Pebble: The future of watches?

Meet the next millionaire-making personal-electronics phenomenon: the Pebble smartwatch.

This unassuming wristwatch is designed to interact with – control and/or be controlled by – your iPhone, iPod touch or Android smartphone, via Bluetooth. The face is so-called ePaper, a display that’s visible in bright sunlight, like a Kindle, and is also backlit for viewing in the dark. The watch can access a wide variety of apps, and more intrepid owners can write their own apps to add capabilities to the device. Instead of building in all sorts of capabilities that would increase the size and complexity of the watch, it piggybacks onto your smartphone and appropriates its features. You can download any number of “faces” to customize the look of the phone – it always displays the time when it’s not engaged in more exotic tasks, like measuring the distance to the pin on the 8th hole of your favorite golf course, or displaying caller ID for incoming phone calls, or keeping track of your bicycle route.

If you’re an Android owner, you will even be able to view incoming text messages on the watch. Apple doesn’t allow external access to such messages so this won’t work for your iPhone; you can argue whether that’s a good thing or not. 

I’ve mentioned Kickstarter a few times in the past, and have “invested” in several projects via this group-source financing tool. But the Pebble is far and away the most successful project I’ve run across. According to its Kickstarter page, more than 40,000 pledges now total more than 60 times the original $100,000 goal.

You can still get in on the funding for this project, which is accepting pledges for another three weeks. Depending on your level of backing, you can get your own Pebble before it becomes available to the general public.