Awesome! The first Pebble absolutely fascinated me by having a hackable, C-running watch on my wrist.

I vividly remember spending days fine tuning the heuristics of a simple step detection algorithm in the first watchface where I thought “seeing your daily step count next to time sure is awesome”. And later, tens of thousands of people thought so as well - this was one of the signs what the health-tracking wrist device is about to become.

It was incredible that even the first model allowed you to run a 30 samples per second accelerometer sampling and classifying the movement, 24/7, and still lasted days. No other watch offers a similar level of hackability.

And as the time progressed, Pebble became the first platform to get Weathergraph - my graphical weather watchface.

Weathergraph was then ported to Garmin (as Pebble shut down), and then to Apple Watch widget (as it became a capable platform with the introduction of standalone watch-apps in watchOS 6), and then to iOS app & widget, where it now lets me live a life of indie developer, after a serie of corporate design/PM/dev jobs.

Thank you for that, Eric & Pebble team.

I still keep the developer edition Pebble with my name printed on the back (great touch!) in my shelf and heart, and will always remember Jon Barlow, one of the best and most helpful developer advocates I ever encountered.

And kudos to the whole dev team. The watch and companion app was rock stable, always staying connected, the calendar always being in sync, watch apps installed quickly and reliably - the things that 10x larger companies struggled with for years were nailed here almost from day one.

Godspeed!

PS: What a mishap to shut the company down shortly after a release of Pebble 2. It nailed the experience of a lightweight watch, with the most contrasty BW reflective screen I have seen, and buttery smooth animations (while Garmin still renders menus in like 8-10 fps on their MIP screens 10 years later). So small and lightweight, I’d love everyone to try it on, and compare with 2024 smartwatches.

I noticed my mouth had been hanging agape for a while while reading this. This is huge news. I feel like Pebble is the smartwatch that got it right the first time. So many smartwatches try to replace the phone instead of being an extension of the phone. Pebble seemed to better understand what is important than most smartwatches by being the extension of the phone, a focus on battery life and always on displays.

I love the animation when you click "No" on "Do you want a new Pebble?". So extra.

The primary use for a smartwatch for myself (and many of my family, friends) is fitness and health tracking. Card payments, notifications, WatchFaces etc. are all secondary.

Basically what Whoop is doing with their strap - but minus the subscription model. I know a ton of people who tried the whoop but felt it was extremely pricey and didn't have the accuracy of an apple watch.

I would be happy to pay ~$400-500 up front for hardware that integrates with Apple Health and provides solid, reliable health tracking without a need for a subscription.

And by health/fitness - features expected would be sleep tracking, activity (gps), heart rate, Sp02, skin temperature sensors, fall detection. Then secondarily - additional things like ECG/EKG, apnea, AFib detection

The in-accuracy of some of the devices in the market is why I still choose to remain with my Apple Watch.

This youtube channel may help understand a consumer's perspective on health accuracy - https://www.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist

Looking forward to checking it out!

I still have this email in my inbox from 2011, after a posting here on HN about your launch:

Subject: You bought the first one! BODY: Congratulations...

Great to see this happening again, best of luck!

This is great news. In the last few years, I have upgraded my apple watch couple of times hoping to accept even marginal improvements to battery life and hackability but every time I stop using it seeing how it's still not what I am looking for.

I tried keeping my pebble alive for so long even after it's demise, I bought 2 Pebble Time when a few were still available on ebay.

I remember writing my first integration from scratch to control room lamp using my Pebble watch. I hacked it together by getting a wifi socket and programming a web-server hosted on my raspberry-pi.

Here is the DEMO video I made 8 years ago: https://vikashbajaj.com/pebble.mp4

My pebble watch would call an app on my phone, in turn the app would make a request to the webserver and the webserver would then make a query to the wifi socket to toggle it.

It lagged a bit but it got the job done. I could connect anything to these wifi sockets and control any appliance with my Pebble time. This was before hackable smart hubs were a thing.

