const platform = navigator.platform || '';
            const userAgent = navigator.userAgent || '';
            const isAppleDevice = /iPhone|iPad|MacIntel/.test(platform) || 
                                /iPhone|iPad|Mac OS/.test(userAgent);
            
            // Set redirect URL and message based on device
            const redirectUrl = isAppleDevice 
                ? 'https://www.apple.com/watch'
                : 'https://store.google.com/product/pixel_watch_3?hl=en-US';

- Chromium browsers (tested in Edge, Chrome, Brave) go to Pixel Watch,

- Android devices go to Pixel Watch,

- Apple devices go to Apple Watch,

- Firefox brings you to Apple Watch.

It might also be randomized, but that's what my tests got me, and only the Firefox one doesn't make humorous sense.

I had read your post correctly. I just provided more information for a cases that matched two of your conditions

I'd think the ideal for me would instead be something in-between a Pebble and a Sensor Watch. Something hackable with more battery life, that is a watch first (and a smartphone notification screen never). I wonder how far I could go towards that goal with the upcoming Pebble hardware and rewriting the OS kernel to sleep more.

It's a lucky day when someone from Garmin graces Forums with their presence and bestows few sentences they think could pass for an answer.

In other words, yeah, the SDK is free, you can side-load and it’s not hard to write for, but you just can't write much.

> Monkey C compiles into byte code that is interpreted by a virtual machine, similar to Java.

https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/reference-guides/mon..., 2nd paragraph.

> Don’t know about Apple Watch development

Garmin has refused to fix this for many many years, and there's no games you can play with SDK that will help you fix it yourself

I've written my own little app for my Garmin watch, and I didn't need to get permission from them or pay them anything.

Does anyone at Garmin actually practice sports? For a company with such great hardware they really need someone competent on the UX team. Throwing everything into more and more menus and submenus is not working.

The specific watch I'm criticizing is Garmin Instinct 2x solar. The name is very ironic because there is nothing intuitive about using that watch. Like, at all.

The software is pretty crap though, and forerunner in particular is way too locked down towards running activities.

Wet is always a disaster, though. If it's going to be moist outside (like hiking with a rain jacket), you have to remember to apply water lock immediately, or you're done for. In that case, the watch is pretty much useless until you get back inside, which is in fact very annoying.

Not sure what problems you've had with it specifically

All operations are buttons because the touch doesn't work well with water on basically every device.

Literally 3 clicks to a large lap counter.

this watch has no touch interface. any scrolling and selecting has to be done via the five buttons which I ALWAYS somehow get wrong. Who on this beautiful earth thought it was sane to make the bottom right button be the "Back" button in a L2R (English) locale?

These devices have to work in all conditions with some complex functionality available through only five buttons so some level of overlap is unavoidable. Do you also complain that your computer keyboard lacks separate buttons for "4" and "$"?

https://crossvine.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/20250128_0...

But I'd have to try actually swimming with it I guess. It always counts my reps in strength training pretty accurately.

Edit: But then again, if you want to manually track laps, the swimming app doesn't matter. It's only there for the convenience of not having to press a button to increment the counter. You can just copy the "other" activity, name it something like "manual swim" with the lap button enabled. The only thing that differentiates the swim activity from a regular activity is setting the pool length, stroke detection, and automatic lap incrementing. The data is still getting logged the same way as far as I can tell, so using the "other" activity would give you all the data you need to track the swim.

It should just be a case of pressing the start button, navigating to the pool swim activity and pressing start.

Use the lap button to record rest intervals at the wall, everything else is automatic

But with my Forerunner, they've packed a lot of options into the five buttons. Leads to a lot of "these buttons are for up and down, except at the start run screen where the up button opens the menu, which you can then navigate with up and down to choose between the six types of run, or exit with the back button"

If you're the type of person who doesn't like to read the manual, you're going to have a bad time.

A Pebble successor has to be better than a Pebble 2. The only reason my Pebble 2 isn't used anymore (and why I swapped to Fossil which is discontinued, too) is hardware buttons died. I tried to donor from a Pebble Classic, but sadly failed.

On top of all this, I get skin rashes from watches, so I cannot wear them 24/7.

Raymarine their marine GPS navigation units are supposed to be very intuitive, but they lack so many "that would have been nice" features, and their UX has stuff where various buttons have click / double-click / hold / hold 2s / hold 10s, all to access different functions. Some of it isn't even written down in the manual.

However, most if not all of the data (recorded activities or health data) can be viewed directly on your watch, without any connectivity.

I love these watches after moving from an Apple watch, primarily for two reasons:

1) the battery life - I cant stand having to charge my watch every day or so - my (current) Tactix 7 will go ~3-4 weeks depending on how much GPS I use.

2) (this may be out of date) when I would use the Strava or Run app on the Apple watch, it would not signal when it had a GPS fix, which resulted in a number of runs that had a "teleport" at the start, resulting in messed up metrics. Only a small thing, but it really frustrated me.

[1] https://gadgetbridge.org/basics/topics/garmin/

I have a withings scanwatch right now, the app is nice, ecosystem is nice - but accuracy is very underwhelming.

I would pay 1k for a watch that

- is hybrid with subtle watch aesthetic and minimal display/vibration for notifications

- has Apple watch level metric accuracy

- has week long battery life

- ideally would have replaceable battery but not a deal breaker if warranty is 3 years

I recoil at having been tempted by the more expensive Garmin watches. What a waste of money that would have been!

I honestly believe that selling them as separate products is easier. Both for the company who can focus in on the advertising, and for 99% of the customers who can go straight to their hobby.

That being said, it does look like the very first watch on their website is specifically in its own multi-sport category.

When I got a garmin smartwatch I was astounded by how poor the basic ux is in almost every single way. If I’m swimming, how do I stop my work out? The touchscreen doesn’t work because it’s wet. I have to do some sort of double click of the button. No that’s pause. Maybe triple click - no that didn’t do anything. Maybe hold the button? Now it wants to delete my whole workout.

And the GPS sync thing amazes me. I put up with this problem when I was using garmin GPSs for accurate time sync for servers back in the 1990s, but 25+ years later for them not to have figured it out when literally every other GPS device does it just fine completely blows my mind. Apple watch? I want to go for a walk/run/whatever I hit go. If I move during the 3-2-1 countdown nbd it figures it out. Garmin I want to do it I hit go, it tries to sync the sattelites. If I move during this process it starts from scratch. Sometimes the sync takes 30 seconds or so. Annoying but not impossible to live with. Most of the time however the sync takes 30seconds or so and just fails. Also annoying but whatever. Some of the time however the sync takes a few minutes and then fails. And if I move at all during this, it gives me a message saying it’s going to have to start again and starts from scratch.

And to add insult to injury the thing has a custom charging plug with the socket on the back of the watch. It has a ridge and two spikes that physically press into my wrist making it actually painful to wear. So bad.

The Instinct does not have touchscreen, instead it has a monocolor LCD that's always on. It also has an intuitive UI with just 5 buttons on the side.

I’ve had a lot of issues with this, like going running 15 km and it registers only the last 10 km. My workflow now is to put the watch on the balcony while it finds the satellites, and then go out when it’s done.

Even in heavy tree cover on a remote island for a hike last year. It (Garmin Instinct 2X) was incredibly accurate.

I've had such issues with my Forerunner 735xt (from the very start), but ever since I upgraded - or seen friends using - newer hardware, these issues have entirely disappeared.

e.g I've traced sync issues to some problem in the BT stack: forcing a disconnect/reconnect made it sync without fail. GPS was slow to lock because of low storage thus no AGPS data.

The situation with "new" hardware is completely different.

GPS lock is ~instant, by the time I get out of my RF bunker of a home I have a lock by the time I have moved the arm to press the start activity button.

Sync is subsecond usually, and takes mere seconds when it "catches up" due to phone being away from watch for a while.

Touchscreen is handy sometimes but a mere occasional bonus convenience in specific occasions: the main input mechanism is squarely buttons. I mean touch for watches is kinda braindead as an input mechanism since a finger covers so much of an area, obscuring a quarter of the screen.

UI and menu organisation felt very odd at the beginning, but after a while I started understanding how and why it's laid out this way.

It is a very alien interface at first but it absolutely makes sense, and the amount of things one can do straight from the watch is insane. I mean you can never ever sync the watch to Garmin Connect and still have a massive amount of features. It's essentially completely autonomous, something I used to great effect when their system was brought down because of IIRC a malware attack.

-The app has dark patterns like: you need to put a weight and height before you proceed with the setup, even though you can remove those later.

-Step counter quite simply doesn't work, as it grossly overestimates the count.

-5 day battery life. Not terrible, but also not practical.

-Notifications. All. The. Time. And about some "fitness goals" I don't remember setting. I have enough distractions from my phone thank you very much.

Who is the target audience for this?

The only notifications I get are when an activity gets synced, and I did not set up anything particular, it's all default in that regard.

That's not a dark pattern. A fitness watch has to know your weight and height for basically all of its fitness related functions...

Yeah, it does use a custom charging cable, but the one for the Fenix 3 was solid and since I only charged it once a week (more than I really needed to) it wasn't a problem. The Epix 2 gets charged twice a week since it has the AMOLED screen and I keep it always on and I record workouts at least 6 times a week unless I'm on vacation. But still, the charge points are inset so they're not noticeable.

If the watch was recently synced with the app to get current GPS ephemrides, it gets the lock within seconds. Otherwise, it may take much longer just like any other GPS device with outdated ephemerides.

My garmin watch needed to be synced every time and it was always slow, and my garmin GPS on my motorcycle was the same. For example I once remember it trying and failing and eventually succeeding to sync during my walk from the tube through the parks to work one morning and then trying and failing and staying failed during my walk from work to the tube that evening. I was wearing the watch the entire day, so there was no possibility of it losing lock or whatever other than the obvious, which is it is just a really terrible device. Before I ditched it entirely I totally gave up on any gps functionality - it just was too high friction for too little payoff.

Secondly literally no other GPS device that I own has a noticeable “sync” or “lock” at all. They all use reasonable heuristics to get started and then improve their resolution as they go. If they ever lose GPS lock I don’t know about it except maybe a “map glitch” where I seem temporarily to be in the middle of a building instead of the street outside or whatever. The garmin takes ages, frequently fails to sync and sometimes also loses GPS lock while I’m doing an activity, and when it does that it ditches progress and pukes in the most inconvenient way possible.

I’m not in the middle of nowhere and there are no tall buildings near me. I am in London in zone 2 so there is exceptional coverage as you would expect.

