Pebble smartwatch to begin shipping

The Pebble smartwatch will start shipping this month.

Last April, the Pebble — a watch that pairs with smartphones — was announced on Kickstarter, a funding platform for creative projects, with a flashy video and design images of the device.

Within days, the start-up received more than 85,000 orders for the watch and over $10m (€7.5m) from people who wanted to back the company.

It shattered Kickstarter records and this week in Las Vegas — at the International Consumer Electronics Show — the company announced the watches, originally due to be shipped in September, are finally ready and will go out to customers on Jan 23.

Eric Migicovsky, CEO and founder of Pebble, said: “We feel the time we spent was making the hardware rock solid as well as the software.

“We wanted to make sure the core of Pebble was great. That meant we shipped a bit later than we expected to.”

The watch can be paired with a smartphone via Bluetooth, and configured to show text messages, emails, and missed calls. It can also play music and has an LCD e-paper screen that can be seen in direct sunlight, and a backlight for the dark.

It also fits well, unlike some of the chunky iPod Nano-like watches that have been made.

Meanwhile, by showing off a phone with a flexible screen, Samsung is hinting at a day when we might fold up our large phone or tablet screens like maps.

Brian Berkeley, head of Samsung, demonstrated a phone that consists of a matchbox-sized hard enclosure, with a paper- thin, flexible colour screen attached to one end.

The screen does not appear flexible enough to fold in half like a piece of paper, but it could bend into a tube.

The company also showed a video of a future concept, with a phone- sized device that opens up like a book, revealing a tablet-sized screen inside.

The screen uses organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. Only a thin layer of these chemicals is needed to produce a bright, colourful screen.

They are used in many Samsung phones already, though with glass screens. For the bendable phone, the chemicals were laid out over thin plastic instead of glass — a trick that can’t be pulled off with liquid crystals in standard displays.