Pebble Time 2: 1 week review
I have been running this bad boy for a week, and now I think I have used it enough to write up something and share with the community.
First, prob a delivery experience. The watch shipped quickly and at scheduled time, and the delivery took roughly one week. Unfortunately, I had to clear all the customs on my own, because PDD is not available in Kazakhstan. Trevor helped me a lot with this process, so props up to the contact service.
Second, the device itself. It is made of metal, the buttons are clicky (but bottom button started losing its clickiness today, which is quite unfortunate).
The display is nice, but isn't bright enough to my liking. I can confirm all the issues with low visibility in certain situations, especially when it is bright outside and the watch face is low contrast.
The silicon bands are, well, silicon bands. I do sweat a lot, so they are not very comfortable to wear around. Right now I am looking for another band types to wear.
Anxious about the glass bump, it is cleary above the body, so in the future I definitely will print a bumper for extra protection.
Battery life is decent, I have charged only once and so far it still has 76% battery life left with all the HRS, sleep and other sensors turned on.
Now, let me review the software side and device experience.
Lots of custom watch faces, that's awesome, I like that.
Lots of old apps, from what I've noticed. I don't know whether they still work well on this pebble, but prob I will abstain from installing legacy apps for a while. I wanted to enhance sleep tracking, but top apps were almost all updated in 2016. This needs some work from the pebble devs and the community.
Touch does not work, idk, maybe, there is a toggle in the settings somewhere that I should push, but it is basically inactive. The only thing I use it for is to activate the backlight when I can't read the watch properly.
Sleep algorithm is wonky, sometimes it detects me as sleeping when I sit still. Saw a relevant issue on GitHub, so I hope this will get fixed in future updates.
HRS idk, seems like it works well, I don't have any other decent watch to compare it against, but from what I've seen in other reviews, it should work well.
Given all the observations above, I'd say that the watch is only for enthusiasts, and that there are much better daily driver alternatives out there at this price range.
I, personally, bought these watches to tinker and see what fun stuff in theory I can do with it. I am excited to learn some edge device development, so hopefully I will be able to contribute to the community. I am happy that such projects do exist and give an opportunity to the community to enhance the product by collaborating on it, so I do hope that we will be able to make something out of it.
I think that's all the things I wanted to say about the product, hope, that some people will find it useful.