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.
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.)
Having owned and worn Pebble watches for the lifetime of the original company and then some, I think you would be _stunned_ at how many little things Pebble got right that others didn't. Personally, nothing has come close to these devices since the release of the Pebble Time.
PebbleOS was quite polished compared to the other RTOS out there.
The animations were smooth most of the time, and responsiveness was great, the concept of the timeline is genius. The Pebble team made sure that it was accomplishing its main purpose (always displaying time, and time related events) really well, and then built everything around that.
I hope this revival will be sustainable and bring back some of that brilliance.
Yep, my duo arrived about two weeks ago at 76% charge and is currently at 18%; I've only ever plugged it in for a few seconds to verify that the charger works. Amazing battery life.
(The buttons, however, are atrocious - mushy, hard to press, and literally falling apart. I'll probably do the 3D-printed button mod but to advertise this watch as IPX8 water resistant is ludicrous. The first button press out of the box put a crack in the silicone.)
Did you get it in black like I did? My buttons also cracked practically right away (within a day), I suspect because the reinforcements were installed poorly (the buttons are VERY hard to press). It made the down button unusable.
But kudos to Eric and Claudio, they're shipping me a replacement (in white, which, as I understand it and as they said in their email, should be less susceptible to the issue, something about the white rubber versus black makes it less problematic). My only frustration was how quickly it failed, since I know it's a new-old-stock case.
Highly looking forward to the Time 2. I only stopped using my Pebble Time Steel when the battery life degraded to ~3 days (after about 6 years), used a Fossil Hybrid for a few years, now a Pixel watch. Measuring battery life in weeks will be a breath of fresh air :)
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 do use pebble for (something like) that. I find that setting it up so they certain people can get to my wrist makes me check my phone less. So I get sucked in less.
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,
They actually sold more than the whole run; I ordered one, and recently got an email informing me that they don't actually have the parts to fulfill the order.
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.
thank you for this incredibly transparent and honest post.
The section on "Setting Expectations" (5 employees vs 180) is the most valuable insight. As an indie developer myself, I'm deeply curious: how does this new "sustainable" mindset (vs. the old VC-funded model) change your prioritization for the software roadmap?
Does it mean focusing 100% on the core functions and being more ruthless about saying 'no' to feature creep, which is something that plagues so many other wearable companies?
Readit News
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.
(Nothing against those projects, I enjoyed them for what they were as well.)
I hope this revival will be sustainable and bring back some of that brilliance.
(The buttons, however, are atrocious - mushy, hard to press, and literally falling apart. I'll probably do the 3D-printed button mod but to advertise this watch as IPX8 water resistant is ludicrous. The first button press out of the box put a crack in the silicone.)
But kudos to Eric and Claudio, they're shipping me a replacement (in white, which, as I understand it and as they said in their email, should be less susceptible to the issue, something about the white rubber versus black makes it less problematic). My only frustration was how quickly it failed, since I know it's a new-old-stock case.
Highly looking forward to the Time 2. I only stopped using my Pebble Time Steel when the battery life degraded to ~3 days (after about 6 years), used a Fossil Hybrid for a few years, now a Pixel watch. Measuring battery life in weeks will be a breath of fresh air :)
https://github.com/coredevices/PebbleOS/tree/main/src/libc
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 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.
The Pebble software is second to none in nailing the basics. I'll definitely continue to choose Pebble over no-name brands on AliExpress.
They actually sold more than the whole run; I ordered one, and recently got an email informing me that they don't actually have the parts to fulfill the order.
> 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 Time 2 are designed from scratch and expected to be still available after the pre-order batches have been shipped out.
The question is indeed if it's a big enough market to carry to the company. I hope so.
https://developer.rebble.io/tutorials/watchface-tutorial/par...
The section on "Setting Expectations" (5 employees vs 180) is the most valuable insight. As an indie developer myself, I'm deeply curious: how does this new "sustainable" mindset (vs. the old VC-funded model) change your prioritization for the software roadmap?
Does it mean focusing 100% on the core functions and being more ruthless about saying 'no' to feature creep, which is something that plagues so many other wearable companies?
Rooting for you all.