Best Buy has started accepting pre-orders for the Pebble Time smartwatch in the US. The California-based company had announced a few weeks back, that regular pre-orders for the device will begin June 22nd onwards for those who did not take the Kickstarter route to book the device. The Pebble Time comes with a price-tag of $200 and is being offered in three colors on Best Buy – Black, Red and White. The pre-orders have opened only for Pebble Time and not the higher priced Pebble Time Steel, which will reportedly retail for a hundred bucks more, at $300. It is worth remembering here, that late last month, the devices had started shipping to the original Kickstarter backers, who only had to pay $179 instead of $200 to get their hands on the smartwatch.
The Pebble Time is the California-based company’s third generation iteration of the original Pebble smartwatch, and was released by the company after an extremely successful crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter. The smartwatch was announced by Pebble Technology Corp. on February 24th this year via its Kickstarter campaign. The project reached its goal of $500,000 in pledges within just seventeen minutes, and touched a million dollars in just forty-nine minutes. The project realized $10.3 million within just two days and by the time the campaign ended on March 27th, the Pebble Time had received pledges over $20 million from over seventy thousand backers.
The Pebble Time is powered by an STM32F205RE Cortex M3 CPU, and comes with 128 MB of RAM. The device runs on the Pebble OS, which uses a customized FreeRTOS kernel, and is compatible with both Android and iOS operating systems. The smartwatch features a 64-color e-ink display protected by Corning’s Gorilla Glass, and comes with a 150 mAh battery. That gives the device an impressive week-long battery life with normal usage, according to most early reviews. The watch is also fully waterproof like its predecessors. The company is also launching a stainless steel variant of the Pebble Time called the Pebble Time Steel, which will be available in silver, black and gold. According to Pebble, the device will have an even longer battery life of around ten days, and is slated to start shipping from next month to its original backers on Kickstarter.