What Time Is It? Time To Get A New Watch

I have always been a watch person.

In middle school, high school and college I owned G-shock watches. Those things are amazing! I had one that could tell you the altitude which we used while back-packing. They also had at least 5 alarms and a myriad of other cool features - like water proof up to 200m. Never mind my ears hurt after 10 feet - I could go 200m!

And yes, I was that kid in class who had it beep at the top of every hour. In retrospect, I bet my teachers hated that. :)

Being indestructible was my favorite feature. I could wear it while working and not have to worry hurting it. That's a major bonus when doing construction work in Mexico and everyone wants to know if it's lunchtime yet. My last G-shock made it through junior year of high school, college and a couple years beyond.

That G-shock finally met an untimely doom during a construction project on our duplex. I accidentally slammed my wrist up against a wall and it literally shattered the outside casing into 3 pieces. So much for that highly valued 200m water proof feature. I milked it for a few months beyond, but once the battery died I knew it was time to move on.

For my next watch I ventured into new territory. I wanted something I could wear for more occasions: mainly dressed up or casual. My G-shock didn't work well with long sleeve shirts because of it's bulk. Since I mostly play sports for exercise, I didn't need a sports watch. I found an analog Timex that met my need.

I've already gone through one battery and it's been a trooper. The only time I don't like wearing it is when I do serious typing (like right now) because it rubs my wrist weird.

I don't want to dismiss this watch - it's good. But today I once again ventured into new territory.

Kickstarter is a website that helps people raise money for creative projects by allowing other individuals (the crowd) to collectively fund them. This is known as crowd-funding. It's a pretty amazing platform with many interesting projects.

One project is called Pebble. It's an e-paper watch that connects, via blue-tooth, to your smart phone. It can display the time, incoming caller ID, text messages (on Android), control music, monitor your running pace, and many more cool functions to come. Here's a video of the watch:




Pretty cool, right? On Kickstarter, people can pledge to give money to the project with various rewards for contributing. For example, for $115 you can get a black watch when it comes out.

I was hesitant at first to fund the project because the blue-tooth technology they were using was an older one. That meant greater batter drain and less possible features. Then today they announced they would upgrade to the latest version of blue-tooth given all the popular demand for it.

Boom.

I signed up and will be getting mine in September.

So I enter a new phase of watch awesome-ness. It's a 2012 high tech version of the G-Shock watch, but with the sleek look of my current Timex watch. Now the big question is what color I should get. I like the white since it'll match my iPhone, but then I might come off as a bit of a hipster. I'm not sure how I feel about that... :)