Pebble is worried.
So much so, that they’ve ripped a page out of Google’s, Samsung’s, Xiaomi’s and many, many others’ playbooks: Copy Apple as closely as possible; appropriate their trade dress to the point of infringement in order to rope in the ignorati.
Pebble’s Kickstarter page introduces the “Pebble Time Steel” with the line that “This time we mean business.”
The Pebble Time Steal, er… Steel features a 316L stainless steel casing and a “premium” leather and stainless steel strap.
For some reason – we can’t quite place it – it looks eerily familiar:
Oh, wait, now we remember! We have seen something like this before, last autumn, for the first time:
Shameless, Pebblesung. Absolutely shameless.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: March 3, 2015. The day Pebble jumped the shark.
What? No MDN pun about Pebble “Steal”?
Added one just for you!
Of all the watch and band combinations, this one with the yellow gold, red leather band and lipstick red digital crown, seem to me to be the most feminin of them all. No big whoop, just sayin’ … I really hope Malissa Mayer will be so kind as to treat us to another ‘red ball’ pic, but this time, styling this sexy watch.
Pebble can’t even steel [sic] good.
But theirs has two loopy things to hold the strap and is therefore completely different, at least by applying Samsung logic.
Apple does not have a patent on the rectangle or gold. It actually has more differences here than some cell phones from some manufacturers though! Wait till Stauer makes smart watches… they have the best ad copy!
But, wait! Is that a Whatchamacallit, a crown bezel whell that my peepers espy?, Gosh! where have we seen that before?
They spelled the watches name wrong. It is Time Steal, with an ea, not an ee. Then it is much more intuitive.
Even in a grocery store the own brand packaging has a similar colour scheme to the premium brand.
You just have to accept it as part of the market. It’s not a slavishly close as some other Apple product knock-offs. The strap is a standard fixing not a direct copy of Apple ; and I doubt if the red shade is a patented colour.
Fed Ex Stolen Idea
m.youtube.com/watch?v=zNCrMEOqHpc
“Looks like” is not quite the same as “is” an Apple Watch. All things are hardly equal. Others continue making 1/2-assed wolves in Apple clothing hoping to fool consumers.
Here come the copy cat cloners! lol
Close enough and thousands of dollars cheaper. No one will ever know the difference if I just flash it quickly enough. There will be so many clones of AppleWatch with peddlers selling them on the street corners and they’ll all be running Android Wear. The pundits will claim they’re just as good as the real deal, maybe better.
/s
Original Headline:
Pebble Time – Awesome Smartwatch, No Compromises
MDN Headline: Pebble’s new ‘Pebble Time Steel’ mimics look of gold Apple Watch Edition
Pebble has been making smartwatches for almost 7 years now. The watch hasn’t even been released. Seems to me that it’s more the gold watch editions mimic the look the the new Pebble Time Steel and not the other way around. Actually looking at some of the models released way before Apple even made the announcement I notice that their watch faces are square/rectangular. Imagine that.
I’m surprised to see no comment about Apple copying the battery life of the Pebble but then again what do you expect from someone looking to denigrate others.
Oh I hope the watch blows Pebble out of the water, on competitive features, not on revisionist history.
Pebble Tim Steel was announced today.
Apple Watch Edition was revealed on September 9, 2014.
Pebble clearly knocked off Apple Watch Edition. No “revisionist history” involved except for those who can’t tell time. Pebble sufferer?
You think that’s a knock off from the photo? Wow, they are both red straps, that can be modified, both have gold color, and both are rectangular. Gosh I hope Apple has patents for all that stuff.
Look, they haven’t been able to copy the round button on the side, and the button is square. A poor attempt to copy Apple. Oh and the battery is supposed to last days. That doesn’t sound like a copy of Apple’s watch.
Worried about another company having an original idea sufferer?
I will say that’s the first pebble I’ve taken seriously.
Any street cred Pebble once had is shot with these blatant copies of Apple Watch.
I’ve watched the kickstarter vid. Must say they new pebble looks like a very different animal to the apple watch.
Mimicing the apple picture is a brilliant publicity stunt.
On ballance, if I wasn’t interested in very tight iphone intergration, I’d get a Pebble Time…. just sayin…
Ummm….no. The problem here of course is that square gold watches with red straps have been around for hundreds of years. Put ‘square gold watch red strap’ into Google image search and tons come up. If Pebble ripped off Apple, Apple ripped off…well, hundreds of watchmakers.
All that’s happened here is that Pebble have done a nice publicity stunt while launching the Time Steel that MDN, among others, fell for – but the functionality of the watch is vastly different. This isn’t Apple walking into a market and creating the definitive form of a product that then gets cloned in all aspects as happened with the iPhone. They might end up making the definitive smartwatch in terms of software (though that remains to be seen), but the hardware form has been established for centuries.
Well, that’s black, red, gold – the colors of the german flag.