Yesterday Best Buy offered the Pebble smartwatch for a discounted price of $99.99. Now this morning, Pebble has said that $99.99 will be the new permanent price of the Pebble smartwatch. But the folks over at Pebble didn’t stop there. Not only is the Pebble now available at a lower cost, Pebble will also be partnering with more retail partners across the world. This will make the Pebble smartwatch more widely available to customers.
On top of these two announcements, Pebble also released a new software update to the Pebble that will add two major features to the smartwatch. The update to firmware 2.6 will add activity tracking as well as sleep monitoring to both the original Pebble and the Pebble Steel. And don’t worry about the activity tracking needing a certain watchface to be displayed for it to work, you can still display any watchface you want on your Pebble while the fitness tracking and sleep monitoring takes place in the background.
Pebble will capitalize on this new move towards fitness tracking with new apps from Jawbone, Misfit, and Swim.com that will all take advantage of the Pebbles new fitness tracking capabilities. The app that seems to be the most useful is the new Misfit app that will fully take advantage of both fitness tracking as well as sleep monitoring 24/7.
Besides the new activity tracking and sleep monitoring, lets run through what else is included in the 2.6 firmware update. First lets talk about a significant new feature called Quick Launch, this allows users to set shortcuts for their favorite Pebble apps that can be triggered by a long-press of the up or down buttons. Next we have a feature that has been a long time coming, a persistent battery icon in the Pebble menus. And last but not least, the select button will once again dismiss a notification when paired with an Android device or an iPhone running iOS 7 or lower. Then of course we have the usual bug fixes and improvements.
For all of you who are eager to update your Pebble smartwatch to the new 2.6 firmware, here is how you do so. Simply open the Pebble app on your Android or iOS device and select Support, then Update Your Pebble. That’s it! Simple and easy. Let us know what you think of the new Pebble update in the comments below.