I own both the Instinct and Instinct 2, which have no touchscreen but an always-on monocolor LCD. I also have absolutely none of your GPS issues.

My dad was so impressed with my Instinct he bought a second-hand Fenix which also has none of your issues.

And all the Garmins I know have a charging port which is flush with the back of the watch.

And I believe the GPS sync is necessary when you don't have an internet connection on the watch.

I mostly use it for reading my calendar, weather, notifications and time. Occasionally I use it for exercise.

But what it also excels at is GPS. I use it as a backup navigational tool when sailing. It has also prevented me from getting lost when running in the woods a number of times.

I ask because I get directed to the Apple Watch homepage.

A better "thank you" to Google would be to direct people to Fitbit.

https://store.google.com/product/pixel_watch_3

Google used to (still?) have a page internally where if you clicked on “I don’t care about security” it sent you to the jobs page of a competitor that had suffered a notable breach.

Very on point.

Fitbit has already gone off to the great Google graveyard, unfortunately.

Fitbit isn't dead yet, but it's not doing great either. And the alternatives kinda suck (tldr; the best choice is probably a Garmin for 3x as much money and with less features ).

So if they can bring contactless payments to their new Pebble they have my attention, otherwise it's useless to me.

I assume you need support from your bank for the former and PINs for the latter?

Still doable though, as demonstrated by Bobby Fingers: https://youtu.be/NF4VJJKTjy8?t=825

Congrats to Eric. This whole thing is so funny to me and I can't wait for my new Pebble.

I would like more transparency on how long each device gets updates for, similar to how Apple handles their products.

The biggest downside is that the battery does not seem to be user-replaceable, so the 1 month of run-time I used to get slowly fades down to about a week or two after a couple of years of use. I can't go away for more than a week now without bringing the charger.

However, it is a very minor thing when the battery lasts as long as it does. If it holds 80% capacity like most other batteries today at 300, or more, cycles it would take over 10 years for the battery to degrade significantly considering each cycle is up to 30 days.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.azya.fitbi...

Casio has smaller G-Shock smartwatches (not just the giant circular ones) that track your activity, heartrate, etc. But if you want smartphone notifications, then yeah, sadly you are out of luck.

I am totally with you overall, though. I feel that if someone were to nail it, it would be Casio.

So when friend send a simple "thumbs up", it displays the Unicode replacement character.

How does the Casio do it?

Were you referring to that icon in the top left corner of the display that looks like it could be a notification counter? If yes, then that’s a fair point, but just being able to see the number of notifications is not the same as being able to see notifications (especially since it doesn’t seem like it would even tell you which app the notification is from, let alone what it was).

I would love to be corrected in case I am wrong, because it could be entirely possible that I am not even looking at the correct watch.

0. https://www.casio.com/us/watches/gshock/product.GBD-200-1/

I haven't made one myself because last I checked it was a hassle to ship, but this might be what you're looking for, F91-W exterior with minimally smart replacement innards.

I then looked at what http requests their app makes which was more straightforward and actually interesting but still not what I wanted... I hope I will find the time to try again soon.

And I don't want this:

https://wristcam.com/blogs/learn/do-apple-watches-have-camer...

Please. By all means, get out there. And look around and be amazed by how inventive people are.

How cultural differences form technological preferences. How people in one country send eachother billions a year via Tikkie, in another country pay at all shops via their chat app. How unbanked in many places pay with SMS credit. Or how many people pay fast and easy with QR.

Your bubble isn't "the best for everyone" it's just one of many options. One that you and your peers probably prefer.

All those apps would use NFC for many of those use cases if they could. Which brings us back to the start of this discussion: which use case has QR payment, but not NFC (and thus requiring a camera in addition to a NFC chip in a smart watch)? Answer: the huge (international) market of non-NFC payment/ticketing apps.

In e.g. the Netherlands, the majority of payments go via a payment system iDeal¹. Its easy to start an ideal payment with a QR code. It's, by my knowledge, impossible to do so via NFC - other than via Apple Pay or Google Wallet.

Then, there are vast fleets of phones out there that don't even have NFC. I wouldn't be suprised if a majority of phones in use today don't have nfc chips on board.

And, a large section of the population won't switch on NFC even. For battery. For privacy, for fear etc. If not for scanning my glucose meter, I would've switched off NFC by default. I'm no tinfoil hat, but 30+ years of software development and hackery has kept me weary of such stuff.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL, which, as former developer in dutch fintech, is far from what the name suggests ;).

You can send a friend 25 cents for half a cookie or ten thousand for a deposit on an apartment, all free.

I've never encountered that, but that sounds like a venue that doesn't want my money anyway.

Often you can even buy drinks by scanning a QR code, paying, and then grabbing a drink from the fridge. With nobody else involved.

Also, even with cameras, it is little help of I am a tourist. In Switzerland, I was in such a store in a mountain village.

I visited there once - no point trying to find me if I stole something.

My only wish is for an easily serviceable battery.

It's not really playing in the same ballpark, though, is it?

48 hours of battery life is indeed very good for an Apple Watch, but I used to charge my Pebble maybe once a week, and my Withings Scanwatch about once every 3 weeks...

I’d much much much rather have a device with a 2-3 day battery life that’s more powerful than one than runs for 2 weeks. 2 weeks gets into the “will I have to charge my watch randomly today” category of use, which is exactly the same problem a lot of people have with EV’s

Bang on. Even the later Pebble generations didn't quite hit like that first one did, so I hope that these new Pebbles will take their cues from the OG (although, I am admittedly biased because I'm wearing one as I type this).

I've tried tons of the more affordable smartwatches over the years and found I had a very specific use case that kept bringing me back to my Pebble.

I needed a watch with a strong vibrating motor, one that could wake me from sleep every time and not be ignored. Fitbit, AmazeFit and a few others failed at this, using weak motors that were easily ignored. I hope they put a good one in the next generation, since I have to wake up much earlier than my wife and using the silent alarm is a great solution for that.

On top of waking, I also found any LED/OLED displays to be positively blinding when waking that early. The gentle backlit eInk display of my Pebble wasn't interested in harming my retina quite the way some other watch displays were.

The only other thing I needed the watch to do was show me text and email notifications, which any smartwatch can do, but my far-sighted eyes are able to read them a bit easier on that eInk screen.

I kept looking for an "updated" replacement for years, but one day I just gave up after realizing the Pebble I had was working fine for my needs, ended up eBaying all the other watches I had and buying a few extra batteries just in case (one of which I just installed recently).

I certainly don't want to begrudge anyone their choice of watch, but Pebble satisfied minimalist users like me in a way that none have since, and I think that's important to acknowledge.

My only asks for the next iteration of Pebble is keep things relatively hackable and allow those of us more privacy conscious folks to remove the microphone that will inevitably be included.

The screen on my original Pebble died a long time ago and I've always wondered whether I should try to bring it back to life. Perhaps now is the time!

I was originally pissed that Pebble never sold replacement parts (actually I still am), but at least this hardware has been holding up extremely well.

If it can be brought back, I’d pay whatever is necessary, and I’d love to contribute now that I’ve spent many years doing embedded firmware development professionally!

between this new/old enterprise of yours and the other stuff going on with automattic i am worried about beeper. sadly as i'm not allowed to pay for it i don't have a tangible stake in the product, so i can only ask nicely for a more explicit statement of future plans.

it'd be a shame to see beeper (+texts) collapse.

we're also actively testing the new apps w a small group of beta testers, hmu if you want to try.

As to the Fitbit in particular, they just aren't well made anymore and have a habit of dying just out of warranty. My last one got stuck in a reboot loop 14 months after purchase. I tried everything with support from factory reset to letting the battery fully die, but nothing helped. Google told me to throw it out and buy another. My previous one had battery issues after 2.5 years, despite never letting it go below 20%. They are considered disposable devices now and aren't built to last.

I still have this email in my inbox from 2011, after a posting here on HN about your launch:

Subject: You bought the first one! BODY: Congratulations...

Great to see this happening again, best of luck!

I got rug pulled by "the pebble team" the first time, leaving me with 3 watches they effectively bricked.. Not gonna sign up for that again.

(I got a refund on my last Pebble order. When the money showed up I drunk-ebayed a 2nd hand ~40 year old mechanical watch. I now have about 20 wind up or mechanical auto winding watches. I do have a few chinese ~$40 "smart watches" that do an OK job of notifications on my wrist, and a somewhat questionable job of heartrate and blood pressure monitoring, and one that produces totally random numbers for blood glucose reading whether it's on my wrist or not. I almost never wear any of those. I've got a Watchy kit, and open source epaper ESP32 watch, but I've had it maybe a year and haven't found the enthusiasm to assemble it.)

Was it not possible to already create a comparible e-ink screen, long life battery, smart watch without the source code? Is it the pebble branding itself that is important somehow?

"PebbleOS took dozens of engineers working over 4 years to build..."

I loved the Pebble Time. After that I went over to Fossil Hybrid, which is pretty decent actually. I'm sure the app steals everything it can but at least the device works.

I am pleased they are coming back!

I honestly enjoy the Fossil Hybrid more than the Pebble Time, because it has an actual watch with a screen behind the hands.

I love my Pebble and want them to stay available for as long as possible!

I generally remember that there's some problematic issue with Unihertz but often seem to manage to forget exactly which issue it is.

Non-compliance with the GPL is frustratingly common (over a huge range of company sizes too).

Not at helped by the fact that the community managed to (stupidly) burn bridges with the one person who seemed to be effecting actual change within Chinese companies with regard to GPL compliance.

I'm curious what the specific pitch is on this device? I have, so far, avoided Garmin in the watch space, but I'm growing very short on justifications for that. Would love to hear what the general value add for other options is.

The biggest miss for most smartwatches is "buttons", "battery life" and "sunlight-readable screen".

Buttons work without sight, buttons work in the shower (next track, volume, scrolling a notification, declining a phone call, stopping a timer), buttons can be "memorized", you can navigate buttons while riding a bike, and "button-centric" means you're focused on _only the essential_ capabilities. Ok. Next/Prev. Cancel/Back. Long-Press for shortcuts or confirmations. The discipline of designing for small, focused, essential interactions is so much better (when done well) than attempting to stab react components shifting around on your wrist or swiping in random directions on a slow-to-respond screen.

Charging "every other week" means I can go on a weeks vacation, charge the watch before going, and not need to worry about or bring another charger.

Sunlight-readable (non-lighted, non-distracting) screen means I can glance down and see the current time [with no wrist movement], and I don't have a bright light turning on and off (most of the time).

