[Pebble] euroclie:
Hi all,

It's been some time since the Pebble hit the market through Kickstarter, and various iterations of the simple yet elegant/efficient smartwatch appeared over time.

Unfortunately, the Pebble adventure didn't end as well as we could have wished, and even though Rebble gives us a much needed life extension, thousands of Pebble users have been looking for a proper Pebble replacement.

Of course, as usual, eveyone has different needs/expectations/tastes, so in the smartwatch department, obviously, one size does not fit all, so take what follows with a grain of salt, after all it's just a personal opinion.

Without further ado, let's talk about the Vla smartwatch. You can purchase it online on your usual Chinese gadget website (Aliexpress, Banggood...) for around US$ 50, and it does look very much like a Pebble. But does it live up to the expectation?

The package itself is quite nice, and the watch ships with a silicon band and a magnetic charging cable (which I replaced by the mesh band you can (almost) see on the pictures).

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The watch has three buttons on the right side, one on the left side, and the screen isn't a touchscreen, so it really is a good impersonation of a Pebble watch. On the back of the watch, there's a heart rate sensor, like on so many smartwatches today:

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Starting from the main watchface screen, a short press on the upper right button launches the "Calendar" view (more on this later), while a long press reverses the display's colors:

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A short press on the bottom right button launches the "QR Code" view (also, more on this later), and a long press gives the same result.

A short press on the left button gets you back one level when navigating in the menus, and a long press (about one second) switches on the backlight.

Finally, a short (or long, for that matter) press on the middle right button launches the watch's menu:

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I'll get to the watchface choice later, when describing the settings, for now let's see what the various "applications" are, and how useful they are.

First in the menu is the "Today" screen:

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Not much to see here, the watch displays your location, and most probably the associated weather... if you live in China! Outside of China, this screen is unfortunately completely useless.

The second menu item is the "Pedometer" view:

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I didn't make any serious acuracy test, I expect the values given here to be as good as with any other activity tracker. Notice the little downward-pointing triangle at the bottom of the screen? It tells you that you can use the up/down buttons on the right to scroll the display, and that lets you access to the last seven days readings. There is no sync whatsoever between the watch and the phone companion application that I could find, so if you live by the numbers and expect to be able to log your activity in a durable way, you're in for a disapointment! No sync either with Google Fit or any activity tracking platform. On the bright side, at least you don't have to worry about your data being accessible online by hackers! ;-)

The third menu item is "Hear Rate", and is rather self-explanatory (on demand HR):

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Not much to say here either, there's no data sync with the phone, like the pedometer, so no logging, you can only have the HR displayed on the watchface if you select the "Sport" one, otherwise you have to get to this screen to have a HR reading.

The fourth menu item is labeled "Reminder", but I'm convinced it would rather be labeled "Alarms", because that's what it is:

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You can setup up to four alarms, with a decent choice of recurrence options:

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Note that you can find a "Reminder" page on the phone companion application, which won't let you program alarms (that's done here on the watch), but which lets you handle the notifications sent by the phone to the watch.

The fifth menu item is "Tools", and it gives you access to a second level screen with various, well, utilities:

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More in a second post...