Pebble Smartwatch Handles Success; CEO Eric Migicovsky Reveals More in Reddit AMA

It hasn’t been all that long since the Pebble smartwatch took Kickstarter by storm, whipping up a cool $10 million in funds, but the device appears poised for genuine success. In a blog post, Pebble’s Eric Migicovsky dished out some numbers surrounding the smartwatch that bode well for its success.

Pre orders for the Pebble smartwatch have reached 275,000, between Kickstarter orders as well as those taken directly from the company’s website and Best Buy stores. The company has already sent out some 93,000 Pebbles around the world, and Pebble owners have downloaded 1 million watchapps for the device. There are 29 Pebble employees, and Eric Migicovsky says they’re still hiring. (It’s not all glowing news, of course: 2,046 smartwatches have malfunctioned, and although Pebble has replaced about 1800 of them, around 300 have languished for weeks in the RMA system.)

Pebble is manufacturing about 2,000 smartwatches per day.

Of all the smartwatches coming down the pike, the Pebble smartwatch is one of the most intriguing. In addition to being one of the few grassroots efforts to make a smartwatch, it’s done better than anyone, likely including its creators, ever expected.

CEO Eric Migicovsky sat down for a Reddit AMA this afternoon and dropped some additional tidbits concerning the Pebble’s present and future.

First, and probably most pressing for the average user, is the issue of an app store—which sounds as though it will happen in the not-too-distant future: “Incentivizing developers to write awesome Pebble watchapps is a priority for us. We also want to make it easier for users to explore apps available for Pebble. We're working on this as our software team focuses on the developer experience,” wrote Migicovsky. Devs will be able to sell their wares on it—it won’t be just for Pebble-made apps.

Pebble is working to wrap multiple features up into the Pebble phone app so that users don’t have to run so many individual apps all the time, and the team is also working to resolve the 8-app limit issue for watchfaces on the Pebble.

Further on the development side if things, the Pebble team is working on adding hardware features via new APIs and third-party developer efforts; we infer that the beta SDK will soon be updated and complete. There is also a new Pebble app version (1.9.2) for Android coming out soon—as in, within hours--to fix a lot of bugs. There will be a major update its iOS 6 support in the next couple of weeks that will bring support for email notifications, with full support for Gmail and IMAP. Unfortunately, the team is not working on Windows Phone 8 integration, although they believe that third-party entities are.

Bluetooth 4.0 is coming at some point (the team is working on it), and there will be custom Pebble watchbands available from other manufacturer soon.

Of all the smartwatches coming down the pike, the Pebble smartwatch is one of the most intriguing. In addition to being one of the few grassroots efforts to make a smartwatch, it’s done better than anyone, likely including its creators, ever expected.