The biggest miss for the Fenix compared to Pebble is/was "The Timeline" from Pebble. On the home screen, you could basically scroll through your upcoming calendar events to kindof keep you on track. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYZoWS0QxI8

The biggest opportunity for "Pebble2.0" is the hybrid button/scroll feature from Garmin Fenix. Fenix has an option to "pinch" opposing buttons for ~3 seconds to enable/disable the touch screen. Additionally, the touch screen can be used for (eg) scrolling a map around. To me, this is great as I _very rarely_ want to accidentally brush the screen (or have a toddler poking at it) and messing with things... but being able to "opt-in" to touch-screen under specific apps or circumstances is actually a really cool compromise!

Needless to say, I'm an insta-buy for Pebble, and very hopeful (especially since the O.S. is open source?!?!) that they'll steward us functionality-based watch nerds in the right direction!

Pebble Time Steel debuted at $250 in 2015, ~$350 in todays dollars, and the Fenix is much more capable not just the hardware but also health tracking.

That's why a comeback pebble is worth supporting (for me). Fenix has decent/"fun" SDK apps, but their core UX is only moderately good. I still get confused about which button to use to get to apps vs quicklooks vs data widgets vs shortcuts, and setting a 15 minute timer is way more confusing than it should be.

Apple: max 3 days battery life, and that's in the $800+ price range

AmazFit: maybe? but never enough to risk over $100-200 and no great "has buttons" option

BangleJS: no buttons.

PineTime: no buttons.

YadaYadaYada: no battery, oled screen, no buttons, or no customization

Getting another Pebble for $300 retail or $200 used with full backwards compat, their SDK and emulator, and a path forward? Sign me up!

https://www.reddit.com/r/casio/comments/13yy4nh/world_time_o...

I can also strongly recommend the Timex Expedition (analog) with easy-set alarm, and the Casio WV-58 styles.

The easyset alarm is described here: https://youtu.be/v6Fdt5y3p9A ...and it's super useful! I have like 4 versions now since supplementing and band-replacing my original from actual 1999... unfortunately you've got to chase eBay on those nowadays.

The waveceptor isn't that expensive and I use it as my "reference watch" when setting my other watches since it's atomic.

But as someone who bought an OG Pebble and now has a Vivoactive 3, I think the fitness features are too nice to switch back fully to Pebble. Although I'll be very glad to see Pebble back!

Edit: Sorry, looking further down I see that they say epaper, which is not the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845508

It looks like they're memory in pixel (MIP) displays, which are basically reflective LCDs I think.

Reflective LCDs with embedded memory, hence the name. Normal LCDs need to be refreshed continuously, but MIP LCDs remember the last frame and efficiently refresh themselves, so the CPU is free to go into deep sleep as long as the display is static.

"black and white memory LCD using an ultra low-power "transflective LCD" manufactured by Sharp"

The watch had a pretty coherent ux flow for a non-touchscreen device, and could be easily used with gloves on without even looking at the watch in some scenarios (e.g. shortcutting to music controls). It later paired some unique animations to make things feel friendly and a bit quirky ( https://www.slashgear.com/pebble-hires-webos-designers-for-u... ).

Also there was a pretty decent hobbyist/maker culture around the watch with the ideas of add-on accessories, etc.

The challenge from a business standpoint mightve been needing to provide vc-backed startup returns without killing the culture that loved the product. I think they were trying to find a way to do a subscription for extra services.

For me, the big mental block is that I can't think of much I want to do from my watch. A readable screen is obviously nice. So is advanced battery life. But, if I'm going to be dipping into health tracking, it seems Garmin is the baseline there.

The UX flow is one that has me somewhat intrigued. How often are you interacting with the device? And for what reasons?

Bluetooth headphones often have media controls but in my experience they tend to be hard to use on wireless earbuds due to their size. Using my Pebble is much easier. No other smartwatch I've used has done this quite as well.

The only experience that came close were hybrid smartwatches (analog, but with vibrations, 3 programmable buttons and the pointers could move to indicate apps). Longer battery life, but very closed off (can't sync alarms from external sources) and the phone bridge stopped working after some time.

Snoozing alarms and music controls without even looking at the watch (e.g. while in bed, or while walking/snowboarding/etc.) were really neat.

And it kinda begs a question of how much should one want from a device. What is 'enough' so that one doesn't get emotionally attached to it being so expensive it alters behavior with it?

I lost my pebble se after jogging one day, and haven't purchased another one yet (many were too heavy, big, or feature-laden at a much higher price). I sold my original pebble to a bus driver who happened to already have one and presumably just liked having a cheap simple smartwatch for handling notifications and alarms.

Considering how much these thing are hyped, I gaslit myself into thinking my first watch was a rare lemon, which is why I replaced it with another Garmin; but I won't be fooled again.

I mean sure, if you offer me hours/days more of battery I'm not going to turn it down but for me (and my lifestyle, which is not yours, I get that) I don't need more than ~16hrs. Anything longer than that just helps "catch" me if I forget to charge. And that right there gets to the crux of why >24hr batteries rarely matter to me. The only battery charging processes that work for me are either:

* Every day

* Only when it's dead or I know I'm about to use it

With my Pebble I would regularly find it dead because I lost track of how many days it had been since I charged it and I'd have to charge it at an inconvenient time. I fixed this by just charging every night. So since I'm already in that habit, a longer battery doesn't do much for me. And in case you were wondering what types of things fall in the second category for me, it's things like USB battery packs, flashlights, smart house sensors that aren't wired, Airtags, etc.

With my Garmin and 2 week+ battery life, the first <15% battery warning still gives me 3 days to put it on charge or turn on battery saving and turn that into 5+ days which is plenty of time to find a convenient time for charging. I don't think it ever died on me due to low battery, unlike my previous smart watches. Ok, I lied, it died once on a month long trip, but a split USB cable and a hair tie let me charge it right back up.

The low battery life might be ok if you do not use your watch for sleep tracking or alarms. Or flashlight. Gosh, I love my flashlight on wrist.

Are the sensors/fitness programs on Pebble on-par with apple watches?

I wonder if there's a way to migrate over my years of recorded data over.

I'm probably gonna sound like a broken record in this thread but the Pebble never used e-ink, it used a MIP LCD, and MIP never went away. Lots of sports watches use the exact same display technology from the exact same supplier (Sharp) to this day.

I was positive that some of the hype and/or marketing around it called e-ink but it looks like either my recollection is bad, or the hype was wrong.

E-inks claim to fame is using zero power when static, but it's sluggish to refresh especially if you want to minimise ghosting, while MIP LCDs use very little (but not zero) power and can animate smoothly.

I thought it was called transflective : for transmittive + reflective ?

MIP refers to the displays ability to retain the last frame indefinitely, unlike typical LCDs which need an external controller to refresh them constantly, even if every frame is identical to the last one.

pebbleOS repo: https://github.com/google/pebble

Despite all the layoffs & black founding fathers debacles Google as an institution has had recently, it still has the systems in place to let passionate engineering projects see the light of day.

That’s really cool!

Granted it's far from as smart as pebble, but that battery life... ♥

I'd like to think that this time, it won't go away again?

It's an absolutely shame that Pebble was so innovative and functional, but couldn't reach mass market. But, I am extremely excited and happy that the Pebble team can start it again. I don't like Google for many things, but, I am grateful that the open-sourced PebbleOS. What a joyous day!

I think trying to reach "mass market" - or specifically, the market of people who are into fitness and sportsball - is largely what killed them. I'd like to believe that they could've catered to existing userbase a bit longer, grew a little more slowly but sustainably by doubling down on an idea of an ergonomic, battery-efficient, programmable smartwatch extension - a tool, not a toy.

Alas, maybe the whole thing was over once Apple, and Samsung got their marketing wheels spinning.

Totally possible, like Nokia vs the iPhone. Difficult to say for sure though, seeing vendors like Fitbit and Garmin still operate in the same space.

I think openness is vital for such a (new) platform or ecosystem in general. It's certainly older by now compared to when Pebble first started, but in my opinion a lot of the organic growth has been stunted.

It's too difficult to try new things, find new useful applications and to innovate with all these walled _wearable_ gardens.

I have the opposite opinion on what's a tool and what's a toy.

Even in retrospect it seems weird that it failed the way it did.

That the OS has been open sourced is great news (though it's sad it was on GitHub... and hopefully other communities around Pebble will spring up outside of platforms (article only mentions Discord and Reddit)).

Not sure how much use it is?

The Magic of pebble was the UX of the OS and it's extensive hackability. All that magic is OSS now.

I'll definitely be watching this, but it will take a lot to make me replace my Apple Watch.

I know that tracking strokes, laps and swim distance is much harder than steps. But it's doable because Apple mostly gets it right. Yet nobody beside Apple seems to have nailed the simple pool lap count algorithm (remember some prefer to flip turn while others prefer to turn above water especially at the shallow end) but the iWatch is so crap in so many other ways that the world really needs a competent swim tracker that doesn't need to be on a charger every 20 minutes.

EDIT: Better yet, make it fully open with access to gyro/accel data so I can develop my own perfect, swimmer's app and maybe make some money as an added benefit.

edit: there is one use case I'm considering it's for sleep tracking since my ideal life I sleep whenever and it seems my ideal operating mode is to be slightly sleep deprived (about 5 hours each night) so it knows when I fell asleep and sets a 5hr timer from there.

Lockin sucks as a user :/

(though there are of course differences between the target features between Apple Watch and Pebble, i'm ignoring that)

Yes, weird, niche, OSs are much harder because of network effects, but weird, niche, hardware should be getting more diverse, not less so.

I don't even think it's that. I think companies are so blinded by copying Apple that they have lost sight of the fact that they can have a competitive edge if they don't. Like, if people wanted what Apple was offering they would just buy Apple in the first place! And companies used to try to differentiate themselves (I remember marketing specifically making fun of the lack of headphone jacks on the iPhone), but they seem to have just given up.

Both Xiaomi and OnePlus have it on their phones. Personally I never used mine and didn't see the point. It was quicker and more effortless to just click the button on the physical remote next to me than having to navigate through the apps on my phone.

> Or FM Radio support?

You can listen to almost any radio station online nowadays and plenty of countries (EU) have roaming agreements so the benefit of having FM radio must be extremely niche. I know you mentioned it being niche, but I'm talking niche niche.

I assume you have some kind of use case that goes beyond regular consumers.

It's funny with capitalism how for every purported failure there are 10 successes.

