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Pebble made history in April last year when it became the most backed idea ever on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, raising $10 million from more than 68,000 people. Its parent, Pebble Technology, had initially asked for only $100,000.
Backers were supposed to receive their first shipment in September. The delay was caused in part by the massive response to the idea, Pebble's CEO Eric Migicovsky told a press conference at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, yesterday.
The device itself looks simple - a watch with a black-and-white, easy-to-read display. Water resistant to 5 atmospheres, Pebble uses low-power Bluetooth to sync with your smartphone to display emails, Facebook notifications and SMS messages on its screen. Incoming phone calls make the watch vibrate and can be dismissed from the watch itself. The display, which is made of power-sipping electronic paper, gives Pebble a battery life of seven days between charges.
It also syncs with the website If This Then That, which lets you set up simple rules to receive information from other sites you're interested in. Migicovsky showed how the Pebble could be set up to notify you if it had started snowing in Las Vegas according to a weather app, for example. It comes with its own operating system and will be open to third-party developers.
The announcement that it is being delivered at last is not just good news for Pebble's supporters - critics often cited the project as a case study in how Kickstarter initiatives over-promise and under-deliver. In September the site's owners even wrote a blog post to those posting projects on the site, warning them that it was better to "under-promise and over-deliver".