> Many old Pebble apps/faces use weather APIs that no longer work (Yahoo, OpenWeather). The Pebble mobile app now catches these network requests and returns data from Open-Meteo - keeping old watchfaces working!
And we are very determined to keep the Open-Meteo weather API open-access indefinitely and don’t share the same fate as many closed-source APIs like Yahoo or OpenWeatherMap.
The return of com.getpebble.android.provider.basalt is a very nice development. It revives the legacy plugin ecosystem overnight without requiring original developers (many of whom may be long gone) to push updates. Moving the app store native and switching iOS weather to WebSockets are also solid wins for latency, but I'm most curious about the package ID reclamation.
Has anyone else successfully recovered a dormant package name from Google Play recently? I was under the impression that once an original developer account goes inactive, those namespaces were effectively burned forever? Is that an incorrect assumption on my part?
I pre-ordered a round one which is going to be my third Pebble and I'm excited for it, but there is some really good competition nowadays. Casio makes a watch with similar display technology, solar power so the battery life is basically infinite (it doesn't even have a way to charge with a wire) and bluetooth time sync to your phone. It's not a smart watch so it doesn't have apps or notifications or customizable watch faces - the things that make the Pebble really fun - but as a watch it's hard to beat a GW-BX5600 if all you need is time-related functions like stop watch, timer, multiple time zones etc.
I've never been a watch, necklace, ring guy. But one time when my phone was destroyed, I wished I had a no-screen typing interface somehow so I could call an Uber and get home... alas it was not meant to be, had to figure out how to use the bus.
> Also, don’t expose it to hot water (this could weaken the waterproof seals), or high pressure water. It’s not invincible.
Aahhh. Finally the mystery of how my old pebble died is solved. Hopefully . One fine morning, the display came off. It was supposed to be waterproof and there was no puffed up battery either.
It doesn't, and I wouldn't hold my breath for such a small company being able to navigate compliance for contactless payments. The Pebble does use standard watch straps though, so you could get one of the ones with a programmable payment chip embedded inside.
If that's all you use your smartwatch for, you may as well skip the watch and get a payment bracelet or ring though.
I was hoping to have my watch well before the forced migration of my FitBit account to Google. Now it seems to be up in the air if I will get it in time.
Pebble was my first smartwatch, all the way back in 2015. It was fun and quirky back when it was first released. Then it stopped production for many years while smartwatch category grew. Now they're coming back with same/similar models as before.
For me, its value lies more in nostalgia than anything else. I don't expect it to ever compete with the likes of my Apple watch for smart features, or a Garmin for activity tracking.
That said, it's an e-paper display so battery life is pretty good. Plus it had (and probably will have) an active community of small apps and watchfaces, which kept (and probably will keep) it from becoming stale quickly.
It's a very minor distinction, but they aren't a epaper display (low refresh rate, zero power to maintain an image), rather the technology is a sharp memory LCD (ludicrously low power, but high refresh rate). They're extremely neat and don't suffer from the washed out color and ghosting that epaper does, at the cost of needing ever so slightly above no power to keep an image displayed. I much, much prefer them even though Sharp doesn't really advertise them anymore.
Isn’t e-paper the general category of low power displays? I understand that “e-ink” are a trademarked subset of the broader e-paper category, which also includes memory-in-pixel LCD displays which other watches like Garmin (and probably pebble) have. E-ink displays are only manufactured by eink corp, and are popularly found on e-readers, shelf price tags in some stores etc.
I may be mixing terms in my brain, though. Happy to be corrected.
I haven't really heard it being used like that, always heard e-paper being used as the specific e-ink displays and never anything else. The only time I've seen the (in my mind) confused messaging is on Pebble's own website, I still have my original Pebble Time somewhere, and that's a good part just down to how much I love those displays. I don't think I'd have used one for years if they were epaper.
> The only time I've seen the (in my mind) confused messaging is on Pebble's own website
Yeah, other wearable manufacturers who use the same display technology usually call it MIP instead. Pebble are pretty much the only ones who call it e-paper, which has led some to think theirs is a distinct thing, but it's just MIP.
