Pebble Slashes Prices Of Its Smartwatches; Upgrades Fitness Tracking
Pebble has dropped its smartwatch prices and added upgraded fitness tracking and support for new apps.
Pebble, the renowned smartwatch making startup, has established quite an image for its affordable range of smartwatches. The company fulfills the needs of both premium and low-cost requirements in the wearable sector with Pebble Steel and standard Pebble smartwatch. As the competition gets intense, the watch maker is improving its products as well as lowering the cost to attract a wider audience.
Pebble is officially dropping the price of its watches to $99 for the standard edition and $199 for Pebble Steel, a saving $50 and $30, respectively on each device. Not just that, the company is also upgrading its smartwatches to fully support fitness tracking in true sense. The company has extended its partnership to include Jawbone and Swim.com, which adds to the existing support for Misfit.
Jawbone and Swim.com apps are available for Pebble watches along with 4,000 other apps. The software update to all Pebble watches brings the long-overdue support for background fitness tracking. With Misfit for Pebble, which was launched in mid-June, wearer's can track their sleep in addition to the basic activity tracking at all times. Previously, wearers were required to keep the Misfit app open at all times to count their steps and sleep tracking functionality was missing, The Verge reports.
In addition to the effective fitness tracking capabilities, wearers can set preferred watch faces while tracking activities in the background. Jawbone has its new watch face that shows daily and weekly goals and syncs data with its paired app for iOS users. Android version of the UP app is underway and will be released soon. Swim.com takes advantage of Pebble's 5 ATM water-resistance to measure "distance, pace, times, strokes and efficiency while swimming with their Pebble and automatically sync this data with their phone and the cloud when returning to the locker room," the company's official blog reads.
Pebble also announced the expansion of its smartwatch's availability in new stores in the U.S., such as Sam's Club, Fry's Electronics and in the U.K. across Dixons retail, O2 and Amazon.co.uk starting October. The company is also releasing the new Pebble smartwatches across various retail stores in Benelux and Scandinavia starting Wednesday.
