(ex Pebbler here) Pebble had - I believe - the most stable Bluetooth stack out there. This was due to two things:

1. Extremely talented Bluetooth engineers. Chris and Martijn were second to none.

2. Very good diagnostics tools built in house. When a user complained of connectivity issues, we could take a snapshot of the state of their Bluetooth stack. This gave us amazing insights into what was going wrong- more often than not we found that iOS and Android were doing something unexpected (we had lots of workarounds for their bugs). FWIW a few of us went on to start a company to build more of those hardware debug tools: Memfault (W19).

Now how can we get the all-buying eye of the Garmin acquisition strategy team to look in that direction?

If Memfault ever want to end the standalone external tool supplier gambit and return to being in-house expertise, sounds like they could be very useful there. Not because Garmin's BT is so terrible (it has improved a lot but still far from perfect), but because Garmin seems to be the smallest living company that still builds their own stack down to the lower levels instead of hitching a ride on something like an Android fork.

Ex-Garmin engineer here. There are pockets of the company that use Android, and a bunch of the larger-scale systems have moved to using embedded Linux with Yocto.

The proprietary RTOS that runs on the watches is a super cool embedded system dating back to the earliest days of the company. It grew across all the product lines - watches, nav units, aviation equipment, marine chartplotters/sensors, etc. I remember once stumbling on some code written in the very early days by an engineer who went on to be the CEO while I was there.

It was a fun system to work on, and had an impressive amount of code sharing at the OS-level across platforms as tiny as Cortex M0 systems up to large multi-core ARM SoCs from TI and other vendors.

Thanks for the glimpse! My personal Garmin angle is cycling, which eventually that also "infected" my left wrist. When they first came under pressure in cycling from leaner competitors that are deep into the outsourcing game, I was interested to the point of pre-ordering. But since then I've learned more about the company and have come to respect them in an entirely unexpected way, for being that almost anachronistic twentieth century remnant that just keeps staying in the high tech innovation game. The mix of continuity and openness to change you describe sounds just right for that.

Thanks for building something I loved for many years. I rocked my round pebble until the screen finally died. Such a lovely decice

You're right, the connection was rock solid in a way that bluetooth basically never is. And I don't know how that didn't wreck its battery life. Even my Airpods give me grief every now and then, and those are often held up as the exception to the rule that is bluetooth being crap. I think that was why I liked it so much, it was a tool I could trust to just work consistently. Tech doesn't have enough of those outside of Unix CLI tools.

I just looked them up on eBay, looks like you can get another for <$50.

I wonder if there's going to be a Pebble maintenance scene in 20 years, I wouldn't be too surprised if there was.

I really hope so. I wear my Time Steel daily and will probably continue to do so as long as I can get parts for it. I've seen some guides out there on replacing the screen and battery, but so far I haven't had to crack mine open.

I'd estimate I still get about 5 days of battery (depending on how much solitaire I play, or how long I use the speedometer app).

Sort of like how retro IBM Thinkpads have all sorts of modifications from new motherboards to screens? I can see something like that happening, I was on the verge of purchasing a Pebble when they announced their doom ^W acquisition via Fitbit.

No kidding. What's even more amazing is that the Bluetooth is still that reliable today, more than 5 years after support ended, communicating with new devices with new Bluetooth chips and new OS versions. Every time I get a new phone or upgrade my version of Android I expect it to break, and somehow it never does.

Curious, have you owned an apple watch? I’ve had exactly zero problems with connectivity, never even occurred to me until now.

Since it only works with iphones, no.

This. People underestimate the challenge of making a Bluetooth device compatible with hundreds if not thousands of different Bluetooth enabled phones.