Now, before I explain myself, a bit of disclaimer (apart from the obvious - I'm not a native English speaker ;) ). I like to wear a watch, taking out the phone from the pocket to check the time don't work for me. Also, for various reasons I usually can't ignore notifications from my phone (my employer is in different time zone than me, I have small kids, etc). So this is my use case, I have no doubt that other people have different expectations/needs.
The original Pebble looked too plasticky to me, Samsung watches are abominations, we all hear that Apple and Google is cooking something but v1 from Google is usually a disaster and v1 from Apple is usually pricey, shiny and pretty limited, so I ordered Pebble Steel in early January. My experience so far:
- I stopped checking the phone every now and then, especially during the conversations/meetings - if there is some notification, I'll see it on my wrist. No more "did the phone vibrated?" moments.
- Having notifications delivered to my wrist is super useful when I'm home, and the phone is not in my pocket.
- Even more useful having a smartwatch is when I'm driving - instead of pulling the phone from the pocket and trying to stay on track, I can just glance on the wrist and see is it something important or ignorable.
All of these use cases is something I anticipated, and so far I'm happy. But not everything is smooth:
- I have an iPhone, the Pebble app on iOS don't work always as expected. So I developed a habit to run the app in the morning, to prevent it to be kicked from the memory.
- Someone would expect to have basic watch functions on the watch. Pebble don't have a stopwatch, so I need to run third-party app to measure time. Which is nice, but Pebble OS don't support multitasking, so if I exit the app (accidentally or on purpose - maybe I want to check time), stopwatch stops. Same for timer applications. I would be nice if the OS have some basic hooks for such essential functionality
- Alarms are dumb. I can have working-days-only alarms on my old G-Shock, but I can't have it on smartwatch?
- Currently I can't buy a plastic/rubber/silicone wristband for my Pebble Steel (because of "smart" case design), so I can't swim with my watch.
I bought a Pebble, and wear it everyday. I don't miss much of anything anymore from my phone. Sometimes I'd put my phone down somewhere and forget it for a couple of hours, or not feel it when I'd vibrate in my pocket. One of the other reasons I didn't really wear a watch is I'd get bored of the watch face and want to purchase another watch. I can change watch faces easily now.
A pebble is thus more of a want than a need.