Pebble Steel – After The Buzz, episode 34 (Video)

Posted on by Taylor Martin

Most new device launches go the same way: usually the press gets review units before they’re widely available, and we get to use them for a few days -or a week if we’re lucky- as we work on our review.Then press day arrives. The embargo on media coverage lifts, and everyone posts their reviews and videos at the same time. It’s a huge frenzy, commenters go nuts, and it’s a giant explosion of frantic opinion-sharing activity.For about … a day. And then it all goes away. Sure, there’s followup coverage as people find bugs and hidden features, but after that initial blast, not many ...

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Pebble Steel meets brick-and-mortar retail sales this weekend

Posted on by Stephen Schenck

Pebble introduced the Pebble Steel this past winter as a sleeker, slightly more capable, and all around just better-looking version of last year’s popular smartwatch. Really, it took most everything we liked about the original and refined it – just what we’d expect from a second-generation model. But right from the beginning, availability was an issue, and even once Steel went up for order, users could find themselves waiting months and months to get their hands on a unit. The situation has greatly improved by ...

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Pocketnow Weekly 088: Moto 360, Android Wear, and hacking a path to Inbox Zero

Posted on by Michael Fisher

Inbox Zero. It’s become something of a myth in the Pocketnow Weekly recording studio ever since we started actively courting listener feedback all those months ago. Skip a listener-mail section here, another one there, and before you know it you’ve got a mountain of mail it’d take a whole episode to get through. So that’s just what we’re doing. Just like we did on episode 076, we’re devoting an entire podcast to your ...

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Moto 360 makes me regret my recent Pebble Steel order

Posted on by Taylor Martin

My preorder of the original Pebble came after a lot of pause and skepticism. I explained in the prelude to my Pebble Steel review that I was a backer of the immensely successful Pebble Kickstarter campaign, but I had my doubts about the company after learning it was essentially round two from the Allerta team, which didn’t have the best time releasing its first smartwatch, the inPulse. While promising, inPulse suffered a handful of timely delays and only arrived in the hands of buyers upwards of a year ...

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Pocketnow Weekly 087: the calm before the #ANHO

Posted on by Michael Fisher

The All New HTC One won’t grace us with its presence until the end of the month, and at this point we’re beginning to wonder if HTC will have anything left to reveal at the announcement. From a sales guide to promotional materials to yet another undercover hands-on video, the leaks surrounding one of the year’s most anticipated Android handsets refuse to let up – and we’re here to talk about them in our latest pre-#ANHO podcast! Before that, of course, we’ve got the usual news of the week, including a duo of Samsung tablet reviews, rampant speculation about ...

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Pocketnow Weekly 086: @evleaks

Posted on by Michael Fisher

“What would you say to the people who think that what you do is illegal?” ” … I would tell them that I don’t want to answer this question.” When you’re interviewing the world’s most notorious phone leaker, he’s bound to duck a question or two. But cautious though he is, Evan Blass –formerly of Pocketnow and currently known across the web by his pen name

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Pebble Steel review: a smartwatch in disguise

Posted on by Taylor Martin

I was among the very first to back the original Pebble Kickstarter. I was also very skeptical of the people behind Pebble, no matter how awesome the campaign or watch sounded back in spring of 2012. Years before that, as a huge proponent of BlackBerrys, I had teetered on the edge of pre-ordering the Allerta inPulse smartwatch for several months, until the whole project went south and the delays starting piling on top of one another. The whole situation slowly spiraled out of control, and I decided to hang on to my $150.

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Smartwatches sorely need cross-device app standards

Posted on by Joe Levi

Wearables, especially smartwatches, are the next “big thing” in mobile technology. Exactly what they should do is still being discovered through iterative trial and error. Currently we have the Pebble 1.0 and Pebble 2.0 (referring to the firmware on the watch itself, and not to be confused with Pebble and Pebble Steel) and the Galaxy Gear. There are a few other more minor players, but already we’re seeing the proverbial floodgates open ...

