Curious about how a smart watch might fit into my life, I picked up a Pebble on eBay right before heading out to WordCamp PHX. It was surprisingly useful in a few different situations:
- When hanging out chatting with people, it was a lot easier to glance at my wrist to see if that buzz was a text message I needed to respond to (perhaps to coordinate where to meet, etc.) vs. a tweet, etc. that I could safely ignore until later. Not taking my phone out of my pocket for each buzz seemed more polite and made me more present.
- Having the buzz happen on my wrist caused me to catch a few more alerts as well. When I’m not wearing jeans, it miss my phone buzzing more often than I’d like. I used to use a belt-clipped holster like I did in my BlackBerry days to avoid this, but gave it up a few years ago.
- Being able to glance down at the weather was a nice alternative to pulling out my phone, navigating to the weather app, and waiting for it to load.
I’m not wearing it as a daily watch; I have a traditional watch that I prefer. But I do think I will bring out the Pebble for situations where I’m likely to be involved in a lot of communication.