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Light At The End Of The Tunnel

systems administration meanderings

Pebble watch

OK I got my Pebble Steel as a gift recently.  I like it. I like the screen that I can read at anytime, twisting my wrist to turn on the back light is neat.  I particularly like the ability to cancel calls from my watch, handy when you are at the barbers and your phone is in your pocket (I imagine useful for cinemas/theatres etc ….).

I particularly like that Runkeeper and Strava send some of their details to the watch  so you can have an easy view of duration, distance and pace.  Pace I find particularly useful. I had to move back to Runkeeper from Endomondo as the latter had no support for the Pebble Steel, your loss Endomondo as I discovered the Runkeeper app had been upgraded beautifully since my last use.

There are some downsides, the notifications from Email/SMS/Calendar events seem to disrupt the updates from Strava so although Strava continues recording your ride the updates don’t get displayed. Runkeeper seems to recover.  The other down side is that when I wore the watch with the leather watch strap whilst riding my bike my wrist always seemed to be at the correct angle to turn the backlight on, it’s not good for the battery life. The other downside to owning a smart watch is having to charge it, I kept on forgetting to.  So the solution for me was to put the charger next to the bed so I can connect it every night, now I have no issues.

The notifications from Email/SMS/Calendar/Phone calls I find useful, but found I was getting too many, the upside meant I spent a week unsubscribing from sales emails, which means I process fewer emails each day and extended the battery life of the watch in the process.

The Pebble Steel is supplied with the leather watch strap fitted and the steel one in the box. I should have swapped the straps when I first received the Pebble Steel as the leather one has not handled the running, swimming and cycling I do, with the corresponding showers. So I had to swap them over. This involved me following this Pebble Steel forum post, and buying a new set of precision screwdrivers. It was relatively easy after that.

Some of the apps for the Pebble Steel work quite well, but I think it is still early days.

Only need to sort out monitoring my heart rate.


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