Pebble adds advanced activity tracking, communication features and a smart alarm

Pebble was one of the more successful Kickstarters and their lineup of smartwatches have come a long way with a series of improvements. Pebble just announced it is rolling out more advanced activity tracking, as well as communication features. The Activity update detects when you are running or walking automatically, and tracks this kind of activity. There are new interactive information graphics that compare your current day, week or month’s activity to averages of previous days, weeks and months. There is also calorie burn information included. The application also encourages users to be more active by making them compete with themselves. There is a small crown icon placed over the period of time with the most activity. There is a sleep tracker as well, that shows how much you slept, for how long you slept. The smartwatch also tracks the type of sleep of the user, and records the duration of deep sleep in proportion to the light sleep. Tracking of the quality of sleep allows Pebble to implement a feature known as the smart alarm. What the smart alarm does is, compare your sleeping pattern to the time of a preset alarm. As the time for waking up approaches, and if you move into light sleep from deep sleep within 30 minutes of the scheduled alarm, the alarm starts ringing. Pebble hopes that you are more refreshed because of this, and are better prepared to face the day. You are also more likely to respond to the alarm if you are sleeping lightly. The communication features involves tying up with certain service providers to allow for users to send text messages directly from the watch. This was a feature that was already available on Android, but is now rolled out on Apple. Apple’s API currently does not support this feature, and Pebble used the announcement as a platform to demand it. Pebble did go around the restriction by tying up with service providers.