A few words about the new toy - Pebble Time.
In the first grade of university, the first lectures in September were marked by a lot of watches beeping around 10. About the third day in everyone, of course, turned them off, but without phones the watch was the main distraction. I even had a habit of trying to look up the weather and which floor am I at on them.
So, finally I have a watch which theoretically can do that.
First things first: they are good as a watch. Calendar, weather (yay!), nice watchfaces. Timer and stopwatch can be installed, there are a few different ones.
First disappointment: only the Western European languages are supported. Not only the interface, but the fonts have nothing but Latin letters! I understand that to prolong battery life they had to compromise on memory as well, but it is not a pleasant surprise in 2015. One can install Chinese and Japanese language pack, Chinese and Japanese characters display fine with that. There is a Russian firmware, but after installing it all the Cyrillic letters become whitespace (as opposed to squares by default). Why is there no Russian language pack I have no idea, neither do I know what to do if I need to install two.
The application catalog is quite boring. Judging by the fact that I see quite a few test applications, like "paint the whole screen with one color", there's not a lot of them overall. Many are very specialized and therefore not of use to many, such as "transport in (some small French city)". Some apps install but don't run. On the whole, the catalog reminds me of Google Play Market during Android 2 times. Hopefully the situation will improve, or...
Let's improve it ourselves! The developer site is quite good, the documentation and the examples are solid. The emulator requires some strange packages and isn't packaged for Arch Linux properly, so I could launch it (an old version - Pebble, not Time) but not install a program there. On the watch itself the example application installs and runs with no problems.
I wanted (and still want) to make an application putting some pins onto the timeline. Turns out pins can only be added through the Pebble servers. Moreover, the pin specification is very specialized: apart from the expected time fields one can create a "sports event" pin with the fields of "first team score" and "second team score", and the score is a single number (hello, tennis and volleyball).
Would be interesting to compare all this to the Android Wear based watches. It doesn't seem like they're a lot more expensive.
Anyway, I just want an HMD. Anyone up for making Glass or something else work properly and solve the eye strain?
P.S. When typing while resting the palms on the table, the watch feels uncomfortable. Learning the right hand position, like on the piano.