Is a Pebble Phone in the works?
Pebble has a big announcement coming up, but what is it? At least, we have to assume it’s something important. The wearable device manufacturer has a prominent countdown timer on its website, leading us to the belief of something happening at 1 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, Sept. 23. Could Pebble be planning its own excursion into the world of smartphones?
A commented line of HTML code might be the answer to that, but it seems way too careless and obvious to hold any truth. Web developers know how easy it is to view the source code behind pages, so if Pebble really wanted the announcement to be a secret, they surely wouldn’t have left the teaser there in plain sight. I suppose it’s possible, though; Pebble’s not exactly Apple when it comes to secrecy.
If that is the plan, it’s not a particularly wise move on Pebble’s part. The company has been feeling the heat following the release of Apple Watch, but the startup still launched a successful Pebble Time and a few software updates for the original wearable device. A smartphone just doesn’t seem like a winning combination for Pebble.
Look at what happened with Amazon’s Fire Phone. The abysmal failure of that device seems to show that there really isn’t room in the marketplace for more than the current lineup of smartwatch operating systems. If Pebble is launching its own device with a Pebble OS, it will face a serious uphill battle against iOS and Android. Even Windows Phone might be too strong a competing force for another phone operating system to succeed.
Hopefully, Pebble has something up its sleeves more interesting than just another handset. It just seems too soon for the company to be announcing a new wearable device, so what’s left? Version 3.0 of the Pebble firmware, with a new Timeline interface to put the day, events, notifications, and other information on the original Pebble and Pebble Steel? We will have to wait and see.