OPINION: When I saw that Pebble, the long-gone, once pioneer of the smartwatch industry was making a return, I almost choked on my morning coffee. While there’s no denying that my immediate excitement was largely down to pure nostalgia for the first smartwatch I ever owned, part of it stemmed from a realisation as to how this surprising bit of news could end up changing the smartwatch industry for the better.
Just as a quick bit of context for those who might be hearing about Pebble for the first time, know that the company launched one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all-time, funding the very first Pebble watch which, when it came to market in 2013, was still a novelty. The very first Apple Watch wouldn’t be seen in public for another three years at that point.
The company would eventually be bought out by Fitbit in 2016, which itself was then swallowed up by Google in 2021. In the time since, the Pebble dream has been kept alive by a community of developers over at Rebble, but with Google making Pebble’s source code publicly available, and the announcement of new Pebble-like devices from the company’s founder being on the horizon, we could be standing on the precipice of something truly great.
Pebble knew how to be fun
To understand why this is such a big deal, you just have to look back and recognise what it was that made Pebble watches so great back in the day. Namely, they were fun.
In both its hardware and software, Pebble just seemed to know how to make an energetic product that offered plenty without taking itself too seriously, and in no device was this better encapsulated than in my favourite watch from the company: the Pebble Time.
This small, boxy device almost looked like a miniature TV on your wrist, but its colour e-ink display allowed for cartoony watch faces and an OS that felt incredibly animated as you shifted from one screen to the next.
The Pebble Time’s sister watch, the Pebble Time Round, featured the same style of screen and OS, but it brought a bit more style to the table with a circular chassis and fashionable watch bands that made it work as an eye-catching accessory.
Neither of these two watches attempted to be all-in-one devices. They were simply great for notifications, reminders, music control and of course, checking the time. It was all about giving you key bits of information in a pinch, and not about serving as a replacement for your phone.
It might sound quaint but it worked brilliantly, and I have to wonder if smartwatches, in spite of how far they’ve come, are now all-consuming in the worst possible way.
The current state of smartwatches
Nowadays, I rely on my smartwatch for tracking workouts, playing music offline during a run, payments, directions, GPS tracking, alarms and more. It’s getting to the point where I’m just as reliant on my Apple Watch SE 2 as I am on the iPhone 15 it’s paired to. I’ll fully admit that the novelty of having a smartwatch is probably lost of me now, having had one (in some form or another) by my side for well over a decade, but the latest operating systems don’t have the same splash of colour that made Pebble so engaging.
Whether you’re using an Apple Watch, Galaxy Watch or a Pixel Watch, these devices have app icons, widgets and more sit almost exclusively in front of a black background. I get that this is probably a means of saving battery life – an important gesture given that these devices don’t last for long on a single charge anyway – but there’s nothing about it that elicits excitement.
If Pebble Founder Eric Migicovsky is able to bring back Pebble’s sense of simplicity and fun to the modern smartwatch market, then I think this could be a great opportunity for the industry to reclaim part of what it’s lost: a sense of identity beyond being a wearable smartphone.