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Pocketnow Weekly 083: Nexus 5 giveaway, Android apps on Windows Phone, & HTC M8 rumors

Posted on by Michael Fisher

Snow storms have their ups and downs. On the one hand, they keep you from partaking in all the Nokia unboxing fun your comrades in more seasonable climes are enjoying – but on the other, they put you in mind of all the friends you have in the great Arctic North. One such person is friend of the show Nick Gray of HTCSource and Android and Me, who joins us today for a special extended episode taking a long look at all the HTC M8 rumors of the past few weeks. That’s followed by ...

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Pebble Steel vs Pebble (Video)

Posted on by Taylor Martin

We first saw Pebble Steel at CES last month, and we immediately fell in love with the hardware imrpovements over the original Pebble. We were a bit surprised, however, when CEO Eric Migicovsky told us it would sell for $100 more than the original, or $250. Inside, they’re practically the same, save for the 8MB storage in Pebble Steel vs 4MB in the original. It has Gorilla Glass 2 covering the display, a machine-cut, marine grade stainless steel chassis, ...

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Pebble Steel unboxing (Video)

Posted on by Taylor Martin

We first saw Pebble Steel at CES last month, and while many feel the upgrade over the original Pebble to be a disappointment, there is no denying how good looking the new Pebble is. It’s internals and specs are practically the same as the original, except this model has double the internal storage. It bears the same display, battery, CPU, etc. But its frame is smaller, it weighs a little more, and it looks infinitely more classy. While we put this smartwatch to the test and determine if it’s worth an additional ...

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Pocketnow Weekly 081: Lenovo buys Motorola, Galaxy S5 fingerprints, & interview with special guest Ryan Negri

Posted on by Michael Fisher

When you can kick off a tech podcast with a string of expletives taken right from your publication’s teamwide chat records, you know it’s been a crazy week in the news. The Lenovo Motorola deal, announced late yesterday afternoon, threw our whole week -and perhaps our whole world- into disarray, and we’re grateful for the chance to sit down and talk it through on today’s show. But the news doesn’t stop there. Galaxy S 5 speculation is still coming fast and furious, with details like Samsung’s rumored fingerprint scanner beginning to take shape; ...

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Wearables will not replace smartphones … yet

Posted on by Taylor Martin

When talking with Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky at CES, one thing he said stuck with me: Pebble’s vision is not to replace smartphones, but to remain a peripheral. It’s a controller or remote for your smartphone – nothing more, nothing less. The company prides itself in how simple and “out of the way” its wrist-mounted notification device is. Frankly, that’s one of my favorite features of Pebble. I set it up and it just works, reliably … for days and days on a single charge. When I get ...

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Pocketnow Weekly 080: HTC M8 x, Galaxy Note 3 Neo, a $50 Motorola smartphone & a resurgent BlackBerry

Posted on by Michael Fisher

 ”Our revels now are ended, Kirk.” That’s a quote from Star Trek VI, paraphrasing a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the latter instance (minus the “Kirk” bit) it’s a conceit of sorts, an admission that the play is a falsehood – and an observation that so, perhaps, is life. In the former example it’s a wisecrack from a Klingon bent on shooting our favorite captain’s ship out from under him. In both cases, it’s a kind of farewell. And in today’s example, it’s also a goodbye – to the old times. ...

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Android on cars, Galaxy Note 3 Neo, Pebble Steel comments & more – Pocketnow Daily recap

Posted on by Jaime Rivera

Pocketnow Daily gets an average of 300 to 500 comments a day, and sometimes even a thousand. We’d like to thank you all for participating in our question of the day, and we love your feedback so much, that we decided that since we can’t respond to ever single one of your comments, we should at least feature a couple in a weekly video. This is the Pocketnow Daily Recap. Since we only have 3 minutes on every Daily video to go through the hottest news, the weekly recap will serve as a more extensive discussion where we also include your thoughts on the subject. Sadly, for the sake of ...

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