I like it for what it is, a well-built smartwatch with with a SDK, internet connection, and decent battery you can hack on over the weekend. It isn't going to replace your Apple Watch, but it is significantly more refined than some other offerings such as the PineTime, Bangle.js, etc.
(Nothing against those projects, I enjoyed them for what they were as well.)
Pebble was exactly what I wanted 10 years ago and exactly what I don't want now. I'm very happy to miss notifications when my phone is in my pocket or bag and I don't care about fitness metrics anymore. However I'd love to leave my phone at home while still being reachable...
I loved Pebble back in the day, and Eric is a great guy and friend to entrepreneurs trying to build cool things.
I do wonder how a modern revival of Pebble will compete from a product perspective within the current landscape. Obviously there's the high-end Apple Watches, but there's also incredibly cheap and long battery life products from China that you can see on Aliexpress and similar. Fitness tracking is another related niche that seems oversaturated, unless you do something really unique in biometrics sensing.
So it seems like a hard market to get back into, curious where they take things.
I used a super-cheap Chinese smartwatch (Amazfit Bip S) for years and recently switched to the Pebble. The Bip's battery lasted forever and it did check a lot of feature boxes, but overall it was clunky to use and not in any way hackable.
I switched to a Pebble 2 Duo recently and while the features are comparable on paper (multi-week battery life, reflective display, basic health tracking, etc.), everything is just nicer on the Pebble. The software is thoughtful and fun and there are tons of third-party apps, so it can do all kinds of things the Bip could never do.
There really isn't a huge market for this kind of thing; most people, including nerds, want a watch with a brightly colored screen and tons of health metrics and service integrations. I imagine Pebble will stay a boutique brand this time around.
If there is market for long lasting watch, I think it is if it looks like a traditional round watch. Or if it can work as outdoors watch. Garmin is moving from transflective to AMOLED for better colors, and there might be spot for rugged, long-lasting, cheap watch.
The key value of Pebble to me was its incredible C SDK that made it super easy to write custom apps for it. I remember way back I got full turn-by-turn navigation working on it.
> Pebble 2 Duo is sold out! We are not making more. If you want a Pebble, I recommend pre-ordering a Pebble Time 2 soon.
Is this supposed to be a collector's item? I'm not sure I'd want to invest in an ecosystem where damaging the device means I'm out or stuck waiting in line for replacement - with no guarantee the new device will be similar enough.
Does anyone know whether more than one device can connect to a Pebble watch at the same time? I'm thinking using it with your phone but also sending notifications from your laptop.
Pebble watches can use Bluetooth LE and Bluetooth Classic connection profiles simultaneously. It's possible to pair two phones this way, but that's considered an undocumented hack. Also there's no ready-made desktop OS support, I'd look into forwarding your laptop notifications to a phone via KDE Connect or something like that instead.
Connecting to a laptop isn't supported AFAIK. Personally I don't have any important notifications on my computer that don't come to my phone already. What would you use it for?
But I do want to dig into that, someday. There is an open source library in Kotlin multi-platform for building applications that interact with the watch (libpebble3) and, in theory, Bluetooth LE can connect to more than one device. But the PebbleOS probably restricts it.
My dream is to use the watch to authenticate to computers, websites and IoT devices.
For me, the best that Pebble has to offer is: "it is your machine, you can do whatever you want with it".
Apple severely restricts what you can install in the hardware you buy from them. Google will soon restrict the installation of Android apps not signed by Google. Microsoft restricts you to use your computer without a Microsoft account. John Deere restricts you from fixing your machines with parts sold by others. Espresso machine manufacturers restrict the capsules you can use in their machines. AWS makes everything incompatible and hard to migrate to other cloud providers.
They all follow the IBM business model: you buy IBM and end up fenced in blue in a walled garden that you can't escape.
I don't want that. I don't want to buy machines that come with a leach.
Yeah, I got burned once, I don't want to be burned again. You will sell out at first opportune moment. Which is why I am passing on this.
(I don't blame you for that, just don't want to be part of it)
This is a rather bizare take. Pebble turned down a massive deal to keep doing their own thing. They sold cheap after they were going down because they had too mich staff, and not enough sales. Which Eric has said many times, and can even be found on his blog.
