For sure, that’s what killed the Pebble watch for me.

I got it home, opened the box, thinking I had a new watch!

Nope. You have to connect it to the internet and let it phone home first. It would not tell time, permit you to manually set the time, or let you explore that watch at all, until it spoke with it’s mothership.

I put it back in the box, and tossed it in the closet, and it’s still there, and now it’s completely unusable because the company collapsed.

Technically it is still usable, with an update that allows the watch to be de-tethered from the old Pebble servers[0], and there is an open-sourced version in active development as of this Spring[1].

[0]https://developer.pebble.com/blog/2017/04/04/transitioning-u...

[1]https://rebble.io/

What a waste! Here in the EU you have 8 days to sent it back without any reason. That is a nice rule for this type of nonsense.

Wasn't it 14 days? And it only applies to online shopping (supposedly to compensate for losing the ability to see/try things before buying them)...

If it is in a mint condition with boxing, hold on to it, in a decade or so I believe it would be worth a lot.

In a decade the hardware may fail (yay today's manufacturing practices). But in 2-3 years, most Pebble fans will probably have broken their current watch, and will be desperately looking for replacement. Since among smartwatches, Pebble was the single least shitty option (by a wide margin) and no company is stepping up with a comparable alternative, people might pay good money to get a working one. I know I probably will.

As long as it isn't the Pebble Time Round, and the battery doesn't swell and require replacement...