Pebble Update

Given all the issues I had been having with my Pebble watch staying connected to my iPhone, it might seem odd that I ordered a new Pebble Time rather than an Apple Watch. For the last few months though my Pebble has stayed connected to my phone almost continuously. The iOS permission notification, that I used to see regularly, now really only appears when the phone restarts.

Intermittent Disconnects

Also, the problem where it appeared to be connected, but was not getting any notifications, has gone away after a factory reset of the watch (from the watch’s settings menu), followed by switching to recovery mode (press and hold back, up and select buttons for 30 seconds) and letting the phone re-install the latest firmware. The app reinstalled 

Not sure what caused the problem, but I suspect either the update process left something in a strange state or there is something that leaks resources. With the latest firmware though, I haven’t seen it again, so I’m hoping that was something in an earlier version. If I do see it again, at least I know the trick to getting things back to normal now, and while it sounds painful, getting watchfaces & apps back on the watch is automatic once the watch is paired back to the phone.

Audio Issues

I still get the interference from the Pebble when using a Bluetooth hands free system for voice calls. Most noticeable on in car systems, though either the latest versions of iOS and/or Pebble firmware, or perhaps my new car (same make as the previous one, but a few years younger) have made it less of a problem. I haven’t had a chance to do any testing with other devices.

The Bluetooth audio connections for listening to music were fixed with a Pebble firmware update a while ago.

Battery Life

For a long time after I had the issues with battery life (which, I am pretty sure, were actually caused by the Bluetooth communication issues), I had been using the Modern Longlife watchface. With that, I was getting 5+ days regularly from the Steel, with moderate to heavy notifications. I switched to Modern Neue recently, which includes a second hand, and I think it has knocked a little off the battery life, but it is still 5 days between charges most of the time. I have become comfortable with the 20% battery warning and know that just means I need to charge that night, even when it pops up early in the day.

The Good

As I mentioned earlier in my smart watch thoughts post, having the important things that happen online appear on the watch is great, and something I would definitely miss now. The watchface options are unbelievable too, and while perhaps not as pretty as the new Apple Watch ones, they are every bit as functional (perhaps more so if you take into account the fact that they on screen all the time and not just when you activate the screen).

On the app front, there is already a huge selection of apps, but my personal feeling right now is that few are really useful for me simply because I would rather use the watch to be notified of things than to act on them. I do like the Nest remote, but even that i don’t use often. I certainly don’t want to be reading anything longer than a notification on my watch (though I do wish Facebook notifications included at least some of the content too so I cou,d decide whether I want to get the phone out or not).

Smartwatch Thoughts

Black Pebble Time SteelWith what seems like my entire Twitter timeline getting excited about their new Apple Watches (arriving, one after the other today it seems), I thought it would be a good time to review some of my thoughts on smartwatches, and in particular why I have not pre-ordered an Apple Watch. In fact, not only have I not pre-ordered an Apple Watch, but I have “pre-ordered” (through their Kickstarter campaign) a new Pebble Time Steel watch.

What are the pros and cons of each in my opinion (and remember, that’s all this is – my opinion; you are welcome to disagree with me and choose whichever smartwatch works best for you, or even not get one at all).

Battery Life

This is the big one for me. I already charge way too many things every day (I carry multiple phones for work, typically an iPad and a laptop, and I also have a Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire and a pair of bluetooth headphones that I have to remember to keep charged). My Pebble and my Fitbit One are my best friends w.r.t. charging since they’re roughly once a week! Getting a 20% battery life warning on my current Pebble Steel doesn’t bother me – that’s still at least a day of normal use.

Less than 24 hours seems like a big miss to me. That means one more thing I need to find an overnight charging spot for. The new Pebble Time Steel claims up to 10 days with a colour screen. I just think that Apple could have pushed the technology here.

Overall Design

I think this one is actually a tie for the new Pebble Time Steel vs the Apple Watch (in fact, I’ve seen some photos that suggest they look pretty similar). Neither wows me as much as the Moto 360, but there are plenty of reasons why I am not interested in that family of smartwatches. I do have to concede that the circular design looks stunning though. I would have loved to see a rectangular and a circular design from Apple rather than just two rectangles in (barely – just 4mm) different sizes.

