The Pebble Time watch, a new product from the makers of the Pebble smartwatch, is on track to become the most funded Kickstarter project yet with several weeks left in its crowdfunding campaign. The original watch raised more than $10 million in 2012. Credit: Pebble
With Apple's first foray into smartwatches still on the horizon, a competitor is generating big buzz online for a similar product. The Pebble Time, a smartwatch from the makers of the e-ink Pebble watch, was introduced last week in a Kickstarter campaign. Within a day, the campaign raised more than $9 million with weeks to go. (As of this writing, it's at $10.3 million.) The record for a Kickstarter campaign is $13.2 million and the Pebble Time at the time of this writing looked set to easily surpass it.
What is the Pebble Time? Like the original watch, it connects to a smartphone to offer notifications, text from emails and info from more than 6,500 apps. But the new watch has a color face instead of black and white only, a microphone to respond to messages and, unlike the Apple Watch, about seven days worth of battery life.
Pebble says the new watch will ship to Kickstarter backers (who are paying $179 for the Time watch) in May. It will be offered at retail for $199 sometime after all those are shipped.
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