Pole position: Galaxy S9, LG G7, RED Hydrogen One | #PNWeekly 289 (LIVE at 3p ET)

On this week's show: the flagship smartphones of 2018 begin to reveal themselves in mysterious ways and the app and ecosystem shutdowns that flew by.

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Fitbit hopes to rain down Pebble’s cloud services through 2017

Pebble’s hardware days are over. Fitbit bought the smartwatch outfit and has gutted it of its software and intellectual property. It has drawn a clear line on refunds and returns. Now where’s the way forward as the health tech company takes over and the smartwatches fossilize?

Well, the company has promised a few things in terms of keeping live cloud-based services afloat — ergo, the core experience of Pebble smartwatches still in use today.

“Our first action to preserve the Pebble experience far into the future will be to update our mobile apps, loosening their dependency on a patchwork of cloud services (authentication, analytics, app locker, etc.),” said Jon Barlow, a Pebble transplant to Fitbit.

The goal for the team is to rain apps down to the devices — either by severing ties with some cloud services or, perhaps, working with open source solutions — and keep them working while not bricking anything in the process (think of it as brain surgery with a conscious patient). As it stands now, the current arrangement of services in use are still in place, but will be whittled through 2017.

Pebble Health APIs, as they are not cloud-based, will still feed to Google Fit and Apple HealthKit. Third-party services like weather, messaging and dictation are at a determination stage. Pebble expects to disclose how long these services can last and to what extent soon.

Nevertheless, we will now have to start watching Pebble OS die.

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Pebble OS 4.0 streamlines access to Health, Timeline, Launcher

All new looks are in store if you decide to update both your Pebble app and your Pebble Time/Time Steel/Time Round watches to firmware 4.0. Not only that, but Pebble OS has a new feel, too.Straight from the watchface, you can press up to hit up Pebble Health. You’ll get your step stats and more to the right. Week-to-week compares are also on the screen, along with your goals. The Pebble app displays ...

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Pebble teases new hardware for later this year, along with wildly different software

Pebble’s in a tricky position: it was arguably the first mass-market smartwatch that saw any real measure of success, yet being first to the party also means that it risks being eclipsed by flashier new models like those on the Android Wear front and the soon-to-be-released Apple Watch. Last year we saw Pebble take some real steps to keep its smartwatches feeling modern, delivering new features via software and

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Moto 360 vs Pebble Steel (Video)

The Pebble Steel, first shown off at CES in January, was thought by many to be the best looking smartwatch to date. Anton and I swooned over the stainless brushed steel and matte black finishes in our pre-brief in Las Vegas. It was exactly what the budding smartwatch industry needed – serious hardware to run the increasingly useful software.Pebble’s stainless steel smartwatch didn’t hold the spotlight for long, however. When Google ...

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