That said, my two existing Pebbles look fine to me, and more importantly don’t scream smartwatch to everybody. I wear my black Pebble steel every day and get very few comments about it. I ordered the new one in black too.

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Ongoing Pebble Issues


Update: Check out my more recent update on my Pebble experiences too.

Anybody following along here will know that I have been having intermittent connection issues, as well as bluetooth audio interference issues, with my Pebble smartwatch. But more than that, I have been having issues with their customer support. Not to mention having their Chief Evangelist accuse me of whining, and then block me on Twitter. Great way to treat your customers. Guess she doesn’t want to actually hear from real users. 

On October 17, I was given this answer by one of their support folks:

We well received your logs, and will review them thoroughly and have a reply by Tuesday. Thanks for your patience.

That was a Friday. By the next Friday, October 24, I had still heard nothing other than another canned response on a different case number because I submitted more logs through their app and it generates a new case each time suggesting I upgrade to iOS 8.1 (which I had already done, and which has made no difference).

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Apple Pay Experiences

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Monday of this week saw iOS 8.1 land on Apple devices, and perhaps the most expected feature in the update was Apple Pay; the new NFC based, Touch ID approved payment service that was going to revolutionize how we pay for things. Or not, because of course NFC based payments have existed in Android phones for a while now, and even in plastic credit cards (mostly outside the US, but my Wells Fargo Visa card has both a chip and touch pay capabilities).

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iPhone 6 Case

Waterfield Smart CaseAll my iPhones to date, starting with my 3GS, have lived inside a Smart Case from Waterfield Designs; my iPads have likewise lived in one of their Ultimate Sleeve cases. They are a local firm here in San Francisco, and I love their products and their service. 

When I pre-ordered my 6, the site I visited next was theirs to get an estimate of when they would have my favourite case ready for the new phone.

But there was no Smart Case listed for the iPhone 6. I reached out to them on Twitter, and it seems it will not be there for a while. They do have a number of other options, but none really appealed to me in the way the Smart Case had (and I have had 3 of them now spanning 5 years of use, so they have become familiar).

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AT&T’s “GeorgeA” Was Right

Of all the people I spoke to earlier in the week about the sudden change in the estimated delivery date for my iPhone 6 from delivering on 9/19 when I ordered it to delivering 10/13-10/31 when I checked the online status, only GeorgeA from the @ATTCustomerCare Twitter team suggested that the reason the order could not be canceled was that it really was still scheduled to ship in time for September 19 and it was the new estimate that was incorrect.

Today’s status on AT&T’s site has changed from estimating delivery in the second half of October, to shipped and expected to arrive tomorrow:

Shipped

It amazes me that their e-commerce systems can’t keep track of things a little better, but it would almost have been better to just say they didn’t have a delivery date available than to estimate delivery over a month after the order date. I’ve heard of under promising and over delivering, but that’s taking it to an extreme!

Thank You GeorgeA

I would like to say a big thank you to GeorgeA both for spending the time earlier in the week explaining what he saw and what he thought it meant, and for being the only AT&T employee I spoke to on Tuesday who could work out that the error actually meant.

Latest From AT&T on iPhone 6 Delivery

After creating a new Twitter account specially to communicate with @ATTCustomerCare (since they were ignoring/blocking my regular account), I finally found somebody who reached out and called me.

He too hit the problem that the order cannot be canceled, and he tweeted the error message to me:

Error Message

That is a little cryptic, but WMS apparently means “Warehouse Management System” and he also added the comment “It’s suppose to go out on 9/19” followed by “Remember it’s a system that is calculating that but since you ordered day one I don’t forsee a problem.” That is certainly what the original date showed on the order, and I live in hope that the earlier comments I received yesterday were wrong and in fact it is the estimated delivery window in the status message that is inaccurate.

Meanwhile, I am going to compare the cost of T-Mobile for our five lines and see how that would work out.

AT&T Bait & Switch Update

After getting no reply from @ATTCustomerCare, but seeing them tell several people it is possible to cancel a pre-order, I thought I would call the regular customer service. After sitting on hold for almost an hour (being repeatedly told how much they value me as a customer), I spoke to somebody who tried to cancel the order several different ways. No dice.

