The Pebble smartwatch has evolved from Kickstarter
darling to retail success despite a somewhat homely appearance. This is
the story of how the company's next watch, the $250 Steel, came to be.
If 2014 is to be the year of the wearable it's at least partly thanks to the success of the
Pebble
in 2013. Sure, it was 2012 that the company's smartwatch hit
Kickstarter and promptly blew the minds of many would-be entrepreneurs,
raising a record-breaking $10 million on the crowd-funding site. But it
was last year, 2013, that the watch finally shipped, hit retail, and
rocketed past 300,000 sales worldwide.
To secure the next 300,000 wrists, Pebble knows it needs to do
better. While the company's first watch has a lot of things going for
it, posh look and feel are not among its selling points. Some call it
"casual," others say "sporty," both euphemisms for what many would call
"cheap." Pebble needs a product that looks as good as it works, and thus
the Pebble Steel.
The Steel is a new smartwatch designed to complement the existing Pebble, not replace it.
(Credit:
Josh Miller/CNET)
The Steel is a new smartwatch designed to complement the existing
Pebble, not replace it. It does exactly the same things but looks far
nicer on the wrist while doing them, an aesthetic distinction that,
according to the company, makes it worth a $250 manufacturer's suggested
retail price (MSRP) -- $100 more than the base Pebble. A small team has
worked in secret for the last six months to create a project code-named
Bianca. This is the story of how the Pebble Steel came to be.
Beginnings
Early concepts for Steel experimented with different styles, finishes, and even orientations.
(Credit:
Josh Miller/CNET)
300,000 sales across 150 countries is huge for such a small company
-- just 45 employees as of December, up from 11 at the end of 2012 (and
seemingly climbing by the minute). Pebble's new offices in Palo Alto,
Calif., feature an open floor plan with plenty of exposed concrete and
raw woodwork. Typical startup stuff, and in typical startup fashion many
predict they'll soon be moving again into ever-larger accommodations.
The success of Pebble is even more impressive if you look at the
current watch's predecessor: 2009's inPulse. Never heard of it? You're
not alone. The chunky wearable offered a color screen and poor battery
life, while lack of extensibility and support for major platforms kept
it from ever gaining mainstream traction. While calling it a failure
would be too harsh, as a standalone product it couldn't be labeled a
success.
Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky (right) describes the Steel as a more formal version of the Pebble.
(Credit:
Josh Miller/CNET)
Except that it was. It served as the training ground for the people
who would go on to make Pebble and, now, Steel. People like Steven
Johns, lead industrial designer responsible for the inPulse, the Pebble,
and the Steel -- or Bianca, as he prefers to call it. Bianca was the
Steel's code name, a character from "The Adventures of Tintin" comics.
(Indeed, the Pebble itself was "Tintin" during development.)
As with the Pebble before, there were no shortage of early concepts.
These watches, most of which never made it past a conceptual rendering
stage, experimented with different styles, finishes, and even
orientations. Some of the watches offered a curiously and distinctly
wide-screen look, though most offered more traditional layouts. Two were
good enough for final consideration, with the more traditional of the
two getting the nod according to Johns.
A Pebble Steel hiding in a 3D-printed case, used for testing in public.
(Credit:
Tim Stevens/CNET)
"The look was playing a bit of an homage to the 3C industry," said
Johns. "It was what people would expect what a smart watch would be. It
was playing homage to that as well as playing homage to the precursors,
the old calculator watches from Casio. Not an inspiration directly, but
certainly a precursor with a nice flat screen...Bianca was taking it to
the next step and trying to bring a class to that otherwise traditional
computerized watch."
CEO Eric Migicovsky describes Steel as a more formal version of
Pebble: "I'm going out for dinner, I'm wearing a suit, I've got a
position that doesn't allow me to wear a plastic watch on my wrist. How
do I benefit from a smartwatch? How do I get notifications and run all
the apps that Pebble offers without having to put something that I don't
prefer on my wrist. We took that as an industrial design problem. It
wasn't really a software problem...We just had to build an aesthetically
different Pebble."
Reducing the size of the watch was a major consideration as well,
the team hoping to add some additional appeal to the fairer sex along
the way. "Part of the idea was to bring it to be a little more
feminine," said Johns. "I was desperately trying to shrink the overall
profile." And that they did, creating a metal watch that weighs just 45
grams. That's two grams lighter than even the plastic Pebble, and it's
significantly smaller, too, crucially along the "lug-to-lug length."
That is, the size of the face as measured between the strap mounts.
Optimization here was key. "That one dimension has more of an effect
physically than any of the other dimensions on the watch," according to
CEO Eric Migicovsky. "If you're off by a half a millimeter in that
dimension you can feel it." So just how much shorter is the Steel along
that dimension? Four millimeters. You'd think it would be an
imperceptible difference, but it's quite the opposite. The Steel looks
and feels much smaller.
(Credit:
Josh Miller/CNET)
Still, it's far from feminine, particularly if you opt for the black
model. Color is applied using a process called physical vapor
deposition, or PVD. It's used on many high-end watches to create a
durable finish, and Johns assures it will be far more scratch-resistant
than the black anodized
iPhone5 proved. A raw, stainless version of the watch will be available as well.
The main body and buttons are injection-molded, but the backing and
bezel are cold-forged, creating a durable chassis that's far, far nicer
looking and feeling than the plastic body of the Pebble. But, the team
inadvertently created something else in the process. "You know what we
just designed?" CEO Migicovsky asks rhetorically. "We designed a Faraday
cage on your wrist. It's inside a thing of stupid milled steel."