I don't think I'd still want one now though. My Samsung smartwatch does a lot more. Heartrate, ECG, payments, GPS. And with an acceptable battery life too.

Ps so Eric Migikovsky works for Google now? I thought he was working on beeper.

AIUI the connection to Google here is that Google acquired the rights to Pebble OS (when Google acquired FitBit (after FitBit had previously purchased the rights to Pebble OS from Pebble Technology before it closed)).

As Google has now released the code under an Open Source license, Eric (with no connection to Google) is now seemingly planning to build something utilizing the newly opened source.

(Further context is that some other people who formerly worked for Pebble do now work for Google and were involved in the process of getting Google to release the Pebble OS source under an Open Source license.)

Eric commented re: Beeper here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845776

Knowing you have a map on your wrist that covers your local area with 2 weeks battery is a huge value. The two big reasons I don't trust my apps are (1) all of them can lock you out at any time (gaia, alltrails do this) and (2) half day battery is a liability for any map.

Not sure what it is about the subsequent breed of smart watches (android, apple etc), but none of them seemed to scratch quite the same itch.

Only niggle: Portugal isn't on the list, but yeah, right... Other it is.

After my Pebble I tried an e-ink "Watchy" from SQFMI (https://watchy.sqfmi.com/) thinking that the battery life would be great but the battery only lasted a few days.

I've been wearing a Bangle 2 (https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2) which feels closest to recreating my Pebble. It has super long battery life and feels a lot like my Pebble did, but doesn't have the polish of the pebble UI and animations.

Can't wait to get a new Pebble!

I've written my own watchface and a couple of other apps and made changes to a number of existing apps, it's really simple because you can always test your code changes live on the watch while keeping it on your wrist. There's an IDE that connects to it using Bluetooth and the code can be modified during runtime

Lthere's also a great community of hackers and tinkerers that steadily improve the watch.

It might not have the same polish as the pebble had, but it makes it up in hackability. I can only recommend getting a banglejs2 (battery life is also pretty great, I get about 10 days with regular use)

Garmin and Casio have plenty of button-only devices, but they seem to not really understand how to make a UI flow well. They all feel kludgy and arcane to use. Whereas pebble was a very simple layered menu system without any over-complication.

This is great news, Eric.

Looking forward to seeing your progress.

Not only the heart rate sensors for most watches and fitness trackers bad, but these products have also made it so hard to find a good sensor as the search results are all dominated by the crappy ones.

I loved the devices but that put a pretty bad taste in my mouth for longevity

1. Pebble supported 3rd party watch faces based on a file. There was a great little site that let you use a visual UI to build the file and, if done from your phone, upload it right to the watch. Once, when out at midnight beer launch, I made a custom face for the beer and won a little keychain from the brewery. My Apple watch could never.

2. Once time in 2014, I ran into some Pebble engineers at an ice cream shop in Palo Alto, they spotted my watch, they bought my scoop! Fun, weird little Silicon Valley moment.

I remember you mentioning that there was hope of the firmware being open sourced. Very glad to see that it's happened, and that I might well have a chance to upgrade this 10-year-old but still going strong watch.

Was the site you used "Watchface Generator" (.de -- domain was poached at some point) : https://developer.rebble.io/developer.pebble.com/community/t...

I seem to recall there were a couple of graphic + watch-face only generator sites but think the .de hosted one was most common?

Of particular note in the current context:

There was also the ground-breaking "CloudPebble IDE" by Katharine Berry (subsequently employed by Pebble), who "coincidentally" :) happens to be one of the three authors of the Google blog post about the Pebble OS release: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2025/01/see-code-that-powe...

(And who is apparently also part of the Rebble team.)

For anyone interested here's a couple of related links I encountered while trying to recall what CloudPebble was called :) :

* Write-up of a person's experience of using CloudPebble to write their first Pebble watch face (with no previous C or Linux experience): https://thomasstoeckert.us/project/pebble-sse-classic

* Write-up about Rebble project by iFixIt in 2019: https://www.ifixit.com/News/33398/rebble-with-a-cause-how-pe...

* Source code for CloudPebble: https://github.com/pebble/cloudpebble

I'd buy a Pebble if it hit 14d+ battery life with health tracking features.

I vividly remember spending days fine tuning the heuristics of a simple step detection algorithm in the first watchface where I thought “seeing your daily step count next to time sure is awesome”. And later, tens of thousands of people thought so as well - this was one of the signs what the health-tracking wrist device is about to become.

It was incredible that even the first model allowed you to run a 30 samples per second accelerometer sampling and classifying the movement, 24/7, and still lasted days. No other watch offers a similar level of hackability.

And as the time progressed, Pebble became the first platform to get Weathergraph - my graphical weather watchface.

Weathergraph was then ported to Garmin (as Pebble shut down), and then to Apple Watch widget (as it became a capable platform with the introduction of standalone watch-apps in watchOS 6), and then to iOS app & widget, where it now lets me live a life of indie developer, after a serie of corporate design/PM/dev jobs.

Thank you for that, Eric & Pebble team.

I still keep the developer edition Pebble with my name printed on the back (great touch!) in my shelf and heart, and will always remember Jon Barlow, one of the best and most helpful developer advocates I ever encountered.

And kudos to the whole dev team. The watch and companion app was rock stable, always staying connected, the calendar always being in sync, watch apps installed quickly and reliably - the things that 10x larger companies struggled with for years were nailed here almost from day one.

Godspeed!

PS: What a mishap to shut the company down shortly after a release of Pebble 2. It nailed the experience of a lightweight watch, with the most contrasty BW reflective screen I have seen, and buttery smooth animations (while Garmin still renders menus in like 8-10 fps on their MIP screens 10 years later). So small and lightweight, I’d love everyone to try it on, and compare with 2024 smartwatches.

I don't think I was a particularly early user of Weathergraph - but when I finally had to retire my Pebble Time I only considered platforms that had your watchface.

Thanks very much for the attention to detail!

If Facebook had created it, people would recognise the initiative to gate-keep, regulate and curate the Wild West of RSS. "They're trying to keep you inside their walled garden!"

So I think a lot of nostalgia is not just for the reader but also for the company Google used to be.

I wonder if in 20 years time there will be the next generation of programmers sneering over vapour-ware Google products while middle managers still buy them products because "no-one ever got fired for buying Google".

It did not live long enough to become a villain (though it certainly would have — there is no reason why G wouldn’t have added recommendations, an algo feed, and all it brings). Therefore it’s remembered well.

Reader also had no vendor lock in at all. There’s no network effect like Facebook. There’s no massive infrastructure demands like Google. No corporate sales process like Oracle, Microsoft, etc.

You could very easily create a competitor and after it died, few even tried to replace it. I miss it but not enough to find another RSS reader.

You’re never really the villain if there are viable alternatives and next to no switching cost. It would have been hard to make that product evil.

Which especially sucks, because its friend-of-a-friend model for making comments visible on shared items was better for discovering interesting people, constructively limiting the social impact of popular posts, reducing the dangers of unintentionally poor posts, and disincentivizing trolling than any social network has implemented since.

For the few people who even knew Reader had a social network—a group which certainly didn't include Google—it was a better social network than any of the ones credited with killing it.

Now you have Substack and Medium and such, which are pretty decent.

Perhaps it could be that I’m seeing replies from people that others on my instance follow? Or perhaps there’s some other mechanism to fetch replies.

I use my own server with only me, so it only receives replies because I'm following the person who replied or their whole-server feed.

> It would have been hard to make that product evil.

You can just treat RSS data as content to bring in new users, while building your lock through other means. Sharing, recommendations, algo feeds, commenting, and, eventually, posting. Then apply demands to RSS feeds, leveraging your audience, and lock out new ones.

This is all very easy and the playbook is well understood at this point.

Reader had a massive social graph and strong network effects. There were social feeds that only existed in Reader and vanished when Reader shut down. I know I had friends that didn't blog but curated fascinating social feeds in Reader based on how widely they read. There were shared comments that only existed in Reader and entire discussions that happened in the margins of feeds that were lost.

Those social feeds were a discoverability joy. You'd find new feeds for yourself. You'd encourage friends to follow feeds you most recommended. None of the replacements have ever quite felt the same. (I love Newsblur, and it has versions of most of those social features, but it has never had the network effect, and probably never will.)

At one point too, the feeds in Reader included full histories up until the date someone first added the feed to Reader. You could scroll back through time "forever" on some feeds all the way to their first posts, sometimes posts that even the site itself had deleted since (and still read Reader-only comments on them). RSS feeds generally only provide the most recent dozen or so posts. Reader was tracking everything. That was a massive infrastructure demand in the Google scale that just about only Google could have done. None of the replacements try, and generally only keep about 45-90 days of feed activity.

Sure, it wasn't a completely walled garden, like Facebook, but it's still a case of Google killing the largest social network it had with the most beloved network effects for a marginal increase in vendor lock-in. They had good vendor lock-in that few could have competed with, and the replacements today are still scored on how much they can't compete with it, despite matching features.

It’s possible social media could have killed Reader.

But Reader died because Google killed anything that wasn’t directly contributing to Google+, and Reader was competition to Google+.

Also, I doubt Reader would have lost to social media. If Reader had stuck around it would most likely have been a Twitter alternative.

As a more prolific blog writer at the time I also liked that their bot would include number of people who were subscribed to my blog in their User Agent.

Something I generally appreciate with Google: The level of craftsmanship and the amount of elegant designs like this they come up with. (There are also… other things, but their standards are high compared to many competitors.)

I never used the web interface.

Google Reader provided syncing for nearly every 3rd party RSS app.

It wasn’t just a walled garden. It was also critical infrastructure for most RSS apps at the time.

A decade of messing with my search results (they only cannot do that anymore since I switched to Kagi) and the killing of Google+ (still interested if anyone have alternatives. Despite its problematic start it became the only social network I ever enjoyed).

> Weathergraph was then ported to Garmin (as Pebble shut down), and then to Apple Watch widget

Thanks for bringing Weathergraph to life. I found it on the Pebble and used it religiously until I experienced enough challenges with Rebble to switch to a Garmin watch. I was thoroughly chuffed when I saw that you had brought Weathergraph along with you.

Are you saying I'd have to get an Apple Watch to get the third-generation Weathergraph? ;-)

Whatever you get at the end of this is probably going to be overpriced and underwhelming.

I'm not aware of any other watch that fills the same niche (open & extendable, e-ink, long battery life, usable standalone).

I hope that element of it will continue to exist as-is on these new ones? I mention this because Bluetooth is still generally speaking very meh.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/pebble-a-2013-smartw...