> Isn’t e-paper the general category of low power displays?
Yes, or more precisely: reflective displays without backlight. There were many such display technologies a while ago (when the Kindle took off and various companies tried to compete with E Ink), but most have since been abandoned.
Pretty much all colored e-paper screens have much lower contrast than color printing on paper, since they mix colors by using can conventional RGB sub-pixels and darkening them individually, just like regular lit screens, which reduces the amount of reflected light.
> Pretty much all colored e-paper screens have much lower contrast than color printing on paper, since they mix colors by using can conventional RGB sub-pixels and darkening them individually, just like regular lit screens, which reduces the amount of reflected light.
Isn't that how color images printed paper works, too? We use inks (often in CMYK coloration, but a galaxy of other options exist) to subtract light from what would otherwise be reflected by a plain white paper.
They more or less have colored particles hanging around in goop and those get pushed around within a small sealed cell by electrostatic charges, there’s presumably some fundamental limit on the total quantity of the colored particles within the cell that’s quite low. I think modern displays have 4 different colored particles in each cell implying only a small portion of the contents is viewable most of the time. On paper you can have basically 100% saturation of whatever color you want in one area.
> Isn't that how color images printed paper works, too?
No. When you print a piece of paper some color, e.g. red, it will be completely red. But most e-paper screens will only be 33% red (optimistically) and 66% black. This is because physical pixels usually can't change color themselves, only brightness, so you use three of them, and darken the RGB components, to produce a colored pixel.
For displaying white on color e-paper screens you will have three non-dark RGB sub-pixels, but each color component only reflects at most a third of the incoming spectrum, either red, green, or blue wavelengths, while white paper (or monochromatic e-paper screens) will reflect all three wavelengths everywhere.
That’s not really correct, modern color eink displays actually change color, there’s different pigments inside each cell and others are created visually using dithering. Only the older type are monochrome displays with a color filter behaves like you’re describing.
I never had an original Pebble but was always a curious observer. To me, the attraction is a device that is clearly complementing a modern smartphone rather than trying to be a second phone on my wrist. I know lots of Apple Watches are sold without SIM cards, and I get the appeal in very specific situations like a water park where I have to leave my phone in the locker but I can still wear a watch... the watch is now my gateway to texts, calls, Find-My, etc.
But nonetheless, that is a rare occurrence, and I don't think for me it's worth paying the battery life and complexity cost of an Apple Watch (or similar full featured wearable) for that 1% use case. I'd rather have a simpler device that just focuses on health tracking and a few notifications, basically what FitBit was if it had a better battery and didn't suck.
That it's hackable and there will likely be lots of community-maintained apps that link into services I use is gravy on top.
Focus on longevity and extensibility. Lots of people still use their original Pebbles from 10 years ago and the community continued to release content for the platform. Also, the batteries last a really long time.
On top of what others have said, the Watchface/App dev experience is pretty great. The OS provides a lot of compositing and animation features that encourage really lively and cute designs, and the Pebble app has a JS runtime that allows apps to do whatever phone-side stuff you need without having to build separate Android and iOS apps (or, as a user, install a ton of companion apps). Spin-up and iteration is really easy because pebble-tool manages building, deploying to QEMU, and running the phone-side code in Node.js so that you can launch and test your app end-to-end with one command.
Having to write C on the watch-side isn't everyone's cup of tea but they are actively working on a replacement for rocky.js so that you can write everything in JS.
Longtime pebble user here. The main things are the always-on ePaper display, long battery life (they claim this new gen's battery will last a month!), and the hackability. I personally love the user interface and charming animations!
I had a couple of Pebbles in the past that are now broken, I'm considering buying one of the newer ones. One Pebble Steel which had a defect for a bunch of them where the screen would gradually start corrupting and a Pebble 2 where the rubberized buttons turned to mush after all these years.
