Related ongoing threads:

We're bringing Pebble back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845091 - Jan 2025 (1 comment)

The future of Rebble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017 - Jan 2025 (3 comments)

Is the Small Android Phone project dead? :)

Would be a great hardware duo. Neo-pebble and Mini-nexus.

Hmm, maybe we can come at this from the other angle. We can't have small phones because bigger is always better, right? So how about a HUGE 5" screen smartwatch that just happens to be a perfectly functional standalone phone if you discard the wristband?? Instant best seller!

A better use of flexible screens than folding devices. Fitting under the cuffs of men's shirts is a constraint. I dictate most text entered on my phone, so a squishy typing surface wouldn't be so bad. Camera position could be tricky.

Problem is different people want different things. I for one want at least all day battery while using only about 60% of the capacity so realistically two full days battery from a single charge. I then want to be able to set a max charge limit of 80% beyond which the phone won't charge and have the phone die at 20%. Ideally, I also want the phone to be able to work off the wall meaning if the phone is plugged in to the wall, it should use power from the wall and not constantly charge and discharge the battery.

Serious question, when was the last time you degraded the battery of a phone enough to warrant replacement?

I got a Xperia XZ2 compact in 2018, and used it daily util a month ago. It made it through a day of regular use until the very end, when I had to retire it because of issues with software updates.

Modern-ish Li-Ion batteries can take thousands of full cycles.

I have some seriously bad luck with spicy pillows. I had a nexus 4 and 5 that had their battery swollen. Also an iPhone 6 and a Poco X3 pro. Also, a ZTE z959 and moto E4. I don't want a spicy pillow. I'd rather the phone turn itself off before the battery swells up but ideally it should automatically disconnect the battery and keep running off of the wall unless it is too hot, in which case, it should shut itself off.

Something like this? https://thetinypod.com/

More like this: https://www.amazon.com/Fallout-Pip-Boy-Replica-Memory-Stand-...

No, but...not moving fast

This is pretty cool. Have you ever thought about designing pebble to look more like a traditional watch but e-ink based?

forgot the name of the watch but it had an lcd display to save battery and a full touchscreen around 2017? i ended up using the lcd display mostly for HB and walk distance. it would be great if we had a completely e-ink based pebble watch with backlighting (lcd display was great but couldn't be viewed in the dark :/)

That’s basically what the Pebble Time Round was, and it was phenomenal!

I backed a Pebble Time Round Gold on the last Kickstarter, which was cancelled when Pebble was acquired. Somehow the devices ended up on Amazon, and I snagged one there. It's a phenomenally stylish device.

My white 20mm one with a brown leather band started more conversations than anything else I’ve ever owned and used, which was surprising but neat :)

Unfortunately mine got stolen and broken, which is a shame. I wonder how hard they are to buy today, and how difficult battery replacements for them are…

Battery replacement is difficult, not impossible, but bordering on impossible is restoring the waterproof seal. Once you've replaced the battery you basically have to keep it away from water. I wasn't careful with mine and lost two to water damage after replacing the battery, despite re-sealing with permanent adhesive.

Ah that is excellent to know, I appreciate it!

Good to know! IIRC the Round didn't have as high a water resistance rating to begin with, and I typically wear a leather band, so this might not be a deal-breaker for me.

The PTRs weren't diving watches for sure, but the original waterproofing was easily good enough to withstand submersion, as long as the battery hadn't started swelling yet.

Pebble Time used an LCD display just like every other Pebble

Quite, but a transflective one (from Sharp, I believe) which gave it a lot of the benefits of daylight readability while being much much easier to program for and work with.

At the cost of looking very dull and washed out.

With the benefit of a much improved battery life compared to a lot of other smart-watches. A worthy trade off, IMHO. And it its a lot less washed out than current colour (real) e-ink displays

Why do you need an exciting and vibrant display for your watch? Are you looking at movies?

I don’t _need_ a watch at all. I want one, and ideally I want it to look nice.

Pebble watches used a Sharp transflective LCD MiP Memory in Pixel display, meaning that the back surface of the LCD was slightly reflective for daylight reading, with front lighting for night.

Memory in pixel means that each pixel remembers its current state, saving on a lot of power budget because the bus/LCD controller is completely shut down, it essentially only uses power to update the display. Versus a traditional LCD or oled where you need to send it data at x refresh rate continously, meaning the high power draw bus and controller are constantly slurping power.

Even though eink has gotten better I still wouldn't use it for something like this, the refresh rate is still a tad too slow, the controllers are always proprietary weirdness with crazy voltage waveform magic to clear the display properly, resulting in that ugly multiple flashing that most eink/epaper displays do.

Happy to hear about this. My mood tracker [0] for Pebble was the only one that has ever worked for me. Would love to have a comeback.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37221576

Which Pebble are you bringing back? I ask because Pebble 2 was the sweet spot for me with a heart rate monitor but the heart rate monitor is not in this repo.

The HRM aspect is mostly a small binary blob that ought to be fairly straightforward to re-integrate. The far larger issue is the lack of a Bluetooth stack.

This is really unfortunate for the existing users, especially given their profound loyalty. However, more modern chips have all of this loaded in a bootloader of sorts (e.g. nRF softdevices), so the project could prevent the RF driver nonsense going forward.

They don't have permission to open-source that code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845102

I know. That is why I'm asking which Pebble. Nothing is stopping them from writing a heart rate driver but I don't know what the plan is.

I did wear my Pebble until it died, and then never found another smart watch worth it for me. Will keep an eye on this for sure.

