![]() While it's impossible to hide the size of the Sony or Samsung smartwatches, the Pebble, while still oversized, is not that much larger than some of the more ambitious fashion watches available. The smaller dimensions of the screen also reduce the overall footprint of the watch. These all require a positive action press, and I doubt you'll trigger any of them by accident. On the left of the screen is the 'back' button, while the right side has three buttons, a cursor up, cursor down, and a forward/choose button. The Pebble also forgoes a touchscreen, instead relying on four buttons around the edges of the watch. The monochrome screen might lose points for not being colorful, but Pebble earns back far more kudos in battery life than it loses for going monochrome. What's never happened to me is the Pebble watch running out of power. I've been charging every three to four days, which I put down to heavy use of watch faces that feature a lot of animation and many stopwatch/timer apps while cooking and working around the house. By design, Pebble has tried to stop you watching your charge level by removing the battery indicator from the watch until it becomes low. It's quoted as running between five and seven days, although this is naturally dependant on the applications and watch faces that you decide to run. That contributes to the long battery life of the Pebble. The main takeaway is that the screen draws significantly less power than the OLED or Super AMOLED color screens used by the competition. It does not suffer the slow response rates or shadowing that you see on eBook readers, and will happily run at 30 fps with no blurring if an application demands it. Strictly speaking it's a transreflective LCD screen with a backlight, and while many people have labelled it as an e-ink screen (similar to eBook readers such as the Amazon Kindle) it's important to stress that Pebble is marketing the screen as e-paper, not e-ink. It's one of the smaller screens on a smartwatch, at just 144x168 pixels. Let's start with the hardware, because the Pebble watch makes a number of different design decisions to the big boys which all have a positive impact on the watch, and none more so than the screen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |