Looks might be everything for some of you, in which case you'd probably automatically for go for the beautiful Apple Watch over the Pebble Time.
But don't pull the trigger just yet, because the Pebble Time trumps the Apple Watch in eight key areas that could make you regret going for form over function.
The Pebble Time's battery lasts a lot longer.
Pebble claims the new Time smartwatch can last up to seven days on a single charge, while Apple claims the Apple Watch has an "all-day" battery life of 18 hours, so there's little contest there. It also realistically needs to be recharged every night.
Battery life might be the most important detail on a smartwatch as the battery plays a huge role in what the Watch can do and for how long.
In our tests, we found the Pebble Time lasts a little over four days on a charge. The Apple Watch lasts about a day and a half, so you'll still have to charge it every night.
The screen stays on all the time.
If a smartwatch is going to replace a nice "dumb" watch, or if it's going to act as a watch at all, it had better tell the time seamlessly whenever you look at it.
Unfortunately, the Apple Watch's limited battery life means the display is dark for most of the day, only waking when you make a time-checking wrist gesture. Sometimes it won't register your wrist movement well enough to wake the display, and you have to repeat the gesture in order to tell the time.
Meanwhile, the Pebble Time's color "e-paper" display is a battery sipper and stays on all day and night for days. Sure, it's not as sharp or colorful as the Apple Watch's display, but at least it tells the time all the time.
Anyone can make a watch face for the Pebble.
There are hundreds of watch faces for Pebble owners to chose from, but Apple Watch owners only have 10. That's because Pebble lets developers build customized watch faces. Apple doesn't.
Apple will surely release new faces over time, and it may even release a watch face developer's kit to let developers create third party Apple Watch faces.