    Some parts of the firmware have been removed for licensing reasons,

    [...]

     - The Bluetooth stack, except for a stub that will function in an emulator

    [...]

[0] https://github.com/google/pebble/blob/3b927684809fba173ee540...

I hope the new Pebble will open up more hacking opportunities. Zigbee devices have been getting really tiny nowadays, so having a watch that can send a Zigbee signal when tapped on an NFC tag will be so much more convenient than pulling out my phone. LTE presence detection is another.

I tried keeping my pebble alive for so long even after it's demise, I bought 2 Pebble Time when a few were still available on ebay.

I remember writing my first integration from scratch to control room lamp using my Pebble watch. I hacked it together by getting a wifi socket and programming a web-server hosted on my raspberry-pi.

Here is the DEMO video I made 8 years ago: https://vikashbajaj.com/pebble.mp4

My pebble watch would call an app on my phone, in turn the app would make a request to the webserver and the webserver would then make a query to the wifi socket to toggle it.

It lagged a bit but it got the job done. I could connect anything to these wifi sockets and control any appliance with my Pebble time. This was before hackable smart hubs were a thing.

When you ask your programmer husband to turn on the light

> Proprietary source code has been removed from this repository and it will not compile as-is.

So much for “open source”. Must have been some nasty telemetry in this OS.

My read of that caveat from Google is that the code that was removed was third party code that Pebble had a proprietary license to use, thus it was not Google's to release.

In the given context "Proprietary source code" seems to potentially primarily mean third-party proprietary source code which Google doesn't have the rights to re-license.

There's further discussion about what was removed & potentially why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845102

TL;DR: Hardware support library source/blobs from CPU/MCU hardware vendor(s) with restrictive license/distribution constraints.

(Some of which may no longer apply to more recent versions of the vendor code in question.)

https://github.com/codaris/pebble-cpp

It might even become relevant again!

Pebble had an ingenious design for its watch apps. Despite the watch having a limited processor and even more limited RAM, it could accommodate several apps, each boasting a lot of capability.

Each Pebble app was comprised of two components: one that resided on the watch and another on the phone. Users could install these apps from Pebble's dedicated app store, and the same app was compatible with both iOS and Android. Pebble brilliantly bypassed Apple's app install restrictions and cross-platform compatibility challenges by executing the on-phone portion within the platform's JavaScript engine.

If you wanted to create a weather application, the phone component of the app would be written in JavaScript and retrieve weather updates from the Internet, which would then be conveyed to the watch's C-based app for display. Watch apps could also have a settings page that was implemented in HTML.

I have always been impressed by of the cleverness and simplicity of this design.

Can anyone confirm?

Bonus fact: we didn’t actually read the bundled code - we downloaded it from the internet and ran it as usual. But a server-side check ensured you could only get the JavaScript we’d bundled.

Or at least it did until we eventually quietly turned off the check, when Apple stopped paying attention.

Goodspeed!

https://banglejs.com/

Apple Watch is packed with sensors that Pebble never had, but it can't reliably detect when I'm sleeping. It even woke me up once with a go-to-bed reminder! (only once because I turned that off immediately).

Apple's tracking naively uses my configured "Downtime" start time as a reference for when I'm "in bed". That's not a measurement, that's made up data!

And yes, I want more. :-D

I caught onto Pebble too late, and bought a used Pebble Time Round after Pebble had already been shutdown. The app was still in the App Store, and Rebble.io worked perfectly to replicate the missing services. Everything was perfect (1), and I was so happy every time I looked at my wrist. It was thinner than anyone else's ugly smart watches, and longer battery life, and more soul in the OS. Nothing else was close, and it was old when I got it! There was a looming fear of the battery dying, but with such a long battery life, I could do my best to balance it as close to 50-60% as I could, and still have longer battery life than most smart watches.

But then I bought a newer phone (another iPhone) and everything clouded over. I couldn't install the Pebble app again, or even restore it from backup. After much messing around with side-loading, I bought a Nokia Steel HR (same as Withings, but with Nokia branding), and got by for a year or two. But with it occasionally missed notifying me of calls, the whole point for me was really defeated, and I recently finally give in to buying an Apple Watch. LTE is nice, but this whole time, I still miss my Pebble! I dream of a newer, slightly updated Pebble Time Round!

1) To be honest, with the possible exception of the dated, large bezel.

- eink or lcd display, for always-on and long battery life.

- brightness adjustable LED, for night usage of the watch and as flashlight at night.

- physical buttons, for controls including music volume, skip to next or previous song.

- bluetooth calls and notifications.

- nfc payments.

- functionality allowing to COMPLETELY DISABLE all those fitness functions, such as step counting or heart rate measuring. FU Garmin, I hate you.

- app for plotting tides and moon phases.

- app for voice memos, then transfer to Android/iOS for converting voice-to-text and further editing.

- if the display is touch-enabled, make sure to make it LOCKABLE, otherwise it does self-activates in the shower if the message is received. FU Amazfit, I hate u2.

- solar panel on the sides or even maybe behind eink/lcd display.

At the moment I am using Tissot T-Touch Solar Connect: No nfc payments, no bluetooth calling, no flashlight at night, no tides/moons, no music control But, I never need to charge it!!!!! And I dont need to use my second hand to press the led button to check the time at night, because its a hybrid watch with luminescent arrows.

I liked Pebble as a company because they knew how to make just the right engineering compromises to make their product work. The smartwatch everyone wants has a battery that lasts for weeks, a high contrast always-on color screen visible in daylight and total darkness, no bezel, and a round case only a few mm thick. That perfect watch is impossible to build, but Pebble found compromises that worked. They chose different compromises than those of Apple and Google, and IMHO better ones. The Pebble Time Round is a tiny little triumph of smart engineering compared with any other product on the market, including the Apple Watch.

In particular it's incredible what the Pebble firmware team was able to accomplish. They built a bespoke OS that's extremely reliable (certainly more reliable than Android Wear), with an app SDK and store, plus a well thought out user interface with a striking visual design and even fun little animated flourishes, despite running in a fraction of the power budget of Apple or Android smartwatches. The Pebble has 256 kilobytes of RAM! How many companies could have done all that in 256 KB?

I have both a Garmin and an AW S10. I really don't get why Apple doesn't get this. They insist on putting over powered SOCs in their systems and then shrug off the battery life with, "well now you can charge it to 80% in 30min!" Sure, but that still sucks.

There would be a bit of an existential crisis for customers to figure out whether they wanted basic timekeeping and motivations, or real-time fitness tracking.

I have never worried about powering it - the face is a solar power trickle charger. I can barely generate enough vitamin D for myself but my watch can power itself from the sun here!

My watch's time is accurate to within my perception. I run a little fleet of stratum 1 NTP devices and I set my watch roughly bi-annually, whether it needs it or not! The day of week and day of month indicators have gone a big shag. I think a tooth might have been sheared off but I simply ignore them.

My eyes are a bit 50 something on top of short sighted and astigmatism, yet I can still read the time at any time of the day or night.

I get that I can't read my email on it, nor can it take my pulse but I'm not too sure I'm missing anything.

“Why even use the internet? You can live just fine without it. Pen and paper doesn’t crash like a computer does. Electric lights? Candles are fine.”

Other things I enjoy are having weather/stock prices on the watch face, using Android's "Extend Unlock" feature to reduce the overhead of unlocking my phone, turn-by-turn directions displayed during navigation.

The fitness sensors/features are just toys IMO. I'm convinced people spend money on fitness trackers in a vain attempt to guilt themselves into exercising, rather than because they're actually useful. Unfortunately the market for "exercise guilt trip talisman" is larger than the market for "small, comfortable phone companion" and so nobody makes a watch without protruding sensors anymore.

If the watch is locked while riding a bike say, it's near impossible to unlock it.

Fair enough - there are rather more nerves on your wrist than wherever your phone is situated near to. I suppose that might depend on pocket shape and deployment and a few other factors!

OK so a vibrating watch will trump a vibrating phone in most cases - for notifications. That sounds like a compelling thing but not enough for a device that needs charging and care.

Now, how important are those calls and texts? At least you are old school enough to worry about a phone and SMS. Most kiddies are ... ...

Each social and comms app that you use can notify you but what is actually important and which should be able to shake your wrist? I personally think my physical person is nearly sacrosanct. I'll allow a phone to shudder in a pocket and no more.

Not completely wrong, however they're very useful for tracking trends and that's a useful thing to do.

The Garmin watches that have a MIP (Memory In Pixel) display already cover most of that, provided you avoid using some of the more power hungry features that the Pebbles never had anyway. What is the Pebble Watch's value proposition in 2025?

The aesthetics are different enough that a comparison doesn't seem that interesting.

More seriously, yeah it could be more intuitive and consistent. But I sat down, read through the manual end to end, and now I'm fine with it.

I still think it's a great watch and I love the battery life. I just believe it's possible to make something so much better. I don't know if Pebble is the answer but I welcome them trying.

I agree with the above. The limitations are what made Pebble so special. I recommend everyone take a crack at writing an app for Pebble someday; it's a ton of fun to write with such a limited C API.

I can't wait for the comeback. Now that it's open source, I hope we see open competition on the hardware front as well (the way we have retro handhelds and e-readers).

Time to dust off the code for that Time-Round Pong app I started in 2015...

What's the long term vision.

It’s too addicting to just buy small, cute, computer hardware. Very wasteful, not mindful.

  https://www.circa.bio/

I always liked the idea of an "apparent solar time" watch face, and never did find a way to do that with Apple Watch.

Unfortunately the company wasn’t smart enough to develop this direction and followed the leaders like apple with their shitty smartphone-on-hand rather than real watch philosophy.

How does one do this, though? Is he planning on self-financing presumably out of some personal wealth? I've been working in this industry for almost 30 years and I still can't figure out how people are making things happen that aren't of the "Hey VC, I went to Stanford, I'm going to make Uber, give me money bags" variety

This may be relevant context for your question: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/technology/beeper-messagi...

Can’t wait to get my hands on a new Pebble!

Really awesome to hear by the time this little guy gives up the ghost there might already be a legitimate/official successor available to switch to.

If enough people are interested, we'll build it

I'd remove that line from the website. That's a line from a bad Kickstarter.

However...

If you want to make it TRULY HACKABLE as you claim, you will not encumber it with cloud dependencies like you did last time. Let ME self host my own Pebble server if I choose. Go ahead and default to your servers and sell services and whatever, but let me host my own and switch the base URL to my own domain, preferably with open source software and simple APIs, without requiring me to go through your servers.

That way, even if this attempt also doesn't pan out, those of us willing to do the work will at least still have the functionality we want. I get the whole VC "lock them into required cloud services for life so we can make endless subscription revenue" model, but it's absolutely corrupt.

And, Eric, I know you know that - you have a hacker's heart. Please listen to it.

Yes, it will lock out people for whom that price is unacceptable, but now more than ever your real customer is serious hackers, and we are collectively more than fed up with the cloud and subscriptions. Framework and Nabu Casa need to be your models here, because your customers are overwhelmingly their customers.

Wishlist for the next device:

More sensors: heart rate, spo2 and ecg...

Maybe a HW interface to attach other sensor modules could be an option, but could also easily become a distraction and pull down the overall experience.

[Edit] A wireless i/f (bluetooth, LP RF) is of course better to use as interface to any peripheral sensor modules.

My last watch would measure my heart rate to be in the 140s while sleeping. I have since slept with a chest strap heart rate monitor and do not in fact have a medical condition.

Granted, that was a cheap watch, but I still don't see the use case of a smart watch for health tracking versus phone+100$ chest strap.

I believe the usefulness of these kinds of devices is vastly overstated.

----

> But I'm not really sure that this fear is grounded - before we sold to Fitbit we 'unlocked' the Pebble mobile app [...].

If I'm reading OP's comment & your reply correctly, my impression is there's potentially a fear of either (a) "re-locking"; or, even just (b) "new thing not unlocked"--and, I think, you're saying that (a) isn't going to/can't happen?

On closer reading I think you might also be saying that (b) isn't going to happen because "new thing" is still going to use the previous unlocked app and/or maybe a new unlocked app? But, if that's the case, I only really saw that possible interpretation after a much closer re-read.

(Alternatively, maybe I just didn't weight sufficiently strongly the FAQ: "Will it be exactly like Pebble?" "Yes. In almost every way.")

More broadly (outside the positive example of your specific track record with regard to OGPebble & the app unlocking), given the landscape of the past 1.5+ decades littered with even just recent examples such as Spotify's Car Thing, Google's Stadia controller, Bambu Labs, and pretty much every phone ever[0][0a], I think it would be a stretch to consider the fear to be entirely ungrounded.

Particularly if some portion of the device firmware etc and/or server software is still going to be closed source.

In terms of strength of confidence in the potential of achieving a "desired open outcome/ongoing experience", I imagine the ordering from least to greatest trust required by product purchasers is something like: "completely open & unlocked from the beginning", "legally binding commitment/escrow for open & unlocked on 'exit'", "word/reputation for open & unlocked on 'exit'", through to "amorphous hope for largesse/noblesse-oblige/benevolence/other-fancy-latin-phrase for positive outcome at some unspecified future time".

And, um, trust in general might be slightly lacking these days, for some reason. :)

Anyway, IMO FWIW.

----

On a slightly different note, while reading comments in the various PebbleOS/RePebble threads I've been contemplating what has changed with regard to the consumer electronics hardware market compared to, say, fifteen plus years ago.

Certainly the "hope" of Android bringing the Power & Freedom of "Linux on Desktop" to "Linux on the Phonetop"[1] from the early 2000s seems to have been completely abandoned[2] but on the other hand Framework[3] exists and the Steam Deck[4] exists.

Perhaps the two most surprising things related to this "control over personal devices" topic from recent history:

(1) the discovery 1-2 years ago that it wasn't just irascible curmudgeons like me wanting to have control over the devices in their lives[5] but a much younger generation was also looking to "dumb phones" in a conscious effort to exert some control over the impact of such devices on their lives.

(1.1) aside: the attraction of similar demographic(s) to audio cassette tapes on the other hand, I totally don't "get" but by now I'm starting to suspect this state may now be primarily driven by the desire to not accidentally make cassettes uncool by "getting" it. :D

(2) noting over the past year or so the significant increase in the number (or even the mere presence) of YouTube comments from gamers remarking that they have just, or, want to, move from Windows to Linux. Gamers. GAMERS! The same demographic who previously would ruthlessly mock anyone who dare suggest such a move might be possible[6] let alone desirable...

This might all just be the biased perspective of a jaded idealistic optimist[7] but it's not nothing. Unless it is.

Approaching consumer electronics hardware with this trend as a guiding force may also not be the way to run a financially sustainable hardware business but on the other hand, what if?

----

BTW I noticed in one place on the page (https://repebble.com/) the text states:

* "(which purchased Fitbit, which had bought Pebble)"

and in another it states:

* "before the company's IP was sold to Fitbit in 2016".

I mention this because the difference is a nuance that has seemed to be significant in other times/places, so thought it might have unintentionally slipped through proof-reading--even if of no real consequence now. :)

----

Also: Hello! (Again. :) ) This was unexpected news, for sure.

Left another "short" note for you here (in case you've not encountered it organically): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856930

----

[0] Yes, yes, Fairphone exists.

[0a] Televisions!

[1] Irony? Satire? Sarcasm? *shrug*

[2] Speaking of small phones, this still remains of interest: https://smallandroidphone.com/

[3] I so want to know what category Framework's "Next Thing" is in--primarily because what's seemingly the "most obvious" category for them to move into also seems the most "unlikely" by any reasonable measure. So to find out would be to either be surprised by a category I hadn't considered or surprised by the audaciousness of their next goal.

[4] Hand-waving away for now any problematic aspects of its current context.

[5] See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42848761 & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845574 (non-pejorative :) )

[6] Yes, yes, every PlayStation fan-persoin runs BSD.

[7] I do like the phrase "user-respectful technology" as used here: https://rebble.io/2025/01/27/the-future-of-rebble.html

The 2022 updates gave an interesting insight into how your perspective had changed in regard to your initial thoughts and I'm interested to know if another three years has lead to further perspective changes.

I found Andrew Witte's remark of particular interest with regard to "...we allowed early success [...] to mask the fact that we never gained a good understanding of what our actual customers valued the most. We lucked into having made something people wanted (the original Pebble) and, IMO, never really were able to figure out exactly why it was successful. So it was hard to reproduce that success."

----

[0] https://ericmigi.com/blog/success-and-failure-at-pebble

-- agree with you rzazeuta!

I don't think we will be getting this in our "free market". It would need to be mandated by state for manufacturers to use open APIs. There is just no incentive for them to offer those otherwise.

- Servers: I agree with you. Make a default "cloud" owned by Pebble, but give us the ability to self-host it. NO SUBSCRIPTIONS, NO ADS, NO PRIVACY INVASION, PLEASE.

- PebbleOS: This is already a reality, and I'm very happy that it's happening.

- Mobile apps: Make them open-source! Let us play with them and you'll benefit of the fixes, improvements and innovation of the community.

- Hardware: It would be fine for me if the hardware was not open. As long as I can install my own firmware on it and have full control of it, I'm happy.

I think I speak for most of us when I say that I'm sick and tired of not owning my stuff. In the dystopic world we're living in, with enshittification at it's peak, an open, hackable, and truly owned device would feel like a breath of fresh air.

You have a real opportunity here, Eric. Please use it :) Best of luck!

I still have yet to find anything quite as good as the pebble. Fossil hybrid came close, but now fossil shut that down.

I am beyond excited to get a pebble back. Please let this happen.

...good memories working with the pebble team back in 2013 as a coop student <3

> The new watch we’re building basically has the same specs and features as Pebble, though with some fun new stuff as well.

why use the same specs? they are almost a decade old :-/

Please ship to my country, India, I will definitly get one. and please don't change some hefty shipping, most of the time, the shipping charges are more than the product itself :-(

I guess the legalities and logistics against the possible sale ares just not worth it.

It's not the actual shipping cost: at business rates a small 250g/0.5lb package from the US to India is about $20 with USPS first class (weeks) or $45 with UPS (days.) It's the other costs of selling abroad that are the issue: legal issues, different liabilities, complying with import taxes/other taxes, certifications, etc. The cost of complying with these things is very high and if you haven't sold things internationally you may be surprised exactly how bad things are.

One normal household product I'm making has to comply with a specific private standard in one country by law; just to _read_ the standard is ~$3000. So, if I want to sell in that country, just to read about some of the things I'd have to do costs me $3000. By the time you actually are legal to sell somewhere you can easily spend six figures per country. Add up lawyer hours, certifications, translations and cost of product modifications and you will need a lot of sales to make selling in a new country worth it.

While I don't mind the same feature set, I would sure hope you upgrade the hardware for something to last 5 years. Update the design while keeping the spirit of the original and focus on a user replaceable battery.

The physical controls were incredible… I actually controlled my music from that watch, because you could do it without looking. Who has ever controlled their music from an Apple Watch more than once a month? It’s so clunky and cumbersome, and you have to intently stare at what you’re doing — you might as you reach for your phone.

I can’t believe we’re a decade on, and the smartwatches that exist today are a joke compared to the PTR. The only practical improvement from my Apple Watch Ultra is the fitness tracking / health tracking sensor suite… which is great, but I miss having a good smartwatch, not just a fitness tracker.

The software UX of the Pebble was on point, and the animations surprisingly smooth for such a device. I'm still convinced that after all there years, the Timeline UI is unrivaled.

I'm eager to see what you'll come out with :)

I'd love to have a small watch with long battery life, reflective always-on hi-dpi grayscale screen, and classic industrial design using a metal case and small bezels. For now I'm (reluctantly) making do with a Withings ScanWatch Light.

Here's hoping we can get a color screen pebble time successor, maybe with one of the buttons upgraded to a dial + button.

I also maintain an omron device with such an e-paper display to emit error messages. It's night and day

I'll be first in line for a new generation watch!

Be great if you could get @Pebble onto BlueSky, for those of us who have left Twitter/X.

Relying on Twitter is a liability, not a feature :/

P.S. your homepage is terrible.

Never stopped thinking about Pebble whenever a similar product got announced so this is a really great piece of news to start the year. I never got into hacking my Pebbles when I first got them however now I'm fiddling around in C and more smol hardwares generally so I'm psyched to get it on.

I tried Garmin Forerunner 245. It was the closest but OS and button placement were less intuitive. And it was thicker. Pebble time has a much sleaker design that doesn't give sport vibes but an everyday watch style. PTR looked great too but battery life wasn't great

Even as it stands today, all the old Pebbles can still be used and are still great. On Android, it's easy using the Gadgetbridge app or even the original Pebble app. On iOS, you currently have to install the ipa-File yourself - meaning you have to have the iOS device in developer mode and re-sign the App regularly. Pebble apps can easily be installed via rebble.io. There is even still some developer activity - for example, there is a relatively recent Home Assistant app - so you can totally control your 2025 smart home with your 12 year old smart watch (even by voice).

