Stone me, the Pebble watch is coming back!
They said it was ahead of its time, but perhaps now is the ‘time to shine’ for the return of the Pebble smartwatch.
I was a huge fan of Pebble watches and very sad to see them go (or not have development continued). Could this be the great news myself and many others have been hoping for?
The concept was so simple; build a watch with incredible battery life (pretty much not matched even today), a highly readable display and simplicity at its core.
It told you the time, showed you simple notifications, tracked your sleep, let you manage your music… and that was about it.
But that’s all a lot of people wanted. In fact, even today that’s all a lot of people want: Battery life over features that are better managed on your smartphone.
One of the best features of the Pebble smartwatch family was the custom watch faces. If you didn’t like one of the many hundreds (now thousands) of faces, there were countless ways to create your own – easily.
Yes, they had huge bezels and the circular watch was particularly crazy on the bezel front, but had the company continued the development it’s quite likely a lot would have changed in the last ten years or so since the company was riding high.
And soon we might be able to see what could have happened, as the original founder of Pebble, Eric Migicovsky, posted on his blog the news that Google (which ultimately ended up owning Pebble through Pebble’s buyout by Fitbit, later purchased by Google) has open sourced PebbleOS and now that means Eric – or anyone else – can start to make their own watches.
Eric has decided that he’s going to give it a shot, and this time without asking for investment from customers through Kickstarter. He’ll be developing something himself to release to the market.
Assuming there are no sudden surprises or gotchas that we are yet to find out about, there’s no reason that other people won’t also try and give it a go – although I think I’m going to register my interest on the site below to see what Eric can come up with ten years on. I really hope it will be something special, but retain all of the core principles of the original watches.
You too can sign up below to be informed of the progress.
(Featured image adapted from repebble.com)