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Rest easy: The Pebble Time will wake you at the best point in your sleep cycle

By Christian de Looper Published May 10, 2016

Pebble isn’t as known for its fitness tracking than its smartwatches, but that doesn’t mean it’s ignoring fitness altogether. The company has just announced a hefty update to the Time family of watches with a big focus on fitness.

Related: See here for more Pebble Smartwatch products and accessories

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One of these new features could help you start your day in the best way possible. The feature is called Smart Alarms, and it essentially wakes you up based on your sleep cycle, within 30 minutes of your set alarm time. So, if it notices you’re in a light sleep 30 minutes before your alarm time, you can set it to wake you up, helping eliminate drowsiness. If you’re in a heavy sleep, however, it will wait until the set alarm time.

Apart from smartly waking you up, the Pebble Time also now offers you a “mobile health snapshot.” This is basically a new way of looking at your health stats from the past day, week, or month, showing you how your performance stacks up against your typical performance. Not a groundbreaking feature among fitness trackers, to be sure, but certainly a helpful one for those using their Pebble Time for health tracking. Coupled with this is a new “activity summary” feature, which basically just shows you summaries of sleep, fitness, and so on.

pebble-time2 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Another important new feature, although not health related, finally expands on messaging for iOS users. While previously, you could really only reply to texts on your Pebble watch, now you can start a conversation from the device. Not only that, but you can also reply to an incoming call with a text response or a voice note. These features were both sorely missed in previous versions of the Pebble Time operating system, but were absent more because of iOS’ closed nature than because Pebble was slacking off.

Sure, none of these new features are going to revolutionize the wearable world, but they should prove to be helpful, and show that Pebble is focused just as much on current users as it is on gaining new ones. To get the update, simply make sure the Pebble for iOS or Android app is at version 3.12, then go to Menu, Supper, Update your Pebble, updating it to firmware version 3.12.

Pebble for Android

Christian de Looper

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Christian de Looper is a long-time freelance writer who has covered every facet of the consumer tech and electric vehicle…

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Garmin Vivomove Sport dial close up. Credits: Garmin official.

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