I've never owned or used a Pebble, but for me it's poignant that this coincides with my decision to stop wearing a Withings Activite and dusted off my trusty ol

I've never owned or used a Pebble, but for me it's poignant that this coincides with my decision to stop wearing a Withings Activite and dusted off my trusty old Seiko 5. This shift was primarily motivated by two factors: 1. I lost interest in the activity tracking features. 2. Even worrying about the battery once every 6 months was too much. And supplemented by a third, which is that the fancy watch wasn't very readable and lacked a second hand. That made it less capable at the main thing I use it for: keeping track of the time. I looked hard at a Pebble at one point before deciding that, since my phone is almost always in my pocket or on the table in front of me, getting it into position for viewing information would take only nominally more effort and probably gets me to a place where I can act on whatever information the device is telling me much more efficiently. Also, having a non-user-replaceable battery means that the device will only live for so long, and I'm really trying to limit my consumption of disposable technology. I think that, for now, my most optimistic case for smartwatches is that they're at about the same phase as handheld computing was 15 or so years ago. The technology is really interesting, but there needs to be more technology development and ironing out of subtle details before the idea is quite ready to take over the consumer market.