Pebble Steel first impressions:

• Nice looking but is not going to replace my Hublot or Cartier anytime soon.  Kind of wish I didn’t go for slate and went for a fun color since it isn’t exactly a dress watch.
• Kind of biggish feeling
• Leather and steel bands are a nice touch

• Installation was a breeze.  Downloaded and installed iPhone app and it did all the work.
• From within the iPhone app you find Pebble apps, and “faces”.  I’ve experimented with a few faces like this one. Some add data like the weather.
• Buttons are a little too firm, hard to click easily.  Left button is “back”, Right has three buttons: “up”, “select”, and “down”.  That’s the entire interface.
• Charging is trivial, USB cable attaches to watch with a magnet
• Screen seems a little dim.  Shaking watch turns on backlight but only briefly.

• Simple to setup and use, a good thing.  Not too many options.
• Echos text messages.  Does not do Emoji though which is crummy.
• Shows when phone is ringing and allows you to answer or ignore
• Shows calendar alerts and slows you to sleep or dismiss them
• Rings when alarm goes off and allows you to snooze or dismiss

• There are a bunch of Apps available, more for Android than IOS.  Most of them coordinate a function between the watch and the phone.
• Apps sync easily and settings are easy to maintain.  I installed “PebbleBucks” which is a readout of your Starbucks account (can't do anything, but you can display a payment barcode; will try it next time I’m at Starbucks).
• Some Pebble apps require a symbiotic phone app to be running.  For example you can download an app which controls your phone’s camera (take picture, etc) but it requires the app to be running on the phone.  This is considerably less convenient of course because by the time you've run the app on your phone you might as well just use the phone.
• A cool app called Slides lets you remote control a slide display running on your phone.  I haven't gotten it working but that would be useful (as opposed to merely cool).

Stay tuned for more!

PS most important development so far – I’ve created a custom face, using my cat Fluffy as a model :)