The move from Pebble to go from nothing but an awesome concept, to a real, usable smartwatch, is finally underway. They announced that they’ll be releasing a proof-of-concept watchface SDK in early April, which has its backers, as well as all smartwatch fans, very excited.
Their next goal, of course, is to get the developers on-board. They plan on making the watchface SDK available to developers around the second week of April, according to Eric Migicovsky, who is the founder of Pebble. This is however, Eric noted, a very early version, hence the term “proof of concept”, and, most likely, the watch’s APIs will be changed, maybe even considerably so, before its actual release.
Even though many people are excited to get their hands on the watch’s sensors and radios, this release, will not allow people to play with these features, sadly. It’s focusing more on the button-input, and the watch’s interface itself, not the cool extra features people are expecting the Pebble to have. Luckily though, most of the games that the Pebble will have, will not require any of this technology, so developers interested in the gaming aspect of the watch, should come away feeling very satisfied.
Currently, the watch’s SDK is already in the hands of some of the backers who pledged to it $235 or more, and were given the ability to play around with it, and even try and hack into the watch, so that this hacking can be prevented in the future. This group of people stands at around 100, or so. and they’re the lucky ones that are already toying with this new SDK. They’ve also already created some apps for the watch as well, which will be released with the SDK in early April, so it’ll be exciting to see what these guys have come up with. Apparently, the phone currently features a low-resolution version of Snake, which should be interesting to see as well.
While new watchfaces don’t really seem like all that big of a deal, and it probably seems to most, that they should be focusing more on the overall functionality of the watch, as opposed it its UI, it’s important to note, that this marks a big stepping stone for Pebble as a whole, to be going from just building the watch, to now focusing on watchfaces, is a very dramatic shift, implying that the company is finishing up with the design of the watch very quickly. They’re now focusing more on building up their app-ecosystem for the watch, which will greatly determine whether it actually succeeds in the long-run or not.
According to the founder, they haven’t really “done the best job so far of communicating with developers,”, but, it seems to me like they’re planning to change that very quickly. It’s exciting to see what will be coming out of these guys, can’t wait. No doubt we’ll have more details very soon.