I heard about the rebirth of the legendary smartwatch Pebble from an article from WIRED. The Pebble was a smartwatch with an e-paper display, launched in 2012 and discontinued in 2016. Google opened the source of PebbleOS, which is the OS used on Pebble. In tandem with that, Eric Migicovsky, the founder of Pebble, announced the development of new Pebble hardware.
When Pebble was live, I was at university. One of our lab’s Ph.D. students was a tech-savvy early bird and had one. Given the current smartwatch market, I regretted not getting one alongside him until now.
Here’s the list I want from smartwatches:
- Long battery life (no charging for at least a week)
- Always-on Display with seconds display (no-go if the device requires user input like wrist gestures to display seconds)
- Display notifications from smartphone
- Date display in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD)
It’s almost lamentable that Pebble is the only smartwatch brand satisfying all of the above. Most watches use AMOLED and touchscreen, draining the battery over the course of a single day. The battery life will worsen if you want to turn AOD on with a second display. Technically, you can satisfy all of the above using MIP Garmin watches with API level 2.3.0 or higher, but Garmin watches tend to be bloated due to those sports tracking features I don’t need, skyrocketing the price.
Then the blog article by Eric Migicovsky, the founder of Pebble, came to my eyes, tugging at my heartstrings.
You’d imagine that smartwatches have evolved considerably since 2012. I’ve tried every single smart watch out there, but none do it for me. No one makes a smartwatch with the core set of features I want:
- Always-on e-paper screen (it’s reflective rather than emissive. Sunlight readable. Glanceable. Not distracting to others like a bright wrist)
- Long battery life (one less thing to charge. It’s annoying to need extra cables when traveling)
- Simple and beautiful user experience around a core set of features I use regularly (telling time, notifications, music control, alarms, weather, calendar, sleep/step tracking)
- Buttons! (to play/pause/skip music on my phone without looking at the screen)
- Hackable (apparently you can’t even write your own watchfaces for Apple Watch? That is wild. There were >16k watchfaces on the Pebble appstore!)
Exactly. Finding someone with value who is this well-aligned with you feels great. Based on those values, the new Pebble device seems like it’s damn sure instabuy for me.