I got my Time Steel used something like 5 years ago for around 35€ and use it most days. In a previous job, I could use different Apple and Android smartwatches as much as I wanted but I always kept the Pebble as my main and personal device.

- Good accuracy sleep tracking

- GPS ( I know this uses up a lot of battery but could be off by default)

- Self-hostable servers. (I'm a very privacy conscious person, and also I don't want to be bound to an ecosystem that might disappear one day)

I'm gonna keep an eye on this project. It really looks very interesting. I hope it gets far.

https://pine64.org/devices/pinetime/

Pluses of my Pebble Time:

- A lovely always on e-ink screen (the Pine Time has a TFT that relies on wrist detect to be visible, like an apple or pixel watch)

- Much better battery life

- A perfectly crafted UX full of lovely little touches, it's hard to explain if you haven't used one. It's full of animations but somehow they aren't annoying. Bit like using BB10. You can tell the dev-years & care that went into knocking off all the rough edges. It's the opposite feeling of "f you you're the product" I get from using most modern "tech" (Windows/Pixel watch/etc etc).

- Brilliant timeline view

- Rock solid connectivity (again, better than android/pixel watches)

- Much nicer HW feel in terms of build & fit/finish

- Huge user base who created a massive range of apps & watch faces

And orienting towards fitness means compromises for size, weight, comfort and battery life. The original Pebble was slim, light, didn't have a sensor bump, wrapped nicely around the wrist.

The UX especially is something l look back fondly on, especially the timeline interface was such a natural way to use a timepiece for me.

That said, there are a lot of other open-source watches in the pipeline that could use a bit of motivation to update their designs .. The TT-Watch situation is pretty fruitful .. I have a Watchy in my drawer somewhere that I should probably get working again .. all of these options, and maybe Pebble can learn something from them ..

There aren't many smart watches out there. I've loved what Garmin has done. I had always hoped something which would open up an ecosystem to build on. This looks promising on that front.

Now, I can and still want it.

I don't remember, can it vibrate (for timer/alarm) ?

Is there a smart watch that would connect to two phones at the same time? I’d immediately buy one which showed notifications from my personal and work phones.

Basically what Whoop is doing with their strap - but minus the subscription model. I know a ton of people who tried the whoop but felt it was extremely pricey and didn't have the accuracy of an apple watch.

I would be happy to pay ~$400-500 up front for hardware that integrates with Apple Health and provides solid, reliable health tracking without a need for a subscription.

And by health/fitness - features expected would be sleep tracking, activity (gps), heart rate, Sp02, skin temperature sensors, fall detection. Then secondarily - additional things like ECG/EKG, apnea, AFib detection

The in-accuracy of some of the devices in the market is why I still choose to remain with my Apple Watch.

This youtube channel may help understand a consumer's perspective on health accuracy - https://www.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist

Is it about inducing more exercise? Or is it the timer aspect that it records how long your workout is? (in which case I don’t understand why it’s so much better than a stopwatch?)

For me, and those around me, the fitness feature seems vestigial and has very little impact on actual fitness levels of the individual.

An example here is how I made sure my parents are getting their exercise in by making completing their Move rings and 10K steps every day. This pushes them to take a walk in the evening instead of doom scrolling / watching TV.

Another example - Check trends like resting heart rate to see if my body has fully recovered from covid19, SP02 at night indicating potential sleep apnea etc.

My regular doctor I do need to make an appointment to see. Typically I can get an appointment in about a week anytime I call, though normally I just make the next appointment as I leave the last one and so they are months out.

Urgent care is great, but they usually don’t have MDs. There are nurses that can give you stitches or a course of antibiotics but a cancer diagnosis is way out of their expertise

The important point here is her fitness tool alerted her to something and that startee the chain that eventually found the real problem.

If I am really in trouble, I can go to his clinic as a drop-in (along with dozens of others) and wait, hoping somebody doesn't show for their appointment.

The state of healthcare in Canada is...bad. really bad. Canada's healthcare system is effectively using long wait times as a form of passive rationing, where delays lead to natural attrition of patients. This is a poor solution to address the per-capita physician shortages by decreasing demand rather than increasing access to care.

When training for something I will often at least consider its recommendations and those are based partly on the health readings as well as the training load it has tracked from treks/runs. Though TBH other than that the health tracking is unimportant compared to it being a GPS device that can track for a day or more constantly without needing to talk to a phone (which sits in my pack/pocket in low-power mode to conserve battery unless/until I need it for something). A don't even tend to pay attention to the heart-rate stats (though I do know people who use those features to directly guide their training).

I know a few people whose use pattern is very similar to mine, near identical in fact, so I think it is fairly common amongst people who walk and/or run more than the average person.

----

[1] Less than I'd like ATM, the rest of life like ill family and my own burn-out² are getting in the way, but I'm getting myself back into it

[2] The key reason I'm trying to get back at it: herfing myself around the green stuff³, is something I find beneficial to my mental state as well as physical.

[3] or even the “mostly brown stuff” as it can be this time of year.

And what is the point of the tracking? Do you take time out of your day to review your past runs for some reason? My completely uninformed self is imagining a person sitting at their desk thinking, "Oh yeah, that was a good run. Look at that part where I turned the corner onto Market Street! Hah, I remember that, good times." And realize this sounds so ridiculous I must certainly be misunderstanding the point of the tracking.

I think some aspect of it must be aspirational. Man sees the advanced fitness features and thinks, "this is the thing that will get me looking like Vin Diesel!" and it feels productive to hit that Record Workout button and so the watch makes you feel more athletic in the same way that chatting on Slack can feel like you're being productive when you're not actually changing your behavior on a fundamental level.

Previous devices I've had only did breadcrumb mapping, though you can match the trace you are making or the pre-programmed trace you are following with a paper map to make such decisions. I upgraded a while back to one that has actual map data so what you suggest is actually possible, though I use it to augment my paper map with accurate positioning rather than to replace it for navigation decision-making.

> … what you mean when you say you use the watch to plan your route?

“Plan” is probably overstating it. Most of the time I'm following a route and using it to make sure I don't go too far off course, or if I deliberately take a detour (“ooh, I bet the view from over there is pretty”…) to help me get back on course afterwards.

The watch does have enough map data and enough brains to plot a simple route to a waypoint, it can certainly reverse a trace to make a track “home”, but I don't use any of that. If I'm somewhere where I have a few relevant routes already in the watch I can switch mid-outing if I decide to do something longer/shorter, and if I go off my beaten track I can use it (possibly along with my paper map to make decisions about doing direct or around bits of landscape) to roughly guide me to a known place.

I do sometimes use the traces to plan future routes though, especially when I've been out exploring new routes or a completely fresh area. For example if I spun 180⁰ somewhere there is a good chance there was an obstacle at that point I might want to avoid in future, which may not be obvious on the paper map, but I remember when I see the past trace. Route traces can be nice to share too: I can hand send friend a route that I particularly enjoyed, and they can do the same back.

These days most trail runs hand out a GPX trace for you to more-or-less follow (allowing for number-of-points resolution issues on any given watch & such), but back when I started events would often just give a description. I would go out to do a recce of parts of the route following the description and paper map, maybe getting lost a few times due to missing a turn, and back home I could edit the trace to cut out those deviations so on event day I had a reasonably accurate path to follow (the watch vibrates if I go beyond a certain distance off-course, which I might do intentionally to avoid a temporary blockage like an angry looking bull in a field but don't want to do accidentally by, say, missing a somewhat hidden turning).

Some people use the location & speed tracking data in conjunction with heart rate, temperature, and such, to tweak their training plan, but I don't go into that detail.

> imagining a person […] thinking, "Oh yeah, that was a good run. Look at that part where I turned the corner onto Market Street! Hah, I remember that, good times."

I do have a plan at some point to make a big map of the moors & dales for my wall, with my favourite routes (from events or personal outings) marked on, the tracking data will be useful for that if it can be made to integrate nicely with whatever I end up using to draw the main map. Like the world maps people have on which they mark which countries/cities they've visited. I've had a fair number of good times out in the green. Less so for city outings or other road/pavement routes.

I did use the watch once to see what each HR zone feels like and I thought that was a useful calibration, but as a normal dude where fitness is just one small aspect of my life I wouldn't buy an Apple Watch specifically for that feature.

I'm not saying it can't be helpful with fitness, but responding to OP saying that fitness/health is the primary feature for themselves and many of their family/friends. For me, the primary features are:

1. Telling time

2. Putting my notifications on my wrist

3. Starting timers with Siri

4. Setting up reminders with Siri

Surely there are folks where the fitness features provide the critical marginal feedback that gets them up and moving, to the point where owning vs not owning the watch is a big deal!

But reading the comments here, it sounds like it's very useful for people who are quite scientific about their fitness (HR zones, tracking, etc), and tangentially useful (rings remind folks to get off the couch/stand) for other folks at risk of a sedentary lifestyle. It doesn't all add up to me as "fitness is the main reason many people use the watch!"

I generally "track" the effectiveness of my exercise based on the end results: my weight, how I feel, how my body looks, etc., and I can generally tell by how I feel while exercising if I'm doing enough or if I need to exercise more or use heavier weights.

It's funny, because I am a bit of a data hoarder, and love the idea of tracking stuff. But I've started to realize that I never really use that data for anything. And it's not like people didn't have effective exercise regimens before the advent of all this tracking technology.

I walked the exact same path.

For runnings and aerobic exercise in general I tracked for a few years my times, calories, heartrate. But indeed never did anything with that data, nor really used it as a benchmark.

After a while I was also pretty easily able to find and sit in a particular heart rate zone, without periodic feedback from my watch.

Of course you'd want that precise info as a professional runner. But for me it was mostly useless. My apple watch broke during a swim one day and I never cared to replace it. Haven't missed it once to be honest.

I still track my big compound lifts in the gym on my phone using a simple app, to track progress. I don't particularly do much with that data. If it's improving I'm happy, if it's not I'm a bit disappointed. But in any case I tend to go pretty hard in the gym, lifting a number of sets with a few reps in reserve, and try to increase the weights slowly. In that regard tracking a set helps to set the baseline for the next workout, that's helpful. But I still adjust based on how I feel that day, aiming to simply complete a few sets with a few reps in reserve (i.e. making it as challenging as it can be without sacrificing safety or unnecessarily long recovery). It's a constant reminder of how far I've come also, which is nice.