The thing I like about Pebble is the fact its not trying to do a million other things. The two things I really want in a smart watch is to be able to triage a notification/get an update without having to actually pull out my phone and have easy media controls on my wrist. Optimizing for that means it gets excellent battery life and comparatively low prices, because it doesn't need a ton of compute and giant screen and a million sensors constantly taking measurements to accomplish it.
Its nice being able to still get messages and change the music and what not while you're doing something dirty or whatever and aren't about to pull out your phone. Doing yard work, wrenching on the car or motorcycle, lounging in the pool, riding a bicycle, etc. That's all I really want.
The e-ink display is the killer feature. Week-long battery life and always-on readable display even in direct sunlight. Every other smartwatch is a tiny phone screen that dies in a day. Pebble chose the opposite trade-off: less flashy but actually useful as a watch. The open SDK and hackable firmware are the other half - you can write watchfaces and apps in C, which attracted a dev community that most wearables never get.
When the first Pebble was released, and I got a couple of those, it was unique and cool as hell. This time around, you can get a programmable smartwatch from China for a fraction of the price looking way cooler.
Size is the main differentiator for me. I had a pebble, then an Apple Watch, and I've always hated how chunky the Apple Watch and other competitors are.
For me it's the eink display that makes them interesting. Being programmable or looking cool is nice, but for that I could also buy an Apple/Google/Samsung watch - that's not unique.
I think you're confusing Pebble with something else. All current models on the website as well as the OG pebble (according to Wikipedia) use eink displays.
> The watch featured a 32-millimetre (1.26 in) 144 × 168 pixel black and white memory LCD using an ultra low-power "transflective LCD" manufactured by Sharp
Later generations are color, but it's the same tech. If you've ever used actual e-ink then it should be obvious enough that the Pebble displays are something else, it would be nowhere near responsive enough to keep up with pebbleOS's animations.
Check out Watchy. $40. If you search for ESP32 based watches, you'll find plenty. Not all that good looking, but you can probably get one for under 5 bucks.
There's so many these days. Just have a look at AliExpress. There were various KS/IGG campaigns, too. One thing which kind of stood out was a smartwatch remote with what I will summarize as 'Flipper Zero capabilities'. I think I saw it on Etsy. It looked terrible though. For red teaming, you'd want something which looks professional, and blends in. Ideally with a watchface as, ehh.. 'screensaver'.
I have. The main reason though, for me not buying a Pebble, is less about the watch and more about Eric. It seems that his whole modus operandi, is selling out his customers.
Pebble hadn't been in this mess in the first place, if it wasn't for him. Going back to him a second time, is just unresponsible in my opinion.
> Many old Pebble apps/faces use weather APIs that no longer work (Yahoo, OpenWeather). The Pebble mobile app now catches these network requests and returns data from Open-Meteo - keeping old watchfaces working!
That's some sweet quality of life fixes!
And we are very determined to keep the Open-Meteo weather API open-access indefinitely and don’t share the same fate as many closed-source APIs like Yahoo or OpenWeatherMap.
Somehow I've managed to avoid learning about Open-Meteo until now, this is really awesome!
Thanks for providing such a great service. I use it in a totally different free, OSS project, and it's really great to have this option available!
just here to say i love Open-Meteo keep up the good work !
Thank you!!!
The return of com.getpebble.android.provider.basalt is a very nice development. It revives the legacy plugin ecosystem overnight without requiring original developers (many of whom may be long gone) to push updates. Moving the app store native and switching iOS weather to WebSockets are also solid wins for latency, but I'm most curious about the package ID reclamation.
Has anyone else successfully recovered a dormant package name from Google Play recently? I was under the impression that once an original developer account goes inactive, those namespaces were effectively burned forever? Is that an incorrect assumption on my part?
I pre-ordered a round one which is going to be my third Pebble and I'm excited for it, but there is some really good competition nowadays. Casio makes a watch with similar display technology, solar power so the battery life is basically infinite (it doesn't even have a way to charge with a wire) and bluetooth time sync to your phone. It's not a smart watch so it doesn't have apps or notifications or customizable watch faces - the things that make the Pebble really fun - but as a watch it's hard to beat a GW-BX5600 if all you need is time-related functions like stop watch, timer, multiple time zones etc.
