Pebble Is Shipping, But Slowly, And Without iOS App Approval

The Pebble Smart Watch, a clever little watch that connects to your phone via Bluetooth (and tells time), has officially started to ship in limited quantities. After the product’s Kickstarter campaign blew up, receiving over $10 million in funding after only asking for $100K, the company faced issues with manufacturing and distributing such a high volume of orders.

The Pebble was originally set to ship in September after reaching its funding goal on May 18, 2012. inPulse, the company responsible for the Pebble among other smart watches, missed that original shipping date, and also missed the holiday season. But at CES in January, designer Eric Migikovsky promised that the Pebble would begin shipping on January 23, and so it has.

There are a few small caveats to the good news, one of which being that the iOS app isn’t immediately available. This means you’ll still get notifications and have control over Music, but the ability to install watch interfaces or update the PebbleOS won’t be available until the app is approved — or rather, if it’s approved.

The Android app, on the other hand, will be live in Google Play tomorrow morning.

The other caveat is that only 500 units of the Pebble went out today (inPulse was “held up by documentation at the airport”). This means that they accidentally sent out more confirmation emails than Pebbles.

So if you got a confirmation email this morning, you may not receive a tracking number for a few more days. But don’t panic, mass manufacturing is ramping up at the factory and the team reports that “it’s going to take some time before we reach our maximum capacity, but we’re getting there.”

Here’s a video from the front lines:

[vimeo 58004890]