512 Pixels

..and he may kill us all. But hey, it could be worse: this maniac could be launching nuclear weapons from one of those stupid new thin iMacs.

Myke and I discuss Apple’s iPad marketing, the Retina MacBook Pro, my impressions of the Pebble smartwatch and the rumored Facebook phone.

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Just shy of a year ago, a Kickstarter project was launched that would take the nerd world by storm. In five weeks, the group raised $10,266,845, even though they needed only $100,000 to launch. The Pebble was born.

A year later,I’m sitting at my dining room table with the smartwatch next to my MacBook Pro. I’ve had it for a couple of days, and have collected my thoughts on this new-to-me product category.

Hardware

The Pebble’s name is apt. Mine is the “jet black” option, and it is as slick and smooth as a polished stone.

It’s about as light as my normal watch, but taller. As such, it doesn’t sit as nicely against the top of my wrist as my Casio does. It’s bulky, but not heavy. You know how weird the weight of the iPhone 5 felt at first? It’s like that, sort of.

The band is made of soft rubber and feels great.

The sides of the Pebble are pretty busy. The left side (shown above) houses the back button and a custom charger. The charger works over USB, and connects to the gold pins show above. While the charger snaps in to place easily enough, I don’t like the exposed pins.

The right side has three buttons. The top and bottom ones are oblong, with the middle one shorter than the others. They feel cheap. Unless pressed directly, they rock a bit, and can depress a fair amount before engaging whatever mechanism is underneath.

The 144 x 168 pixel display black and white e-paper screen is recessed into the watch, and unless it’s in direct sunlight, it’s hard to tell where it ends and the chunky plastic bezel begins. The screen isn’t super sharp, but its usable. I haven’t seen it glitch or slow down while paging through the menus.

The backlight is a cool white, and works well, but there’s no brightness setting to be found.

Inside, the Pebble packs a vibrating motor, which is great, and a battery that can last a week. I haven’t had it long enough to test it, but since the Pebble UI doesn’t show the battery percentage anywhere, I haven’t found myself worrying about it. Once the watch gives me a low-power notice, I’ll charge it up via my MacBook Pro.

All in all, the Pebble’s hardware is nicer than I was afraid it might be, but it’s far from perfect. It is, however, passable.

Software

The Pebble — like most devices — is all about the software, and like most devices, there was an update ready for me after I unboxed the watch. After I paired the watch, I opened the Pebble app, and it quickly downloaded the update and pushed it to the watch. 90 seconds later, it was done.

I’m ashamed to report I took that photo with my iPad. Even though I was alone in my office, I was embarrassed to do it.

The software on the watch is pretty simple. Changing watchfaces is easy, and additional ones can be added via the Pebble app. Alarms can be set quickly, and the font size can be changed easily. Past that, however, there aren’t any settings for the thing.

While Pebble has promised that apps are on the way, at this point, there aren’t any available for download. Not a single step tracker or game. Being able to use the Pebble to track my steps throughout the day would be a killer feature, and put the watch on par with something like the FuelBand by Nike. Pebble says RunKeeper is in testing now.

The real magic happens when the Pebble is paired to a smartphone.

The Pebble & iOS

Getting the Pebble set up with iOS is a little fiddly, but it’s not too bad.

The Pebble’s big feature is its ability to show notifications from the iPhone on its screen. Coupled with the vibrator, this makes it easy to check in on a text or email without having to pull out your phone.

When a notification comes in, it pops up on the screen, staying there until it’s replaced by a newer message or is cleared by the press of a button. Keeping the watch and phone connected all day does impact battery life on the iPhone. While it isn’t draining my iPhone drastically faster, it is a noticeable change.

(The low-power Bluetooth 4.0 standard is supported by the Pebble’s hardware, but is not currently enabled.)

