Pebble Chief Sees Apple's (AAPL) Smartwatch as 'Lacking'

Pebble, which saw its Time smartwatch become the most funded Kickstarter project on record today, announced a version of the next-generation smartwatch encased in metal: the Time Steel.

With the announcement, CEO Eric Migicovsky fired a few shots at Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and its upcoming Apple Watch. Migicovsky commented to TheNextWeb:

Obviously Apple is coming into the space and they seem like they’re interested… It says iPhone, Mac, Watch [at the top of Apple’s website] so it’s going to be pretty exciting, but it’s a pretty different product.

In some ways, it’s definitely lacking, in quite a few ways, but they’re going after a pretty different market segment.

Notably, Pebble also has over 26,000 developers creating watch faces and other content for the devices. Migicovsky said:

What we’re excited about is the opportunity that hardware developers will have the same kind of renaissance of being able to hack on their Pebble.

I don’t think it’s exactly an overlap [between hardware and software hackers]. A hardware hacker is probably more in the Arduino community than someone who’s building JSFs (JavaServer Faces) for Pebble, but I think there’s definitely some overlap. I think it’s more just complementary; people who write apps and beautiful watchfaces are interested in Pebble, people who like hardware are interested in Pebble and we want to get them all hacking on it.

I won’t be happy until I see an Arduino wired up to talk directly to Pebble, that’d be cool… I don’t know exactly what it’d do but I know it’d do something awesome, maybe LEDs and making them do cool patterns.

Shares of Apple are just about flat Tuesday afternoon.

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