- Measuring resting heart rate, SpO2, etc. passively and tracking these over time and the impact of my fitness regime on them

- Sleep tracking

- Tracking pace and heart rate on a run, ride, etc. and (a) using it to manage my pace during the activity; and (d) use it to measure how my performance changes over time

- Navigation and tracking when hiking/skiing

I don't have so much interest in the tracking during, say, a gym workout.

I agree with the GP about wanting a subscription-less Whoop as I like to wear "real" watches so a band on the other wrist is perfect ("double fisting" watches VC-style is not an option I'm willing to entertain). I did like my Pebble enough to include it in the rotation of "real" watches though, too.

On the note about how annoying it is to start and stop activities, I strongly agree, tho quick start and auto track have eased the pain a lot for me. I cycle everywhere and really like to keep track of the total distance I do in a month and my watch just automatically tracks that for me.

That price point would make it unaffordable for the majority of the world’s population. Shouldn’t we try and make health monitoring and fitness tracking more accessible? That was one of Pebble’s biggest benefits.

High quality, healthy food is much more expensive per calorie than hyperprocessed, high calorie/low micronutrient, carcinogenic food. Gym memberships are pretty expensive, even without any of the personal coach and flex location fluff. And for someone with a lower paying job, time is more scarce as well, in addition to the job itself likely being more harmful to health. And of course, health care is expensive, and even if you live somewhere with socialised medicine, access to specialists is a lot easier and more expedient if you can afford to pay extra.

It's not like poor people don't care about their health, they just have fewer options and less time to spend on it. I support anything that can bring more options to more people.

Largely true, but frozen vegetables are inexpensive. And they are healthier than fresh vegetables. Veggies are the key to good health for the poor.

Citation needed

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/4060/

"Overall, the vitamin content of the frozen commodities was comparable to and occasionally higher than that of their fresh counterparts. β-Carotene, however, was found to decrease drastically in some commodities."

It was occasionally lower, too.

But just because advanced devices with (currently) costly components have higher costs is no reason to not create them.

If something works and meets a need, the costs of components and manufacture usually come down as engineering and manufacturing progresses on the learning curve and competition comes into play. (Not true when there is a captured market where extractive pricing becomes the norm, but those are the exception in consumer goods)

A solution could be to measure it but not really track / visualize it day to day.

At the same time the fitness features add cost, bulk, the uncomfortable sensor bump and cost battery life. The original Pebble didn't have any of that and in my opinion was better for it. I also see little point in competing with the already existing numerous options for fitness tracking, even if you only look at the ones without a subscription.

For a more practical take on heart rate accuracy see the DC Rainmaker reviews instead.

Too many products nowadays are bound to some sort of online checks and that is even worse than "battery not replaceable". The second is much easier to circumvent than the first (dependence on cloud infra). And ofc the data security. I will never be comfortable with giving corpos my medical data.

I gave up with tracking because the short life of a smart watch meant many of the more critical times (sleep/sleep tracking) would be interrupted by charging or dead batteries. I just want a band/strap that is focused on sensors and battery life WITHOUT a subscription.

Until that happens I'm staying out of the ecosystem entirely.

I'd still prefer a band over a smart watch. When I initially looked at them they were very bulky and only had a few days battery life, but its been a while.

It also needs to be a good watch. Don't forget to not fail at that.

I have my phone on me. My watch doesn’t need to tell me the time.

I turned mine off to save battery life.

The Forerunner 255 can be found on Amazon right now for $250.

Mind you, I also used to own an Apple Watch. Garmin is the best, and second place isn't close.

And for those who recommend a Garmin, an Oura ring or similar:

I have a Garmin and it's great but I cannot wear it during martial arts (grappling).

I also can't wear a ring doing weight lifting or when I'm grappling.

I had a Whoop and it was really good for tracking martial arts (the boxers with the holder was super comfortable) but alas it was expensive and the sleep tracking with it in the boxers was really poor.

I'm almost the opposite for your, Notifications, then watch functionality, and card payments are primary for me. For me, fitness, and health tracking are barely secondary.

Which, IMO, is what I've always loved about Pebble, it was a smartwatch first.

I, like most of us I believe (and we are dozens :), am using it with GadgetBridge.

I wrote my own watchface for it, in C. Also wrote some automation that periodically exports and backs up my data off GadgetBridge.

I would like to keep using GB, but my aging P2 might die any time now (already had to replace the side buttons, the plastic disintegrated after a few years) and I have been looking for a replacement watch that allows exporting my sleep data into GB.

NONE of the hardware currently supported by the app appears to make sleep data available in the way Pebble did?!

Please make new Pebbles, and keep them compatible with GadgetBridge.

I think this is the peak of interest in the new Pebble, especially with the announcement just being made. Maybe they don't need crowdfunding, which is great, but they still need buyers.

Besides that, I'm down for whatever.

I had a Pebble. It never came close to being a watch I wore normally; I just used it when cycling, as a "notifications screen" -- that way, if I felt my phone vibrate in my jersey pocket, I could steal a glance at my wrist to see if it was important enough to stop (which basically meant "is it my wife?").

When it died, and Pebble was gone, I replaced it with an Apple Watch, and it's that class of hardware that proved so handy that it mostly has supplanted my collection of fancy mechanical watches.

Pebble was something special though, so I'll be looking forward to what comes of this.

1: https://developer.rebble.io/developer.pebble.com/guides/tool...

I'd be completely ok if they keep the new pebble as simple as possible. Using the same e-Ink display and functionality. One of the most memorable things about the original watch was the battery life. Didn't have to charge for days.

How does this work out on the IP and legal side? A portion of the OS is now open source, but that doesn't make google surrender the trademark does it?

1: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/27/24352968/pebble-smartwatc...

I’ve never earned a pebble only an Xiaomi band many years ago so I maybe missing something.

(It's impressive quality company swag.)

@erohead, when you're at the stage of needing a kick-ass RePebble SDK developed & supported again[1], you know where to find me. :)

lol @ the FAQ: "Aren’t you the guy who screwed this up last time?"

Also, while looking through the repo, I'd totally forgotten the alphabetically ordered fast-food themed release code names which included the "Kiwiburger" (a global chain's local product that contains neither the bird nor the fruit) that I now wonder how many people it confused. :)

The "Kiwiburger" code name release also happened to coincide with the inclusion of "Simplicity" (a watch face I designed & implemented) as one of the standard faces shipped with each Pebble watch by default.

I was particularly proud of the inclusion of "Simplicity"--especially when Engadget subsequently said it was "...sure to make minimalists happy" which was what I was aiming for. (I seem to recall it also gave me the opportunity to say "Hey, I designed that watch face!" when I saw a Pebble watch on display at an airport duty free store once. :D )

Anyway, I should probably get this memoir off to the publishers[3]. :)

----

[0] Oh, sorry, apparently it's cranberry. :)

[1] I helped develop & support the very well-received initial SDK that enabled "Hacker Backers" and others to create their first Pebble watch faces & watch apps.

It was quite an experience to be working on the SDK remotely from New Zealand[1a] and then have the initial public SDK release immediately covered by the likes of TechCrunch[1b], The Verge[1c] and Engadget. (An SDK! :D )

There was a lot of pent-up interest/demand for the SDK so it was really great to see how excited people were when they successfully implemented their first watch face or (later) watch app. In many/most cases this was the person's first experience of anything approaching "embedded" programming--there was a lot of effort put into removing as many barriers from the development experience as possible, so it was really rewarding to see people succeed.

(Initially the process still required a locally installed embedded development environment, so even with all the effort invested to reduce barriers it still wasn't a simple process but turns out people were really motivated. :) It also turned out that I was really motivated to script/automate & simplify the process simply to avoid having to write documentation covering a more manual process. :D )

It was also super cool to see people then develop other (particularly web-based) tools to enable people with even less technical experience/skill to still create e.g. a custom watch face with their favourite sports team logo or the family dog featured on it.

I mention all this in part to reminisce and in part to convey some of what the mood around Pebble was at the time for those who may not have been around *cough* nearly fifteen years ago and were wondering what (part of) the "big deal" was...

An early version of the SDK documentation is archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130415083512/http://developer....

[1a] via this HN Jobs post IIRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4132957

[1b] https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/12/pebble-watchface-sdk-now-a...

[1c] https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/15/4228700/pebble-tetris-clo...

[2] https://github.com/google/pebble/blob/3b927684809fba173ee540...

[3] Okay, one last note: interesting to observe it was suddenly a lot more difficult to find Pebble/SDK related links from ~2012/2013 due to the amount of coverage the PebbleOS/RePebble announcements seem to have received. Read into that what you wish. :)

i've been using my pinetime as my only watch for several years now, and it does everything i need it to do. however, i will happily pick up a new pebble again if this happens. the battery life on each of mine was awesome, the buttons were handy for things like quick music playback without having to look at my watch, and it had a great little 'app store' with tons of cool watchfaces and stuff from the community. looking forward to this hopeful 'pebble resurgence'. :)

I lost interest, but that's still the smart watch I most liked.

My apple watch just sits on a shelf. My fitbit I only wear when sleeping. My pebble unfortunately broke, but it also sits on a shelf as I haven't been able to admit to myself that I'd never get around to repairing it.

Looking forward to what new hardware is on the way -- have had the same experience where I kept looking at alternatives but nothing met the Pebble bar.

https://youtu.be/j_GJfSTz6Dg

https://youtu.be/UC-ru1P3GVo

It would be great to have a good map system on the watch. Not a GPS but a good communication with LocusMap, OSMAND, Google Map.

Also, for me it signifies the golden age of hardware startups. There was a time when all the cool kids started hardware companies, especially wearables were really hot for a short time. Weird to think that was almost 15 years ago now.

Emacs-w3m just cannot acces it )':

However, I still get the point of having a hackable device.

Pebble started ok, it was the first attempt. The first UI basically scrolled through watch faces which I wasn't a fan of, but it was the first real Smart watch so experiments were required.

Then they put out the new UI that is used today, it's fast, cool playful animations, easy to navigate, had calendar, steps, sleep tracking and heart rate right at your finger tips (still better than today's watches). The navigation buttons blow away any other watch, long press customization is amazing, app store, etc.

Garmin, once you pull it out of the box, you got what you got. Pebble, everything the newest watch got, the old one did too (as long as the required sensor existed) and GAINED performance through the years. Not to mention the 10's of thousands of apps that gave you so much functionality.

I still think the Rebble store gives Google and Apple a run for their money... After 9 years of Pebble being "dead"