Eight years later, new but familiar-looking PebbleOS watches appear

Certain watches can stay just as they are and people will keep buying them. The Casio F-91W, one of the continuously best-selling watches in the world, keeps the time on a readable display and offers a single daily alarm slot (unless you board-swap it). The Timex Weekender may last as long as non-digital watches exist. What about the Pebble? Is there still room on people's wrists for the most exciting Kickstarter-backed tech of 2012–2016? Eric Migicovsky, founder of the firm that was perhaps a bit too early to the smartwatch market, has made good on his pledge to find out and has made new Pebble watches available for preorder. The Core 2 Duo, "almost exactly a Pebble 2" with modernized chips, 30 days battery life, and a black-and-white e-paper screen, is $150 at preorder and is scheduled to ship in July. The Core Time 2, Migicovsky's "dream watch," is bigger, color, and metal and goes for $225 right now. Its release is slated for December. Both watches are sold through the rePebble store in quantities limited by display availability. Migicovsky writes that there are more people signed up for news about the Pebble relaunch than watches available. Both watches run PebbleOS, which Migicovsky and others pushed Google to make open source late last year. Therefore "most of the existing 10,000+ PebbleOS watchfaces and apps will immediately work on these new watches," Migicovsky writes on his blog, with the long-running Rebble store making them easier to get to. Both watches get something like 30-day battery life, largely due to the advances in low-power Bluetooth tech over the last eight years. New to the watches are a speaker (though not one that might necessarily make wrist calls easy) and a linear resonance actuator for stronger vibrations. The Core Time 2 has a touchscreen, the first on a Pebble watch, so its apps can scroll and watchfaces can have interactive complications, but hackers may come up with other uses. Both watches charge with the same magnetic pins as the original models. Migicovsky is wise to note that industrial testing on the Core 2 Duo shows a 30 percent improvement in longevity compared to the original Pebble 2. Mushy, decimated buttons have been the bane of those keeping their Pebbles alive over the long term. The Pebble Time 2 eschews silicone for metal buttons.

Not going to be “awesome with iPhones”

The blog post ends with a "You shouldn't get one if…" section to set expectations. It's a "labour of love" project, so delays and incomplete features can happen. The Pebble is not a GPS sports tracking watch. It is also, notably, not any kind of Apple Watch. In a separate blog post on his site, Migicovsky details all the ways in which the Pebble cannot "support all the functionality the Apple Watch has access to." A 2025 Pebble cannot:

• Send SMS or iMessage text
• Reply or otherwise act on notifications
• Keep a connection alive if the user closes (swipes up on) the Pebble app
• Separate or mute watch notifications while a phone is in use
• Run a JavaScript engine on the watch OS, which complicates development
• Keep notifications hidden on an iPhone lockscreen and still show on a Pebble

"The problem is that 40% of everyone who signed up on rePebble.com still uses an iPhone," Migicovsky writes. "So we’re going to make a damn iOS app. I guess we’re gluttons for punishment." The hope, he writes, is that people are fully aware of the inherent differences with an Android-paired Pebble—and perhaps make Apple aware of their annoyance, too. Interested pre-buyers should read the blog post for all the other little notes and catches. The Core Time 2, for example, will show original PebbleOS apps and watchfaces with a small border around them, as it cannot scale the original 144-by-168-pixel screens to its 200-by-228 display. Developers can update their apps, however, and a new companion app from rePebble is coming for iOS and Android. There is an optional JTAG connector available for those who want to mess around with the hardware. This post was updated at 1:25 pm to note a separate post from Migicovsky concerning iOS restrictions on Pebble watches. It was again updated March 19 at 10:40 a.m. to clarify the comparison watches in the first paragraph.