Smartwatches Still in the Running

I’ve written about smartwatches before. So far they have not been selling as fast as some expected. The marketplace still hasn’t sorted out the right combinations of features and price.

Apple’s iWatch is arriving in April. It will no doubt sell well – if for no other reason than it’s an Apple product.

The first real smartwatch was the Pebble, which broke Kickstarter records in 2012. They announced a new version of it yesterday, called the “Pebble Time”. They launched a new Kickstarter project yesterday morning – but this time just to take pre-orders at a discount for May delivery, rather than for funding development.

If nothing else, it proved that there is tremendous interest in smartwatches. They achieved their $500,000 sales goal in about an hour, and the last I checked they were over $9,100,000, which translates to around 50,000 watches.