The coming release of the Apple Watch in April no doubt has current smartwatch makers rushing to up their game or be potentially left behind. And Pebble might be on the verge of showing its next big step forward.
Pebble has posted a mysterious countdown timer on its website, which is set to expire in under five days – on Tuesday, 24 February, still several days before Mobile World Congress kicks off with its expected bevy of device announcements. Aside from a friendly-looking pixel face on a basic Pebble watch design, there’s nothing more to the tease.
But 9to5Mac reports that its sources claim that Pebble is planning to launch a brand new watch, which will bring a “slightly wider, colour, e-paper-like display” said to be housed within a slimmer, microphone-packing body. That’ll be a big step forward for the company, which currently only produces monochromatic e-paper displays.
Despite the bump to colour, 9to5Mac says the new Pebble still won’t have a touch screen, so we expect that it will remain a lower-priced alternative to the Apple Watch – and perhaps even lower than Android Wear still. Battery life is expected to remain about the same, although the report says it’s unlikely that the new watches will have a heart-rate sensor.
Early this month, CEO Eric Migicovsky claimed that the company had both new hardware and software on the horizon, but it sounded like something to expect later in the year. The bigger part of the equation here may well be the software shift, as he claimed the brand new UI to be unlike anything seen on current watches or smartphones.
Might we see a completely new Pebble experience next week, in both hardware and software? We’re less than five days away from finding out, according to the countdown.
