Pebble Smart Watch's Success: Keeping Wearable Computing Simple

Companies looking to wearable computing should check out the little Kickstarter that could, the Pebble. As of Friday, the company has sold over a quarter million smartwatches, and about a million apps for the new device have been downloaded so far.

In a post on their Kickstarter page, Pebble announced that things are rolling along nicely for the company. "Since January," Pebble's post stated, "we've shipped over 93,000 Pebbles to backers and pre-order customers in over 150 countries around the world." In addition, the company now has "over 29 employees," and is still hiring.

Pebble says it's continuing to increase its production capacity, because of the "massive demand for Pebble," sharing that since their Kickstarter funding campaign ended, 190,000 Pebbles have been pre-ordered. Put that together with the over 93,000 Pebbles shipped to backers and others, and you've got over 275,000 Pebbles sold.

Pebble is a Kickstarter smartwatch, which became the second most highly crowd-funded project, with over $10 million pledged by over 68,000 people. The watch itself is a low-power LCD with a backlight that provides instant notifications and customizable watch faces. It's got a vibrating motor, and a magnetometer, accelerometer, and other sensors. The watch tethers to iPhones or Android devices using Bluetooth, and charges using a magnetically-attached USB cable. Rather than using a touchscreen, the Pebble works with a menu button, and three navigation keys. The smartwatch is waterproof for up to 165 underwater. It sells for $150.00.

The Pebble's success isn't limited to its Kickstarter page, as it is debuting at Best Buy (it's already sold out online) and, as well as adding more and more third-party support. Right now there are more than 1 million "watchapps" downloaded to Pebble, but the company says it recognizes that their software developer's kit is incomplete, so they're going to work this year to add more native development tools, as well as "incentivizing developers to share their watchapps with the entire Pebble community." The Pebble can't play video or music, but can provide basic things like message notifications, fitness tracking, and email. In addition, up-and-coming web platform-connecting software IFTTT is going to provide support to the Pebble, so that automatic notifications across platforms can stream straight to the watch as well.

The success of Pebble shows technology companies that cheap, simple, and reliable can work for wearable computing - at least in some cases. This could be a good thing for companies like Dell - which recently hinted that it may be interested in developing wearable computing devices in the next few years.

The Pebble isn't as fancy as a touchscreen Sony smartwatch, or as groundbreaking as a Google Glass, but it has had success with people who just want a waterproof, durable, customizable, respectable-looking smartphone notification gadget on their wrist for a minimum of cost. How much more success the Pebble will have, and how soon it may seem dated and plain, as more technology companies introduce wearable devices, remains to be seen.