May I ask why it was so special for you? As I did not participate in all the hype and now I'm a happy owner of a Garmin watch and it does seem like it is closer in specs to Pebble than most other smartwatches. Other than the openness.

I wear a Garmin and I still miss my Pebble Time that died to swelling battery.

- Always on. Garmin has option to do that as well but it reduce the battery life to like 3 days. In outdoor my Pebble Time is very bright with zero backlight.

- 5 days battery. I went on a trip to Japan without its proprietary charger, by the time I board my flight back it was on power save mode and it died the moment the plane landed. Garmin could do this if you set it to power saving mode, but the Pebble is in standard mode. One could argue that the Garmin do have more stuff like health monitoring that Pebble didn't.

- Cheap and no frills. I want a second screen for my phone, not a health tracker. Originally my Pebble Time shipped with zero fitness features, and it later added a step counter once it's clear that the market direction go that way.

- Garmin is quite thick, Pebble Time is thinner

- The UI is simple - press up for past event, down for future event (calendar). Press the middle button for menu. Hold are configurable. Garmin has 4 main menus which are very confusing (fitness menu, shortcut menu, apps menu, system menu).

- Lots of free apps and watch faces which I actually used (like a music app that show album art). I don't see any apps I would want to use on the Garmin, and they're mostly paid. The "hide in a hole while ceiling crush the map" game on Pebble was really well done. Now my Garmin use the simple time in Verdana watch face because I cba to find a decent one.

- Even with low framerates, Pebble managed to deliver cute little animations. Replying to message show a flying paper plane, screen transitions have suitable animations (not generic ones like Android), and the best one is muting an apps show a Ostrich putting its head under the ground. The animation also hides how slow the hardware actually is, with later OS versions stalling over a second or two after a second long animation.

- I think the phone app UI is not as good as say, Apple Watch, but it focus on apps and the store without the fitness features. Garmin's app is entirely about fitness and they hide smartwatch stuff in a menu plus another separate Connect IQ app.

Overall the PebbleOS feel like a really solid and polished product than any smartwatch today. It do fewer things than most smartwatches, but that's all I care about and everything it does is very polished.

It was cheap, simple, did everything I wanted from a smart watch, and wasn't annoying to use (never had to worry about the battery). It wasn't a matter of a killer feature, more just the lack of the problems I see with all the alternatives since. Every time I've looked at a replacement option, I've noticed something that just made me not bother getting it.

the site asks if you want a new pebble and if you click "no" you're redirected to apple watch website LMAO

Redirects to Pixel watch for Android user agents.

with a referral link or no?

Neat, I'm super excited! I've hoped the PineTime would be the new Pebble, but hasn't really materialized (though, it has gotten pretty good! despite being a little awkward).

I actually held off from buying a Pebble back in the day because the software wasn't open source and I was worried about getting dependent on a product I had no control over. (Yes, I see the vicious Tragedy of the Commons wrapped up there, but still gotta make the optimal choice for me). I'm beyond stoked to see this movement! And it being open source, I have no such qualms. If they are affordable enough, I'll probably be gifting these out on the regular so expect to sell at least a dozen or two :-D

There is apparently huge amounts of goodwill for Pebble!

But. Isn’t most of the value of a codebase like this not the code itself, but all the knowledge of the people who worked on it day to day? Where are they?

It’s really intriguing. People who have a lot of goodwill towards Pebble BELIEVE the source code is valuable. That doesn’t mean that it is.

Oh this is awesome news. The Pebble was by far the best smartwatch I've ever used. No quirks, just always reliable. The hard work shone through with how quirk free it was.

I never used a smart watch before. Can you share some examples quirks with other watches?

I had the OG pebble, which I only stopped using due to suffering the screen corruption bug that plagued a small percentage of the original models. Other than that it was smooth as silk. It'd last close on a month on a single charge. I literally charged it up before going on a 2 1/2 week vacation, didn't take my charger with me, and had no problems.

Then had an Asus ZenWatch 3. WatchOS was frustrating at the time over the ability to customise what notifications would actually get to the watch, and the battery life of the device was terrible, getting worse over the space of a couple of years. Even had some reliability issues with the messages actually reaching the watch at all.

Wanting to go back to e-ink displays and longer battery life, I've got a Amazfit Blip, who's software was just awful. Even "simple" things like sleep tracking wouldn't work properly, dying out or flat out not being accessible from "Sleep for Android", heart rate monitoring wouldn't sync reliably to anything, notifications would just randomly stop working. It also had no ability to disable certain apps from sending notifications to the watch, even if the notifications are set to silent on the phone.

There was an open source app that I used to have to use alongside their own app that was necessary to actually fix everything wrong with the original software and make the device work with anything approaching reliability.

The recent overhaul of their own app (seems like a ground up rewrite to me) has actually fixed most of the issues that I've had with it. It still occasionally just craps out and requires me to turn the whole bluetooth stack off and on again.

Thanks! I don’t think I’ll ever go back from my Apple Watch, but pebble does still hold a soft spot in my heart.

I love what you're doing but the design of the pebble turns me off. Thoughts on making a sleek design that actually looks like a pebble?

Oh this is awesome. Are you involved with repebble directly?

I still have my time round in a drawer somewhere. I moved to a galaxy watch, which is great for being able to play Spotify offline, GPS etc, but like all modern smart watches is terrible for bloat and a screen that's responsible for like 70% of the power draw.

It's really disheartening that the average consumer only sees the shiny oled and slick animations and doesn't think at all about the inconvenience of charging at least once a day...