I've had the pebble for a couple of months now and I reckon I'm overdue writing up a short review, so here goes.
Like many other people who purchased the pebble, I haven't actually bought worn a watch for years. However because the watch is so closely integrated with my iPhone, it has become a useful second screen for the phone. What do I mean by this? For those of you not familiar with the pebble, not only does it tell the time, but also allows various notifications from the iPhone to be displayed on the watch screen. The most obvious thing that it can do is show you the phone number of any incoming calls and the text of any SMS messages that come in on the phone.
The watch face can be changed to any number of watchfaces, (you can see sample faces at My Pebble Faces), my favourite being the one shown below:-
It's worth noting here that not all notifications are currently working as they should, but pebble are working on this and in time emails should show reliably on the watch face as well. Currently, this doesn't happen on a reliable basis, but can be nudged occasionally to work.
So what is the advantage of having a watch that displays these various notifications? Simply in the past every time the phone rang or buzzed in my pocket, I would have to take it out to see what the notification was all about. Now with the pebble I can just look at the watch screen and see whether it's even worth taking phone out of my pocket. I suspect a few people will say so what, but it's not until you get the watch that you realise how often you pull the phone out of your pocket. And let's not forget one of the biggest things that drain the battery of any phone, is the screen. Every time you take your phone out and turn on the screen you are using up more power; which is going to be less the case when most of the notifications are appearing on the pebble screen. Of course there is a slight power impact because the pebble connects to the phone via Bluetooth, but in my experience this has been negligible.
Speaking of power the pebble itself only need to be charged up every 6 to 8 days in my experience.
So in all honesty I'm enjoying being the proud owner of a pebble, it's a good first step into the arena of smart watches, with the promise of much more functionality to come, as the pebble team wrestle more with the limitations of iOS. In fact we are promised that a number more features will become available when iOS 7 is released later this year.