> if all you need is time-related functions like stop watch, timer, multiple time zones etc.
But if you just need that, almost any watch will do. The Pebble is clearly not made for those people.
I've never been a watch, necklace, ring guy. But one time when my phone was destroyed, I wished I had a no-screen typing interface somehow so I could call an Uber and get home... alas it was not meant to be, had to figure out how to use the bus.
> Also, don’t expose it to hot water (this could weaken the waterproof seals), or high pressure water. It’s not invincible.
Aahhh. Finally the mystery of how my old pebble died is solved. Hopefully . One fine morning, the display came off. It was supposed to be waterproof and there was no puffed up battery either.
How hot is hot, though? Boiling hot or taking it to a hot shower?
Glue seal can easily loosen at 50 degrees C and a hot shower is 40-45C.. so it must have been very hot shower (or bad glue).
How hot is a hot shower?
40-45C
Can this do NFC/tap to pay? That's all I use my smartwatch for....
It doesn't, and I wouldn't hold my breath for such a small company being able to navigate compliance for contactless payments. The Pebble does use standard watch straps though, so you could get one of the ones with a programmable payment chip embedded inside.
If that's all you use your smartwatch for, you may as well skip the watch and get a payment bracelet or ring though.
e.g. https://www.curve.com/wearables/
Except not in the USA. To bad the rings looks nice.
I was hoping to have my watch well before the forced migration of my FitBit account to Google. Now it seems to be up in the air if I will get it in time.
I'm curious, what sets it apart from other watches? The design look nice
Pebble was my first smartwatch, all the way back in 2015. It was fun and quirky back when it was first released. Then it stopped production for many years while smartwatch category grew. Now they're coming back with same/similar models as before.
For me, its value lies more in nostalgia than anything else. I don't expect it to ever compete with the likes of my Apple watch for smart features, or a Garmin for activity tracking.
That said, it's an e-paper display so battery life is pretty good. Plus it had (and probably will have) an active community of small apps and watchfaces, which kept (and probably will keep) it from becoming stale quickly.
It's a very minor distinction, but they aren't a epaper display (low refresh rate, zero power to maintain an image), rather the technology is a sharp memory LCD (ludicrously low power, but high refresh rate). They're extremely neat and don't suffer from the washed out color and ghosting that epaper does, at the cost of needing ever so slightly above no power to keep an image displayed. I much, much prefer them even though Sharp doesn't really advertise them anymore.
https://sharpdevices.com/memory-lcd/
Isn’t e-paper the general category of low power displays? I understand that “e-ink” are a trademarked subset of the broader e-paper category, which also includes memory-in-pixel LCD displays which other watches like Garmin (and probably pebble) have. E-ink displays are only manufactured by eink corp, and are popularly found on e-readers, shelf price tags in some stores etc.
I may be mixing terms in my brain, though. Happy to be corrected.
I haven't really heard it being used like that, always heard e-paper being used as the specific e-ink displays and never anything else. The only time I've seen the (in my mind) confused messaging is on Pebble's own website, I still have my original Pebble Time somewhere, and that's a good part just down to how much I love those displays. I don't think I'd have used one for years if they were epaper.
> The only time I've seen the (in my mind) confused messaging is on Pebble's own website
Yeah, other wearable manufacturers who use the same display technology usually call it MIP instead. Pebble are pretty much the only ones who call it e-paper, which has led some to think theirs is a distinct thing, but it's just MIP.
> Isn’t e-paper the general category of low power displays?
Yes, or more precisely: reflective displays without backlight. There were many such display technologies a while ago (when the Kindle took off and various companies tried to compete with E Ink), but most have since been abandoned.
Pretty much all colored e-paper screens have much lower contrast than color printing on paper, since they mix colors by using can conventional RGB sub-pixels and darkening them individually, just like regular lit screens, which reduces the amount of reflected light.
