liked the Pebble, but didn't find it useful. I gave it to my partner, who's a horticulturist and spends a lot of time up to his wrists in soil - he loved it because it let him figure out which notifications were important enough to clean off his hands and pull out his phone, and which could be ignored.

Productivity wise it was mainly good at prioritizing incoming information and calendars.

You can set the pebble to only notify on emails from a particular filter/tag/sender which was great for alerting you to time sensitive emails in meetings and the lab when your hands are full.

Ditto for calendar alerts.

Customizable canned messages were great for this as well.

No I'm not saying it was the perfect productivity tool before. But, of many uses, the only one I was looking up to, was to perfect productivity in some way. I feel that path was dropped too soon.