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If you’re selling me something, and you call it a “kind-of-thing” I want it to be an actual thing first and a “smart kind of thing” second. Pebble was kind of
by ignobleParting 9y ago
If you’re selling me something, and you call it a “kind-of-thing” I want it to be an actual thing first and a “smart kind of thing” second.
Pebble was kind of not a thing. A little too smart for its own good.
- wvenable 9y agoIt's a smart watch -- a watch that is smart. If you don't want the smart bit, just get a watch. I'm not sure why this is so surprising. What did you want it to do?
- ignobleParting 9y agoNo. Wrong. If I don’t want the smart bit, the device’s degradation into an ordinary version of a watch should be graceful, and without barriers or punishment. I’m not sure why this is so hard to understand and design toward. Why would anyone buy something that bricks itself if one refuses to play the mother-may-i game?
- wvenable 9y agoBricks itself? You can run the watch untethered if you want, it even has a perfectly serviceable airplane mode.
- ignobleParting 9y agoIt’s shipped in a locked state. A factory reset reverts it to that locked state. The device is rendered inoperable through a factory reset by design. You need a remote server to reactivate this watch. If you try to reset the watch, erase your own private information, and sell it, the person that receives it will need to engage in some problem solving to reactivate it. Or they’ll demand a refund, because they don’t know what to do, to reactivate a watch that can’t validate its own existence.
- crtasm 9y agoI agree devices should let you use their offline functions without remote activation - a featurephone owning friend wanted a Fitbit and the one we picked was reviewed as "does not require a smartphone". She couldn't do anything with it before installing a desktop utility to activate it.
- wvenable 9y agoActually you don't. When the servers go offline in June, you'll still be able to update the watch. You will still need a phone running Pebble software to do it but since most of the functionality requires a phone with that software anyway this isn't much of a loss. Pebble has done very well by it's customers for a company that didn't exist anymore. They definitely put in 110% to make sure nobody is left with a brick -- they didn't have to do that. The lights are off and nobody is there anymore. Honestly, given how much they've done I find you complaints even more misplaced.
- ignobleParting 9y agoThe tenacity of this evasive posturing is pretty tedious. I suppose the odds of some non-technical user wiping their phone or destroying it, thus losing their last working copy of the app (after Pebble’s IP is dropped from the walled-garden markets and itunes app store), combined with the need to perform a factory reset on their watch is, somehow to be regarded as a six sigma impossibility, yes?