> Pretty much all colored e-paper screens have much lower contrast than color printing on paper, since they mix colors by using can conventional RGB sub-pixels and darkening them individually, just like regular lit screens, which reduces the amount of reflected light.
Isn't that how color images printed paper works, too? We use inks (often in CMYK coloration, but a galaxy of other options exist) to subtract light from what would otherwise be reflected by a plain white paper.
What makes e-paper screens worse in this way?
They more or less have colored particles hanging around in goop and those get pushed around within a small sealed cell by electrostatic charges, there’s presumably some fundamental limit on the total quantity of the colored particles within the cell that’s quite low. I think modern displays have 4 different colored particles in each cell implying only a small portion of the contents is viewable most of the time. On paper you can have basically 100% saturation of whatever color you want in one area.
> Isn't that how color images printed paper works, too?
No. When you print a piece of paper some color, e.g. red, it will be completely red. But most e-paper screens will only be 33% red (optimistically) and 66% black. This is because physical pixels usually can't change color themselves, only brightness, so you use three of them, and darken the RGB components, to produce a colored pixel.
For displaying white on color e-paper screens you will have three non-dark RGB sub-pixels, but each color component only reflects at most a third of the incoming spectrum, either red, green, or blue wavelengths, while white paper (or monochromatic e-paper screens) will reflect all three wavelengths everywhere.
That’s not really correct, modern color eink displays actually change color, there’s different pigments inside each cell and others are created visually using dithering. Only the older type are monochrome displays with a color filter behaves like you’re describing.
https://www.eink.com/tech/detail/How_it_works
I never had an original Pebble but was always a curious observer. To me, the attraction is a device that is clearly complementing a modern smartphone rather than trying to be a second phone on my wrist. I know lots of Apple Watches are sold without SIM cards, and I get the appeal in very specific situations like a water park where I have to leave my phone in the locker but I can still wear a watch... the watch is now my gateway to texts, calls, Find-My, etc.
But nonetheless, that is a rare occurrence, and I don't think for me it's worth paying the battery life and complexity cost of an Apple Watch (or similar full featured wearable) for that 1% use case. I'd rather have a simpler device that just focuses on health tracking and a few notifications, basically what FitBit was if it had a better battery and didn't suck.
That it's hackable and there will likely be lots of community-maintained apps that link into services I use is gravy on top.
Focus on longevity and extensibility. Lots of people still use their original Pebbles from 10 years ago and the community continued to release content for the platform. Also, the batteries last a really long time.
On top of what others have said, the Watchface/App dev experience is pretty great. The OS provides a lot of compositing and animation features that encourage really lively and cute designs, and the Pebble app has a JS runtime that allows apps to do whatever phone-side stuff you need without having to build separate Android and iOS apps (or, as a user, install a ton of companion apps). Spin-up and iteration is really easy because pebble-tool manages building, deploying to QEMU, and running the phone-side code in Node.js so that you can launch and test your app end-to-end with one command.
Having to write C on the watch-side isn't everyone's cup of tea but they are actively working on a replacement for rocky.js so that you can write everything in JS.
Longtime pebble user here. The main things are the always-on ePaper display, long battery life (they claim this new gen's battery will last a month!), and the hackability. I personally love the user interface and charming animations!
Besides what others already mentioned, it's the only smart watch with an open source OS supported by the vendor themselves (that I know of anyway).
Privacy, it does not push data to the cloud. And also the ease of access to the data.
I had a couple of Pebbles in the past that are now broken, I'm considering buying one of the newer ones. One Pebble Steel which had a defect for a bunch of them where the screen would gradually start corrupting and a Pebble 2 where the rubberized buttons turned to mush after all these years.
The thing I like about Pebble is the fact its not trying to do a million other things. The two things I really want in a smart watch is to be able to triage a notification/get an update without having to actually pull out my phone and have easy media controls on my wrist. Optimizing for that means it gets excellent battery life and comparatively low prices, because it doesn't need a ton of compute and giant screen and a million sensors constantly taking measurements to accomplish it.