She then transferred me to Premier support, which left me on hold for a bit longer. At the end of that, I was told that the order could not be canceled once it has been submitted (I would have thought it would be harder to cancel one that had not been submitted, but not in the world of AT&T). Almost 90 minutes on the phone & still no progress whatsoever.

Pending Shipment

This is what my order status currently shows:

Order Status

Apparently, they will be preparing it for shipment for the next month or so. And in that time there is nothing I can do.

Refuse Delivery

The helpful advice I got was that I could simply refuse delivery of the phone when it arrives. Really? The best solution to canceling an order that won’t ship for several weeks is to have it ship to me, and then tell the delivery firm to return it?

I also learned that this glitch (the word he used) is something they know about and they are trying to fix.

Meanwhile, my line is not eligible for upgrade, so there is nothing I can do to source a phone elsewhere.

Twitter Support

The lack of responses on Twitter is puzzling too. So I created a new Twitter account and sent a question about my upgrade from that account. Sure enough, I got a response within a few minutes. Is it possible that despite “following” me (and being followed by me), they have somehow decided to block my regular Twitter account? If so, what does that tell me about how they feel about my business. Perhaps I should just cancel the service and move to T-Mobile.

AT&T iPhone 6 Pre-Order “Bait & Switch”

Wavered on whether to pre-order a new iPhone 6, or just wait, but in the end I thought I would pre-order. When I got to the AT&T site, they were still reporting delivery dates of “on or around” September 19 for the iPhone 6, though only for the 128GB model. I went ahead and ordered one and thought everything was set.

Then, early this morning (around 3am PDT), I saw a tweet telling me how to check my order status, so I did. Much to my surprise, rather than the September 19 estimated delivery date I had seen when I clicked the order button, the AT&T site was saying October 13 – October 31. That’s almost a whole month later than they promised. Had they said that on their site when I ordered it, I would have ordered it from Apple (who even today are saying the first week of October), and I would probably have stuck with the 64GB which was my first choice.

No problem, I thought, since it is 4-6 weeks out I can just cancel the order and either try my luck at a store on Friday or order from Apple. So I called the number on the web page, waited 25 minutes to speak to somebody, only to be told she couldn’t cancel the order. I asked for a supervisor, and waited another 5-10 minutes. When he came on the line, he said it was impossible to cancel the order because it was at the warehouse being packed. Really? What do they do to these people to make them believe it takes 4-6 weeks to pack a phone in a box? Of course it is not at the warehouse being packed. It is still an electronic order awaiting devices to arrive to be fulfilled. And they don’t expect those for several weeks. So canceling the order is not impossible at all.

Twitter Support

The normally responsive Twitter support team also seem to be totally ignoring me this morning. I have tweeted to them and even sent them direct messages, but still not a peep back. Amusingly, Verizon responded faster than AT&T!

Perhaps it is time to just take my business to a carrier that does care. It seems clear that AT&T don’t care, and neither can they operate an online business. Bad enough that they advertise one delivery date, and then shift it by a month after the order is placed, but to not have a way to easily cancel a pre-order is ridiculous. Perhaps I should call American Express and dispute the charge for the taxes on the phone – I suspect they’d be able to cancel the order then.

Canceled Orders

Then I started seeing replies to other people on Twitter with iPhone 6 order issues, and to be honest it looks like AT&T were totally unprepared for people to order this phone. Was it really a surprise to them that lots of people would be pre-ordering it? Haven’t they done this before?

Some Examples From Twitter

(At least they received a reply from AT&T – I have had no response at all. Apparently I am on some kind of no response list.)

Pebble Battery Life

Given how random my Pebble’s battery life can be these days,I thought I would extract the battery level information from the logs they keep (tip: if you want to see these, just start the process to generate a support request but when the email editor opens change the recipient to your own address before sending).

The graph is quite telling:

That is a little over 6 days worth of data and clearly shows periods where the consumption is far faster than it should be to allow for several days of battery life. The last two days, I have had to charge the watch every night or risk having it run out mid way through the day (and I don’t want to carry the charging cable with me everywhere I go).

The most recent firmware was meant to address the crazy power consumption issue, but it looks from this chart as though their fix doesn’t change anything.