Mobile, WiFi and GPS would require a substantially bigger battery to achieve the planned 30 days (I get about 25 days). I guess it wasn't a design goal.
maybe. i don't see the appeal of 30 days battery at the expense of such relevant features. 3 days would be more than enough for me. also, considering that the watch is practically useless without a connected phone, advertising its excessive battery life is questionable.
This is a bit of a hand wave, sorry, but if you're okay with a 3 day battery life and want those features, then maybe the pebble is just not the watch you're looking for? I hear good things about the Garmin watches.
I deeply appreciate the battery life personally. Every time I charge it is an opportunity to forget to put it back on. I can go on a long trip and not worry about packing a charger. I can wear it at night to track sleeping more easily. And probably most importantly, with weeks of life, there's basically zero chance of me being surprised at 9am after leaving the house that my watch is about to die in a couple hours.
If he had built the feature set you're suggesting, and with the battery life it would require, he'd be competing directly with Apple, Google, and Samsung. And he'd have no key differentiator.
The reason Pebble has a chance at success is because they carved out a niche years ago, and for some reason no one decided to occupy it in their absence.
the key differentiator is it's driven by open source software and leaves you in control over your data. i shouldn't have to tell you this. given the price point nobody would buy this watch for its technological aspects.
> nobody would buy this watch for its technological aspects
I can vouch for the falsity of this statement. I am more than happy to pay hundreds of dollars for a watch that has weeks of battery life and a great UI. Although there are other watches with long battery life (Garmin, and to a lesser extent Amazfit), their UIs are not good.
Apple and others make watches with nice UIs, but of course the battery life is measured in days, not weeks.
At least, that's what quartz watches could manage in the early 90s, as does the clock in my microwave oven from the early 2000s. Why would a modern disconnected device would be any worse?
I'd suspect that a watch like the Pebble isn't syncing time with a Quartz crystal but by counting processor ticks - that would be a lot less precise in the long run.