The golden age of the (little) silver screen.

We know, some people are already tired of smart watches. They haven’t fulfilled their potential. They don’t have a clear role to play in your digital life. But that’s exactly why this is the most exciting moment of the smart watch’s life as a technology. What are we talking about?

The first people to crowd into movie theaters didn’t have much to watch. A couple of minutes of footage of a train or waterfall: that’s what passed for a blockbuster in cinema’s earliest days. But those first moviegoers had a more intense moviegoing experience than you’ll ever have. Some of them ran screaming from the theater, sure that the train on screen would run them over.

Then, over the next 25-30 years, it happened again and again with new innovations like sound and color. By then audiences were sophisticated enough to know that they couldn’t talk back to the figures on the screen, just as the waterfall on the screen wouldn’t flood the room. But they were still spectacular departures from anything they’d experienced before.

Movies have had further technical advancements, like 3D and surround sound. And, of course, they’ve gotten much more artistically sophisticated. But in terms of sheer reality-shifting impact, they hit the hardest in their earliest years. Everything since has been refining and optimizing the original world-changing form.

Other technologies follow the same arc, from cars to PCs. Smartphones, too. The earliest ones were clunky, didn’t look great, didn’t work great. But still: a computer in your pocket! There followed some whirlwind years of new advancements, from video chat to voice control. Now smartphone makers have to work harder and harder for smaller and smaller advancements. Nothing they do could possibly be as exciting as that first iPhone again - even though, now, you wouldn’t want that iPhone any more than you would pay good money to watch a movie clip of a train.

The most exciting time in any technology’s life is that space between the train movie and The Wizard of Oz. That’s where we are right now with smart watches.

The first ones were those brief silent reels: couldn’t do much but still, it was kind of a little computer on your wrist, whoa! The Apple Watch and its nearest rivals, like the Pebble Time, are the ones quickly expanding the possibilities, taking big jumps with each new release, making everybody’s paradigms go all wobbly.

Let us do our part by making this Pebble Time smart watch available at a reality-shifting price. It can do all the basic notification stuff that any smart watch can. And then it adds Pebble Health, a built-in fitness and sleep tracker. And a microphone for quick voice replies to texts. And a color e-paper screen that’s easy to see in bright light. And it gets 7 days of battery life on a charge, so you won’t have to charge it every day like the Apple Watch. And it’s water-resistant to 30 meters. It’s the best smart watch you can buy unless you maybe have a line on some cheap Apple Watches - and even then, no way they’re this cheap.

Will smart watches get better in coming years? Definitely. Will their incremental advancements be more exciting than having one right now? Probably not. This is the “holy crap” era for smart watches, now available at a “meh” price. Now, if we can just figure out what to do with them…