It is ironic how Pebble looks a lot more like an Apple product than the AppleWatch itself.<p>Apple made a product that aligns with its long term strategies but delivers very poorly the most fundamental and essential functionality. The AppleWatch has short battery life, its screen is not always on, is not waterproof, its interface is not intuitive... And what we get in return? You can send your heartbeat through bluetooth and has lots of cool straps.<p>It reminds me the feature-bloated products that Microsoft used to make. They'd do everything but fail at the essential.<p>One thing Jobs was famous for was trimming the superfluous in order to get the essential well done. It is clear that the AppleWatch could get a lot from Jobs.
Is that really a fair comparison? The Pebble Time kickstarter campaign was just a pre-order portal in disguise --- it wasn't really a "true" crowdfunding campaign.
They didn't need to release through Kickstarter, but this was a nice gesture from Pebble to offer their products to Kickstarter backers at a discount and priority (backers get their Pebble Time watches before it goes to retail).<p>It is also a huge marketing success in getting their brand out there. They properly framed themselves as the underdog with a superior product vs Apple.
I honestly wonder how many of the Pebble Time backers are people who initially got hyped up over the Apple Watch, then decided they didn't want to deal with a watch with only 18 hours battery life.
This is old news already. And this is the second shoddy C|NET article on the front page today (the other one being the quantum mechanics article). Seems kind of fishy to me!
Doesn't even come close to the largest crowd-funded project Star Citizen: <a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/03/fans-dropped-77m-guys-buggy-half-built-game/?mbid=social_fb" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/2015/03/fans-dropped-77m-guys-buggy-hal...</a>