Then, when they were being sold, instead of shutting down the Pebble store and basically bricking all Pebble watches, they intentionally opened it up to make it possible for community support. Which is where Rebble stepped in.
Bizarre and disingenuous take. That really doesn't take into account Pebble's actions, much less their words.
What's bizarre? Per your own statement, "They sold cheap" as soon as they encountered some hardship, so it is quite understandable to not trust they'll behave differently this time around.
> "They sold cheap" as soon as they encountered some hardship
Nobody is perfect, and running a small hardware startup is difficult. I'm not saying Eric and co are perfect, but it seems like he's been fairly forthright about the mistakes made at Pebble[1] and what Core aims to do better.
Shit happens, people make mistakes, Apple/Google decide to compete with you and/or lock you out of parts of their garden.
Amazfit is closed, Pebble is open. That's reason enough for me to avoid the former.
As enshittification encroaches on every corner of the technology ecosystem, a company putting out products in 2025 in a way that embraces its community and works in the open is laudable.
Maybe Pebble will turn evil one day, but at least the watches we have today will still work until they physically wear out, not when the company decides they should die.
They shipped hardware! They successfully open sourced a beloved platform and embraced the community ecosystem that sprung up around it. What more do you want?
I will buy it if it supports esim so I can be reachable by phone and sms all the time, which means some cell phone operator needs to buy in first.
I like it for what it is, a well-built smartwatch with with a SDK, internet connection, and decent battery you can hack on over the weekend. It isn't going to replace your Apple Watch, but it is significantly more refined than some other offerings such as the PineTime, Bangle.js, etc.
(Nothing against those projects, I enjoyed them for what they were as well.)
Pebble was exactly what I wanted 10 years ago and exactly what I don't want now. I'm very happy to miss notifications when my phone is in my pocket or bag and I don't care about fitness metrics anymore. However I'd love to leave my phone at home while still being reachable...
Got my duo a few weeks ago and my battery lasted about 3 weeks before needing a recharge. It does everything I need. Great little smartwatch
I loved Pebble back in the day, and Eric is a great guy and friend to entrepreneurs trying to build cool things.
I do wonder how a modern revival of Pebble will compete from a product perspective within the current landscape. Obviously there's the high-end Apple Watches, but there's also incredibly cheap and long battery life products from China that you can see on Aliexpress and similar. Fitness tracking is another related niche that seems oversaturated, unless you do something really unique in biometrics sensing.
So it seems like a hard market to get back into, curious where they take things.
I used a super-cheap Chinese smartwatch (Amazfit Bip S) for years and recently switched to the Pebble. The Bip's battery lasted forever and it did check a lot of feature boxes, but overall it was clunky to use and not in any way hackable.
I switched to a Pebble 2 Duo recently and while the features are comparable on paper (multi-week battery life, reflective display, basic health tracking, etc.), everything is just nicer on the Pebble. The software is thoughtful and fun and there are tons of third-party apps, so it can do all kinds of things the Bip could never do.
There really isn't a huge market for this kind of thing; most people, including nerds, want a watch with a brightly colored screen and tons of health metrics and service integrations. I imagine Pebble will stay a boutique brand this time around.
If there is market for long lasting watch, I think it is if it looks like a traditional round watch. Or if it can work as outdoors watch. Garmin is moving from transflective to AMOLED for better colors, and there might be spot for rugged, long-lasting, cheap watch.
They sold the whole production run of Pebble 2 Duos, and they are keeping the company small to be sustainable this time. I think they have a chance.
The Pebble software is second to none in nailing the basics. I'll definitely continue to choose Pebble over no-name brands on AliExpress.
The key value of Pebble to me was its incredible C SDK that made it super easy to write custom apps for it. I remember way back I got full turn-by-turn navigation working on it.
One thing I don't understand:
> Pebble 2 Duo is sold out! We are not making more. If you want a Pebble, I recommend pre-ordering a Pebble Time 2 soon.
Is this supposed to be a collector's item? I'm not sure I'd want to invest in an ecosystem where damaging the device means I'm out or stuck waiting in line for replacement - with no guarantee the new device will be similar enough.