While it’s great to read things as they come in by just glancing at your wrist, having Siri built in to the watch would make it possible to respond to a text without pulling out your iPhone. If Apple’s really doing a smartwatch, I hope this is a feature.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, iOS doesn’t have a notification setting to “send to Bluetooth” anywhere. To grant an app’s notifications the ability to be pushed to the Pebble, you have to disable then re-enable the notification. It’s clunky, and made worse but the fact that when the Pebble and iPhone lose connection, the Pebble has to be re-setup.

(Pebble’s support says that SMS notifications will stay enabled, but in my testing, that’s been flaky.)

This means turning off the iPhone, flipping it to Airplane Mode or simply leaving it on your desk when you go to lunch means your phone will forget what its supposed to do. Or leaving your watch inside when you mow the grass. Or leaving your phone in your bag when you workout. Or do anything a normal human does, really. It blows.

Assigning the blame for the issues is hard. While it’d be easy to blame Apple for these limitations in iOS 6, the fact is that the Pebble is pushing the bounds of what anyone has done with iOS, and things are rough because Apple hasn’t needed to explore things like notification settings to Bluetooth devices.

The Pebble also acts as a remote to any media playing on the iPhone. In my testing, the controls work great with the Music app, Spotify, Instacast and more:

Conclusion

So, was the long wait for the Pebble worth it?

When I reviewed the iPod nano as a watch last year, I closed my article this way:

The promise of the iPod nano as a watch is endless. Lots of people would love to see Apple integrate it with the iPhone, giving the nano a true “smart watch” level of usefulness.

As it stands today, though, the iPod nano makes you look like a secret agent, but one who can’t actually do anything all that cool.

As it stands today, I won’t be wearing the Pebble all that much. I might not even keep it. It’s ahead of its time, and while it shows promise, the simple truth is that the Pebble isn’t all that helpful at this point.

Can the team behind the Kickstarter darling fix that with software? Will Apple open the door to Bluetooth-powered notifications? Will the next Pebble’s hardware be something I’m not embarrassed to wear?

The Pebble is like the Model A. When people looked at the Model A, some realized it was the future, and that one day, everyone would drive. Others thought Henry Ford was off his rocker and that his invention was a one-off that wouldn’t ever go anywhere.

The Pebble isn’t great out of the gate, and it may never have the chance to cover the ground it needs to before Apple swoops in. The idea of the smartwatch is cool, but the Pebble is rather simple and — in places — downright crude. But it’s pointing the way forward.

Maybe.

The Apple Pop-Up Museum is an effort to display some of the rich history that Apple pretends it doesn’t have.

The displays will be on show in Atlanta April 20–21, as part of the Vintage Computer Festival Southeast.

The group promises an Apple I, the first disk II and controller card, an original Apple II, an original Lisa and a Xerox Alto, among other machines.

If I wasn’t going to be in Florida with Make-a-Wish, I would be in Atlanta for this in a heartbeat. The exhibit and festival sound awesome.

via Ars Technica

If you are using Flipboard as your Google Reader replacement, there’s an easy way to make a magazine using any site’s Twitter account.

To follow 512 Pixels, search for the site using Flipboard’s search box on the main screen:

Select the site’s main Twitter account @512px, and boom, instant Flipboard magazine, straight from Twitter.

A couple of weeks after launching a new marketing page for the iPhone, Apple’s released one for its tablet. It follows the same outline as the previous page: J.D. Power and Associates awards, apps, hardware, software and services are all pimped.

Gabe’s site has an all-new look, and I must say, it is pretty damn handsome.

The Iconfactory:

Twitterrific’s push notification service is currently in beta and will be rolling out to groups of 1,000 users over the next few weeks. If you cannot enable push notifications, try again in a few days.

The update is rolling out across the App Store now.

The carrier will be selling the iPhone 5 starting April 12, and it will run on the company’s just-announced LTE network.

This isn’t a post about the Adria Richards thing. I don’t have much unique or all that interesting to say about it, honestly.

But this is a post about the Internet, and its response to Adria Richards and those who have stood up for her over the last few days.

