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Comment by Rudism | Hacker News Reader

I've owned an original pebble for a couple weeks now, but I'm still skeptical on their usefulness. I save maybe 5-10 minutes of time per week by being able to check the weather forecast or dismiss non-urgent emails and texts using my watch instead of having to pull my phone out of my pocket, but that's about the only benefit I'm seeing so far.

Maybe a smartwatch would be more useful to me if I was more popular and had calendar events to keep track of or more friends who contacted me regularly, but as your typical socially-isolated introvert software engineer, this thing seems to have limited utility.

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For me its not necessarily a raw measure of just time saved.

I realized that the physical habit that we've all developed of pulling our phones, unlocking , checking time or messages etc is a really really annoying physical habit.

It's disruptive and awkward to do, interrupts conversations or basic interactions with things in your environment.

A two handed fumbling time check/message check becomes a no handed operation with a smart watch.

I don't actually check my messages any more often, in fact less, since the notification is actually much more obvious then phones chirping in a pocket and my decision about whether to handle the information now or later is just much more quick and fluent.

I've had my Pebble Steel for just at a year now and I have the opposite experience. I consider it to be as important as having my phone on me at this point. Part of this is no doubt due to never wearing a watch (for more than a day or two) prior to owning the Pebble so I love having the time/weather on my wrist at all times. I love having texts, calls, emails on my wrist and I've started using Pushover (Push notification API with app) more and more since I don't have to dig my phone out of my pocket to read push notifications any more.

Consider looking at the Glance app. I enjoyed my Pebble to start with, but it became far more useful with Glance. I can now reply to text messages from a list of options I created on my phone. I filled the list with the messages I send the most: "ok", "yes", "no", "on my way".

I really like deciding if messages are worth my time without having to dig out my phone and I really like being able to send quick messages without fiddling about with unlocking and on-screen keyboards.

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