Pebble 2 Duo were reusing the existing stock of Pebble 2 housings and displays. This model was intended as a limited run from the beginning.
Pebble Time 2 are designed from scratch and expected to be still available after the pre-order batches have been shipped out.
Thanks for the clarification.
I just hope supporting this limited run model will not consume too much resources.
The Pebble brand name definitely helps them break back into the market. Even some of my non-techy friends recognize the name.
except for the apps for those cheap watches, all your data is uploaded to servers somewhere all the time I assume.
I think they have a very clear niche: nerdy techies (like me).
The question is indeed if it's a big enough market to carry to the company. I hope so.
Their libc is kind of a mess of various sources. I wonder what's going on there?
https://github.com/coredevices/PebbleOS/tree/main/src/libc
Does anyone know whether more than one device can connect to a Pebble watch at the same time? I'm thinking using it with your phone but also sending notifications from your laptop.
Pebble watches can use Bluetooth LE and Bluetooth Classic connection profiles simultaneously. It's possible to pair two phones this way, but that's considered an undocumented hack. Also there's no ready-made desktop OS support, I'd look into forwarding your laptop notifications to a phone via KDE Connect or something like that instead.
Connecting to a laptop isn't supported AFAIK. Personally I don't have any important notifications on my computer that don't come to my phone already. What would you use it for?
Can't be done, yet.
But I do want to dig into that, someday. There is an open source library in Kotlin multi-platform for building applications that interact with the watch (libpebble3) and, in theory, Bluetooth LE can connect to more than one device. But the PebbleOS probably restricts it.
My dream is to use the watch to authenticate to computers, websites and IoT devices.
For me, the best that Pebble has to offer is: "it is your machine, you can do whatever you want with it".
Apple severely restricts what you can install in the hardware you buy from them. Google will soon restrict the installation of Android apps not signed by Google. Microsoft restricts you to use your computer without a Microsoft account. John Deere restricts you from fixing your machines with parts sold by others. Espresso machine manufacturers restrict the capsules you can use in their machines. AWS makes everything incompatible and hard to migrate to other cloud providers.
They all follow the IBM business model: you buy IBM and end up fenced in blue in a walled garden that you can't escape.
I don't want that. I don't want to buy machines that come with a leach.
Yeah, I got burned once, I don't want to be burned again. You will sell out at first opportune moment. Which is why I am passing on this. (I don't blame you for that, just don't want to be part of it)
BTW, Amazfit, rules.
This is a rather bizare take. Pebble turned down a massive deal to keep doing their own thing. They sold cheap after they were going down because they had too mich staff, and not enough sales. Which Eric has said many times, and can even be found on his blog.
Then, when they were being sold, instead of shutting down the Pebble store and basically bricking all Pebble watches, they intentionally opened it up to make it possible for community support. Which is where Rebble stepped in.
Bizarre and disingenuous take. That really doesn't take into account Pebble's actions, much less their words.
What's bizarre? Per your own statement, "They sold cheap" as soon as they encountered some hardship, so it is quite understandable to not trust they'll behave differently this time around.
> "They sold cheap" as soon as they encountered some hardship
Nobody is perfect, and running a small hardware startup is difficult. I'm not saying Eric and co are perfect, but it seems like he's been fairly forthright about the mistakes made at Pebble[1] and what Core aims to do better.
Shit happens, people make mistakes, Apple/Google decide to compete with you and/or lock you out of parts of their garden.
[1] https://ericmigi.com/blog/success-and-failure-at-pebble
Amazfit is closed, Pebble is open. That's reason enough for me to avoid the former.
As enshittification encroaches on every corner of the technology ecosystem, a company putting out products in 2025 in a way that embraces its community and works in the open is laudable.
Maybe Pebble will turn evil one day, but at least the watches we have today will still work until they physically wear out, not when the company decides they should die.
I was bummed to see recently that Amazfit has stopped making watches with reflective displays! They're all OLED now just like everyone else's.
Or "Milking content out of the old dry Pebble well"
They shipped hardware! They successfully open sourced a beloved platform and embraced the community ecosystem that sprung up around it. What more do you want?