Folks still skeptical on whether or not there’s a real market for smartwatches should checkout Pebble’s latest blog post. The company says they’ve received over 190,000 smartwatch pre-orders since their Kickstarter project ended last year, giving them 275,000 total.
Even if you do that math at $99 a pop—which was just a limited time early bird special price—that amounts to over $27 million. Not bad for a year’s work…
Additionally, the Pebble team announced that they plan to fullfil all remaining Kickstarter orders in the coming weeks, and that they’ve seen over 1 million downloads of the Pebble iPhone app in the past 3 months. They also teased a new feature coming to iOS users.
“A major new feature on iOS will be available within 2-3 weeks. The feature has been lacking since launch: support for email notifications. At first, our testing with iOS 6 indicated that the built-in Bluetooth notification system would be able to send notifications Pebble. Unfortunately, that system only could reliably send SMS and iMessage to Pebble (ironically something we did not promise to support). We’ve finally cracked the email puzzle and the next Pebble iOS app will have full support for Gmail and IMAP email notifications.”
For me, the Pebble still isn’t a must-have, and I feel like the smartwatch and wearable device spaces are going to get a lot more interesting over the next 6 months. Apple’s working on something, Google’s working on something, and it seems like everyone else is as well.
Also keep in mind that, as part of the many new APIs introduced in iOS 7, Apple is giving developers the ability to access all notifications in the Notification Center from a Bluetooth device. So all of the limitations the Pebble currently has will disappear on its release.
“iOS 7 looks quite cool and useful but we can’t talk about it in detail until Apple releases it publicly. In the meantime, we’ll continue to work with it and test Pebble support under iOS 7.”
At any rate, today’s announcements bode well for both Pebble and the smartwatch space. Stay tuned.
What are your thoughts on Pebble’s success, and smartwatches in general?