Take Gina Trapani, for example. Gina’s an excellent writer, great podcaster and successful developer. While I don’t know Gina personally, I’ve followed her work for ages and look up to her.

Last night she tweeted this:

Those of you asking “What hate speech?” here’s 1 NSFW example of 100s of tweets in my mentions tab in past 5 days twitter.com/ginatrapani/st…

— Gina Trapani (@ginatrapani) March 26, 2013

Now, as NSFW as that is, it’s important to see it. Gina and others aren’t making this up. Just a quick pass through her mentions on Twitter show tons more garbage.

Gina’s not alone, of course. Numerous women in the tech industry have had violent messages hurled their way in the last few days, with Richards receiving the brunt of it:

Richards’ own site and that of her employer, SendGrid, were subject to denial-of-service attacks. Richards was personally bombarded with rape and murder threats. Someone sent her a photo of a naked, decapitated bound woman’s body with the caption “When I’m done.” A concerted effort began on 4chan to get Richards fired. Instead of standing up for an employee in the face of rape and death threats, SendGrid caved. It fired Richards because, in short, she was a trouble-maker.

Here’s a quote from the Verge article on the event:

But in a world where thousands of anonymous men can instantly gather to deliver swift retribution against any perceived threat, it’s easy to understand why more women don’t speak out.

While it is eroding in many ways, the Internet was founded with anonymity near and dear to its heart. Sadly, anonymity gives bullies courage, and can enable people to say terrible thing that they (probably) wouldn’t say in person. (Of course, some people are horrible to others with or without a keyboard in front of them.)

Another cornerstone of the Internet is the freedom of speech. The web has given a voice to the masses, as the Arab Spring showed us just a couple of years ago. But too many times, that voice turns negative.

Here’s Alexis Ohanian:

We, the tech community, should be taking a hard look at our response to the aforementioned events. Aren’t we better than this? I’m not talking about the trolls. There will always be frenzied agitators who are just mashing away on their keyboard, trying to outrage people. I’m talking about how many (otherwise reasonable-seeming) people I saw who were comfortable and self-righteous in calling a woman a bitch/cunt/etc from their Twitter, Hacker News, or, yes, reddit account.

Stop.

Now, the name Alexis Ohanian should be familiar to many of you, as he’s the co-founder of Reddit. Reddit famously doesn’t intervene with user content most of the time. Here’s Rebecca Greenfield at The Atlantic Wire:

In practice, Reddit generally stands up for the “free speech” of its site, meaning pretty much anything and definitely everything sexist remain on Reddit without getting pulled, moderated, or mandated. In fact, Reddit even rewards its super trolls. This is the same site that gave an award to Violentacrez, a.k.a Michael Brutsch, a.k.a the “biggest troll on the web” behind the creepshots and jailbait subreddits. The people who run the site justify that kind of action as a part of the site’s philosophy, which Ohanian gets at in his latest plea: “These amazing open platforms for speech work because an internet connection is all we need to share an idea with the connected world,” he writes. That lax policy, however, still results in a lot hateful people talking about terrible things, which was very much on full display as the Richards scandal played out last week from SendGrid to hackers and the tech-troll community in between. Apparently, this time things went too far for Reddit, or at least Ohanian, who would like to remind the “rock star” nerds what it feels like at the other end of things: “Plenty of us got used to being ignored,” he writes. “Many of us were bullied. But what did we learn from it — empathy or hate?”

My guess, Mr. Ohanian, is that the answer is hate, despite your blog post that reads:

We need to know the answer, because suddenly we are the cool kids. They’re making movies about us. We’re “rock stars.” Holy shit, the rest of the world is finally realizing how awesome we are. The geek has inherited the earth. And now that we’re the powerful ones, we need to remember: with great power comes great responsibility. It’s irresponsible to continue to act as though we are victims.

Ohanian’s hypocrisy aside, a single fact remains at the heart of this issue: the freedom of speech we all enjoy the Internet doesn’t entitle anyone to be a dick.

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