Pebble is a smartwatch which was successfully funded on Kickstarter back in 2012, which predated the Samsung Galaxy Gear by over a year. The Pebble watch used e-paper for the display, picked up notifications from both Android and iPhones although only text messages from Android phones. As with the later Galaxy Gear, you can download apps to the watch, as well as new watch faces. The creators went for a crowdsourcing model and placed a request on Kickstarter for $100,000. In the end it broke all funding records on the site and managed to achieve a record $10,266,845 from 68,929 backers. This included 31 backers who took the $10,000 pledge pack for a hundred Pebbles each. The manufacturers have continued to innovate, having released the watch in metal. A recent update called Smartwatch+ also updates the functionality and makes the watch interact even more with a smartphone. It shows multiple status updates from an iPhone such as the battery charge, as well as numbers of messages and phone calls. Despite coming out first, the Pebble remains a viable alternative to the Galaxy Gear, coming in at a cheaper price and having a far longer battery life than its counterpart as well as being compatible with many more devices.
