Update your Pebble!

Today, Pebble has made available the their new firmware (3.8) for the Pebble Time.

The major new feature is the new app Health that can be synced with your smartphone Health Kit.  The Pebble Time smart watch is becoming more and more interesting with each new update and this one is a major one.

You need to update your Pebble Time companion app on your smartphone.  Then you will be able to upgrade your watch in just a few minutes.

At the same time, the original Pebble will also benefit a major revision as it is moving the the new Pebble Time interface.  I just finished installing it on my OP.  Even if the display is monochrome, the new interface is looking great, fast and smooth.  

More than time!

I got my hand on the Pebble Time last week.  I've been browsing the available apps in the Pebble Store, looking for the really useful one that would provide more functionalities to my watch.

My classic Pebble has been really great for the last year but I was tempted by the Pebble Time for two main reasons:  the colours and the voice input feature.

With some many products available on the market, I do prefer the Pebble Time as it does offer a lot of functionalities for a low price compared to the others.  At the price of 179$ CAD,  other products can only offer limited features like activity tracking and basic notifications while the Pebble (Time) do offer thousands of apps and watch faces to customize your watch to your needs.

Beside supporting colours, the Pebble Time has a microphone for voice input thru text recognition.  At the time of writing this post,  apps supporting voice input are rare.  If you're on Android, you will be able to reply to the notifications received from Twitter, Facebook of an SMS.  This is a really neat feature not available for Apple users.  On iOS, all you can do is dismiss the received notification.

As I wanted to explore the possibilities of my Pebble Time with my iPhone, I've discovered Turquoise, a Twitter client app that lets you reply to private messages, mentions.  Shake your wrist and post publicly.  Turquoise is pushing the boundaries of the Pebble Time by providing a new way to use the device.  Most apps will let you view informations, schedule new reminders or acknowledge something.  For the first time, we have an app that is not related to time but to communication.  A few others have tried to provide such a feature but in my opinion, Turquoise nailed it perfectly on the Pebble Time.

Download at http://apps.getpebble.com/en_US/application/562bf75415ecb90d0d0000d9

Back to the future with Ubuntu

Finally, after a few months of fiddling with Windows 10, I got back to my good old Ubuntu desktop on my laptop.

It's not that my Windows 10 experience was a disaster, quite the contrary.  The new interface of Windows 10 was appealing and quite fun to use.  The novelty disappeared and today, I saw that Ubuntu 15.10 was out...  I could not resit the temptation.

Nevertheless, Windows 10 is not exactly what I was looking for.  My trackpad on my laptop was not properly supported, the laptop was a bit slow compared to Ubuntu and when trying apply some updates, something went wrong and updates could not be installed.

I don't know if I am plague by Microsoft but something always go wrong with Windows.  This time, they were minor issues but still, they are annoying.

So I downloaded the latest image of Ubuntu 15.10 (5 minutes), created a bootable USB stick (5 minutes) and installed it to replace Windows entirely (15 minutes).   In a matter of less than an hour, I was booting back into Ubuntu, ready to surf the wave again.

I was surprised to re-discover how smooth Ubuntu is.  Seriously, after having spent many weeks with Windows 10 on the laptop (Samsung RV515), I was accustomed to the speed of Windows 10.  Fast enough, not quite smooth on some occasions...

On the initial boot of Ubuntu 15.10,  I was expecting some delays as the operating system needs to finish some indexing of some sort.  No...  It was ready and faster than ever.  On this machine, Ubuntu is way smoother than Windows 10.  It does provide a better experience as apps are starting faster, switching between them is smoother...

Of course, I did the test with my iPhone 6 (iOS 9.1).  Ubuntu still support iOS 9.1, out-of-the-box as before.  If only syncing could work...

Have a nice day!