What Is Pebble In the First Place?

Pebble watches were created back in 2012, and they were one of the first smartwatches to hit the market. They were known for their long battery life and record-breaking funding - on Kickstarter they raised over $10 million!

However, Pebble was acquired by Fitbit in 2016, and the company was shut down. The Pebble servers were taken offline, and watches were no longer supported. This left many Pebble owners with a watch that was no longer functional.

Until a group of enthusiasts decided to keep Pebble alive! Branding their non-profit project as Rebble, they recreated an ecosystem for Pebble watches, rendering a bunch of legacy devices functional again.

What Crashed Pebble?

Pebble functioned on a ready-to-buy stock business model, even when they were a small company. Their watches were top-tier when they launched, but suffered at one thing that was becoming increasingly popular - health tracking. When Apple Watch dropped back in 2015 and showed the world how useful can a watch be outside of synchronization with a phone and time tracking, Pebble was left behind. Much like Nokia in 2007.

Suffering from hardship in finances, huge warehouses of unsold watches and an identity shift, Pebble could not keep up with the costs and competition. Besides being very promising in the smartwatch market earlier, when they were trying to build a health-tracking oriented watch, they made a great watch, but not a great health tracker.

To understand the situation better, you can read original Pebble creator’s post on Medium.

Why Am I Writing This Post?

I’m not writing this to humble or shame Pebble. It’s more of an honour to them from me.

My dad found an old Pebble Steel and gave it to me a few days ago. To my surprise, it was still working, and even better than I expected!

Following the Rebble project, original Pebble’s creator did everything he could to revive Pebble and even make some new models! Alongside new Pebble watches, the mobile app was rewritten from scratch, and it supports legacy watches perfectly fine. I was also very surprised to find out there’s way more content than modern smartwatches provide. All completely for free!

Coming from the Samsung watch ecosystem, I’m truly amazed by Pebble and the efforts to revive it. I was sick of having to rely on a Samsung phone for more features, and opening my wallet for more premium watch faces or apps.

Pebble was probably the largest revival project of all time. And not only did it make me a person of preservation, but also made me realize how much I love Pebble watches, despite their limitations.

Review of Pebble Steel

I’m not a watch reviewer, but I really like the Pebble Steel. It doesn’t have a touchscreen, but it doesn’t need to. Buttons feel extremely tactile, notifications are clear, the OS is very responsive and nicely animated, the watch even supports common unicode, not all smartwatches of today have support for.

Taking into account its age, it’s one of the best smartwatches I have ever used. But it’s not perfect, and that sometimes irritates me.

The Good

I like great battery life. On a single charge, this watch can be expected to last around a week brand new. Although, after years of sitting in a drawer, the battery has degraded beyond being usable. Thankfully, iFixit has guides on how to do it.

Notification service is built well around the watch. Notifications come the moment they show up on my phone, and are easy to read or dismiss.

Feel of the watch itself is quite premium. Metal band, body and squarish design fit well into the retro fashion of today.

There are watch faces and apps for absolutely everyone. And if you’re still not satisfied, or have coding knowledge and want to poke around, you can make your own watchface. Tutorials online are great.

You’d probably expect no music control on tech this old, but actually it was one of main focus areas of Pebble back before Rebble. You can control music through the watch, and even see the song name and artist.

Watch is marketed as being waterproof for 5 ATM. I haven’t tested it myself, but I’m glad to see claims it is.

Screen looks incredible in any environment. For bright conditions, it doesn’t need to put in any effort as reflecting light is how the watch is supposed to work. For dark conditions, it has a backlight that can be activated by pressing a button.

The Bad

However, there’s flaws, like everywhere.

The metal band is quite hard to customize, and the watch uses non-standard proprietary band design. You can’t use standard bands. Even though I love the metal band, and I have a leather variant, changing them requires some effort.

I mentioned iFixit guides for repair. They are great, but Pebble didn’t focus much on repairability, and it shows. To repair the watch, you need a lot of patience and tools, and even then, it can be a pain to do. I would recommend you to not try and repair it yourself unless you have experience with soldering.

There is no watch face generator on the app. It’s possible to do, but requires C programming knowledge. Not impossible, not easy either.

The bezel around its screen is quite thick. I like how they worked around this limitation by still ending on looks I like, but it can look ugly for some.

The Verdict

Pros:

• Long battery life
• Responsive OS
• Great notification system
• Music control
• Incredible screen performance

Cons:

• Proprietary band design
• Hard to repair

Would I choose this watch over many other options? Yes, but only in some cases. If you’re like me - hacky, like to support open source tech, have found it for an accessible price, and don’t mind the flaws, this watch is for you. Great daylight performance is a huge plus in my book.

However, if you want a watch that can do everything, have a colored screen, be sleek, modern, round and have sleep tracking or activity monitoring, this watch will disappoint you.

Are Pebbles Still Around?

Yes! The original creator Eric Migicovsky actually founded a new company called Core Devices, and they are making new Pebbles!

Operating under a preorder model with all-open-source software, they made sure Pebble can’t fail again, and even if it does, all the assets are open.

Conclusion

Pebble watches are awesome, and the efforts to revive them are even more. They are not perfect, not for everyone, but they don’t have to be. The want of being like the other watches was one of the reasons they failed in the first place, and, in my opinion, having a piece of smartwatch history on my wrist makes me unique, and the watch authentic.

I’m also looking forward to buying a new Pebble Time 2 from Core Devices. Look out for a new post about it!