Hardware: Pebble watch which really does work with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8

I just ordered the Pebble Watch from Best Buy so I can pick it up later today.  I had thought to buy the TEXAS INSTRUMENTS EZ430-CHRONOS-433 CC430, RF WIRELESS WATCH, 433MHZ, DEV KIT, which would be cool, and you can modify the actual hardware inside of the watch.  And the Texas Instruments Dev kit is CHEAP, Digi-Key has them for $51.16.  It does work with Windows 8 and you can drive Power point with the phone out of the box.  Nice.  Downside, how to distribute the apps for the site?  That isn’t clear.

But from a business point of view, I have to think about how do I work within the parameters of the “App” economy.  The Pebble Watch does work with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 App, although for some reason they won’t advertise the fact.  Oh well.

Pebble has some ugly watch configurations, and some nice ones, I bought the Orange Pebble watch and plan on implementing some Windows Phone 8 Apps to work with it. 

The “Cloud Pebble” IDE is just a C compiler that runs in the cloud.  Guess that is ok.  Seems ugly compared to TouchDevelop, which I think needs a Pebble Watch Interface.

On the other hand, I will likely purchase the TI watch later and work out how to implement the full economy of an app store, and other software ecological items.  Kind of sad that there is no camera in these newest watches, I guess the disgust with secret picture taking the previous smart watch cycles finally stuck with the designers.  Or no one really want grainy images.  Also, weird that there is an accelerometer, but no voice recorder like on earlier smart watches.  Oh well.

Total cost right now: $150 plus sales tax.  Also might pick up another watch band.