Pebble Time smartwatch owners will be happy to know that they now have fitness tracking capabilities thanks to a new upgrade with no apps needed. When it came to whether or not Pebble Time would add fitness tracking, the issue was always that Pebble had exchanged that for the ability to have a longer battery life and to have the screen always on. It seems now that Pebble Time has decided to add the fitness tracking capabilities and that means your fitness can automatically be tracked while asleep at the same time.
The Pebble Time tracking has previously worked with a variety of different applications, such as Jawbone and Misfit, but this required it to be running in the background. The newest firmware update which was version 3.8 just launched today, and with that you have the ability to get fitness tracking right on the smartwatch with no other application downloads needed. The operating system will automatically track fitness activity such as daily steps and sleep. You also can set your goals based on various things such as average performance.
Another thing that you can now get with the Pebble Time fitness tracking is that you can get weekly summaries, along with other statistics that have been used in other fitness applications. Think of all of the options and features that are native to the other fitness trackers and you basically have what Pebble Health will be using to help you track your fitness goals.
When it comes to Pebble, Pebble has promised that there will be even more features coming down the pike in the future, including things like cross-posting various activity to the Pebble Timeline. This is basically the day-at-a-glance feature that has been built into the newer Pebble smartwatches. This also means that there is a possibility one day of having the smartwatch tell you how well you slept compared to how busy your day was, although this is all still up in the air at this point.
Pebble did announce though that it would be collaborating with Stanford Wearable Health Lab to make more standards available for their products when it comes to sharing and collecting health data. This basically means that your Pebble Time smartwatch could be used for health data research purposes, but it is not known just how soon this collaboration will be completed and up and running on the smartwatches.
When you look at the new fitness tracking on Pebble Time, it can also be cross-synced with Apple Health and Google Fit. There will also be even more compatibility in the future with third-party fitness apps. The new firmware update will end up eating about 5 percent more battery life with the implementation of Pebble Health. The features of Pebble Health are going to only be available on Pebble Time, Pebble Time Steel, and Pebble Time Round smartwatches. This means that the older Pebble versions will not be able to get the fitness activity tracking capabilities.
If you are unsure which of the smartwatches will not be included in this update, thinkn of the plastic model of the Pebble smartwatch and the Steel. You can still use Misfit and Jawbone though on the older Pebble smartwatches to get the fitness tracking abilities, it just will not be native or baked into the operating system. The earlier Pebble smartwatches though are getting the Pebble Time Timeline at-a-glance calendar and a new user-interface. This is also good news because the older models needed some of these new upgrades, and there will be no more eight-app limits either on the older Pebble smartwatches.
It is not known whether or not Pebble plans on making the new Pebble Health features available to the older Pebble smartwatches down the road. At this point it seems that it might be more complicated to bake the fitness trackers into the user-interface of the older smartwatches, but Pebble has not made a definite answer either way yet on whether these features will ever come to the older smartwatches.