Its nice being able to still get messages and change the music and what not while you're doing something dirty or whatever and aren't about to pull out your phone. Doing yard work, wrenching on the car or motorcycle, lounging in the pool, riding a bicycle, etc. That's all I really want.
The e-ink display is the killer feature. Week-long battery life and always-on readable display even in direct sunlight. Every other smartwatch is a tiny phone screen that dies in a day. Pebble chose the opposite trade-off: less flashy but actually useful as a watch. The open SDK and hackable firmware are the other half - you can write watchfaces and apps in C, which attracted a dev community that most wearables never get.
My old pebble lasted a week. I got one of the new ones in December and so far I've only had to charge it once!
It's like, the easiest thing to write code for. It pairs really well with Android
If you don't plan on writing custom software for it, or if you use an iPhone, then it's not worth it
When the first Pebble was released, and I got a couple of those, it was unique and cool as hell. This time around, you can get a programmable smartwatch from China for a fraction of the price looking way cooler.
Edit: https://diyusthad.com/2021/04/top-5-open-source-smartwatch.h...
Mind to share one of those models ?
Far has I know, pebble user have spent the last 10 years searching for another pebble without luck.
One example could be Watchy. ESP32 based. 40 bucks. Check the link I've added in my original reply.
Size is the main differentiator for me. I had a pebble, then an Apple Watch, and I've always hated how chunky the Apple Watch and other competitors are.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/comments/1qr1npj/pebble_roun...
You can't get a hackable watch for a fraction of the price, though.
I'd pay more for being able to fumble about in the codebase and add exactly what I want.
I wouldn't put in the same league as pebble, but it definitely ticks the boxes:
https://banglejs.com/
Battery life is real.
Ticks the boxes, but not the buttons. :-(
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007059416132.html
For me it's the eink display that makes them interesting. Being programmable or looking cool is nice, but for that I could also buy an Apple/Google/Samsung watch - that's not unique.
The Pebble display isn't e-ink, or unique amongst watches, it's an off-the-shelf MIP LCD from Sharp.
You can get the same thing in watches from Garmin, Coros, Polar, Suunto, Casio and probably more.
I think you're confusing Pebble with something else. All current models on the website as well as the OG pebble (according to Wikipedia) use eink displays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)#Hardware
> The watch featured a 32-millimetre (1.26 in) 144 × 168 pixel black and white memory LCD using an ultra low-power "transflective LCD" manufactured by Sharp
Later generations are color, but it's the same tech. If you've ever used actual e-ink then it should be obvious enough that the Pebble displays are something else, it would be nowhere near responsive enough to keep up with pebbleOS's animations.
They’re Sharp memory displays, functionally LCDs but with memory for retention under each pixel. They are not and have never been eink.
Transflective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)#Hardware
"programmable smartwatch from China" can you share some examples?
Not gp, but here are some: https://diyusthad.com/2021/04/top-5-open-source-smartwatch.h...
Check out Watchy. $40. If you search for ESP32 based watches, you'll find plenty. Not all that good looking, but you can probably get one for under 5 bucks.
There's so many these days. Just have a look at AliExpress. There were various KS/IGG campaigns, too. One thing which kind of stood out was a smartwatch remote with what I will summarize as 'Flipper Zero capabilities'. I think I saw it on Etsy. It looked terrible though. For red teaming, you'd want something which looks professional, and blends in. Ideally with a watchface as, ehh.. 'screensaver'.
I started using Amazfit years ago, love it and it delivers.
I had Basis first and this is the most loved watch from me, then Pebble.
Personally. If I were to use $100+ on a hackable smartwatch, I would much rather go for a Sensor Watch Pro than a Pebble :)
ok buy one of those then
I have. The main reason though, for me not buying a Pebble, is less about the watch and more about Eric. It seems that his whole modus operandi, is selling out his customers.
Pebble hadn't been in this mess in the first place, if it wasn't for him. Going back to him a second time, is just unresponsible in my opinion.
Pebble also wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for him (either time) so I suppose it's a wash