Pebble Appstore Launches Tomorrow, Feb. 3

I’ve been sporting a Pebble smartwatch since back in August. Two months in, I wrote a review. We’re now six months down the road and I still don’t have any major gripes with the Pebble. That doesn’t mean the Pebble can’t get better, and with tomorrow’s launch of the Pebble Appstore (hat tip, ReadWrite), the product should improve significantly.

For starters, the Appstore will come as part of the Pebble 2.0 firmware update. This firmware ushers in the era of “two-way” apps that don’t require a companion app installed on your smartphone. That means, in addition to a central location for apps and watch faces, we’ll get apps that can operate in a whole new way.

But it’s obvious by the way Pebble is talking about the update (it’s tough to even find a mention of 2.0) that the main draw is going to be the Appstore, with good reason. The store is going to launch with over 500 apps and watch faces ready to go, and the list of partners isn’t looking too shabby, with names like Foursquare, Yelp, GoPro and ESPN.

Development for Pebble looks to be picking up steam, and with Apple poised to enter the wearables market at some point, a big lead is exactly what Pebble needs when that time comes.

We’ll be giving the Pebble Appstore a look first thing tomorrow when the update goes live and we get it installed. I’m extremely interested to see what the Pebble development community has been working on over the past few months, and I’m also eager to poke around inside Pebble’s 2.0 firmware.