Engineering challenges
(Credit:
Josh Miller/CNET)
A Faraday cage is a metal (or metal mesh) box that blocks all
external transmissions. They're great if you're looking to provide a
clean, interference-free area for controlled testing of a device's
wireless performance. A Faraday cage will ensure that no signals get in
or out. However, when the device itself is blocking it's own
transmissions, that obviously poses a bit of a problem.
Apple, maker of many a fine, alloy-bodied device, has struggled with this situation in the past. The Antennagate debacle with the
iPhone 4 brought this sort of issue to the world's attention. Many of the company's devices (notably the
iPad) use plastic sections to allow transmission, while the
iPhone 5 and
5S include glass windows to ensure those devices' many transmissions get to their intended targets.
Andrew Witte is Pebble's CTO and a hardware designer on Pebble and
Steel: "Antenna design for a watch is pretty tough because it's on your
wrist and your wrist absorbs a lot of radio waves, specifically in
frequencies that Bluetooth uses... After Apple's experience with the
iPhone and antenna problems we did a lot of testing to make sure that if
it had water droplets on it or if you were holding it and clicking
buttons that you would still get good performance."
Like Apple, Pebble turned to a plastic window of sorts, in this case
a ring that separates the body of the watch from the bezel. The bezel
acts as the antenna and body then becomes the ground, actually resulting
in better Bluetooth performance than the plastic-bodied Pebble (which
situates its antenna behind the lower-right button).
Another concern was durability of the watch face itself. The curved,
clear plastic of the Pebble has proven reasonably resistant to abuse,
but the Steel needed something better. "We were looking at doing a
sapphire lens or Gorilla Glass," said Johns. "Sapphire was extremely
cost-prohibitive, but also has some durability issues. Gorilla Glass is
strong but did scratch, whereas sapphire doesn't scratch, but it
breaks." Ultimately the team went with Gorilla Glass, commonplace on
various consumer electronics devices, thanks to the cost, thinness, and
durability of the material.
Keeping the devs happy
Pebble has about 45 employees as of December 2013, up from 11 at the end of 2012.
(Credit:
Josh Miller/CNET)
While a small team at Pebble has been working on Bianca/Steel since
mid-2013, the primary focus of the company has long been developer
support. Of those 45 (or so) current employees, nearly half are software
engineers, heads-down on building the tools and functionality to enable
the next generation of Pebble experiences -- experiences that will come
not through new hardware, but new software.
This was another important lesson learned from the inPulse, a watch
that shipped with support only for BlackBerry devices. It also offered
very limited app and developer support, compared with the Pebble and the
Steel, which support
Android
and iOS. (Though, notably, not BlackBerry. At least, not officially.)
This shift in platform support and focus on developers was one of the
many lessons the Pebble team has picked up thanks to a willingness to
experiment.
"I think one of the best ways that we can produce quality and useful
interactions for our users is just by trying things," said Migicovsky.
"I think that's very reflective for our company as a whole."
CTO Andrew Witte originally joined the team to build better firmware
for inPulse, and helped to shape the broader developer support that
would come in the later products. "We hacked app support into inPulse
and it was popular, but Pebble was really designed around apps." App
support is good, but for developers, change is bad. That's why Pebble
Steel doesn't mess with the core equation.
Same CPU, same display, same developer interface. "Developers won't
see any difference," said Witte, "and that was one of the goals. We're
in the early stages of fostering an app development ecosystem and we
want to provide good continuity for them." Though there is one change:
an RGB notification LED. This is hidden on the bottom of the Steel's
face, enabled through an extension to the API that won't break
compatibility with the existing Pebble apps.
More to come
Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky wearing Steel.
While the focus for the immediate future of Pebble is on software,
launching the app store to allow for more comprehensive app discovery,
it's clear that more new hardware will come. "We will continue to
diversify between metal and plastic products in the future," Johns said.
"We like the differing aesthetics."
They're not entirely opposed to changing up more than aesthetics,
though. Johns admits that there are some users who will want more: "When
we launch this, will we get flak for not having a color screen? Then
we'll have no choice but to potentially launch a colored screen like
good 'ol inPulse. Sacrifice something for something else." Something
like battery life.
For Migicovsky, though, the biggest hardware changes won't come
within the watch itself, but the universe of devices around it. "Pebble
will actually become the best heads-up display for [Bluetooth] LE
sensors in your life...The way that we're going to expand the
functionality of the hardware is by wirelessly talking to those
sensors," he said. Imagine a fitness app that displays heart rate or a
geocaching app showing distance to the next waypoint -- not thanks to a
heart rate monitor or GPS in the watch itself, but Bluetooth connections
to those discrete devices.
Will this be enough to fend off the approaching competition from the
likes of Samsung and, soon, Apple? Migicovsky believes that simplicity,
in this case, is the company's greatest asset: "When we talk about
Pebble we're talking about the tiny moments in your life that it becomes
extremely useful...When you put a wearable computer onto your wrist or
onto your body in some way, it has to make your life better. If it
doesn't, of if it actually makes your life worse through poor battery
life or bad usability, it's so easy to just take it off and not use it
anymore. That's not what we're about. We're about building a product
that people want to use on their wrist in their daily life."
It's unlikely that Steel alone will push the company on to the next
300,000 wrists, but as more and more manufacturers stumble their way
into the wearable sector this year, Pebble, with its years of
experience, loyal developers, and selection of devices, is certainly
looking well-positioned.