Great device — lasted 4 years, woke me at 5 AM without disturbing my kids, and handled notifications well. Battery life was about a week, and it was swim-proof. That said, it was cheap... I hope this new version isn’t part of the “dumb” device trend where people spend $500 just to detox, thinking the price will force commitment.

I LOVE My Pebble and even got Rebble working on it not long ago to revive it.

However...

If you want to make it TRULY HACKABLE as you claim, you will not encumber it with cloud dependencies like you did last time. Let ME self host my own Pebble server if I choose. Go ahead and default to your servers and sell services and whatever, but let me host my own and switch the base URL to my own domain, preferably with open source software and simple APIs, without requiring me to go through your servers.

That way, even if this attempt also doesn't pan out, those of us willing to do the work will at least still have the functionality we want. I get the whole VC "lock them into required cloud services for life so we can make endless subscription revenue" model, but it's absolutely corrupt.

And, Eric, I know you know that - you have a hacker's heart. Please listen to it.

Developing the for the Pebble was a lot of fun. There was a Pebble hack-a-thon recently (recent being 2 years ago) and I finally got around to finishing a project that I started a decade earlier:

https://github.com/codaris/pebble-cpp

It might even become relevant again!

Pebble had an ingenious design for its watch apps. Despite the watch having a limited processor and even more limited RAM, it could accommodate several apps, each boasting a lot of capability.

Each Pebble app was comprised of two components: one that resided on the watch and another on the phone. Users could install these apps from Pebble's dedicated app store, and the same app was compatible with both iOS and Android. Pebble brilliantly bypassed Apple's app install restrictions and cross-platform compatibility challenges by executing the on-phone portion within the platform's JavaScript engine.

If you wanted to create a weather application, the phone component of the app would be written in JavaScript and retrieve weather updates from the Internet, which would then be conveyed to the watch's C-based app for display. Watch apps could also have a settings page that was implemented in HTML.

I have always been impressed by of the cleverness and simplicity of this design.

My Pebble Time Round is still the single best piece of tech I have ever owned and used, and I miss it every day.

If it can be brought back, I’d pay whatever is necessary, and I’d love to contribute now that I’ve spent many years doing embedded firmware development professionally!

Even though I haven't used one in a really long time, the Pebble Time still stands out to me as something I wish I still had.

It's an absolutely shame that Pebble was so innovative and functional, but couldn't reach mass market. But, I am extremely excited and happy that the Pebble team can start it again. I don't like Google for many things, but, I am grateful that the open-sourced PebbleOS. What a joyous day!

Love this!

After my Pebble I tried an e-ink "Watchy" from SQFMI (https://watchy.sqfmi.com/) thinking that the battery life would be great but the battery only lasted a few days.

I've been wearing a Bangle 2 (https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2) which feels closest to recreating my Pebble. It has super long battery life and feels a lot like my Pebble did, but doesn't have the polish of the pebble UI and animations.

Can't wait to get a new Pebble!

I lost mine somewhere in SF while visiting years ago but I absolutely loved it. I won it at a hackathon after making a tiny Pebble app where you could keep score during a soccer game as a referee by pressing the side buttons. App development and publishing was extremely easy on their app store.

Excited (cautiously) about this. Loved my Pebble Time and was gutted when 1) Pebble bit the dust, and 2) my Pebble vanished down that black hole things like small devices and the other sock invariably go down. If this happens, I hope they can keep the revived Pebbles just smart enough and rebuild the app ecosystem. Best of luck, folks. I'm cheering you on from the sidelines!

I haven't used a Pebble, but I wanted to mention something I have seen praised a lot on HN and elsewhere. Apparently, the Bluetooth stack on a Pebble is absolutely legendary: reliable, dependable, robust, you name it. It still works reliably today seemingly thanks to their very diligent software design.

I hope that element of it will continue to exist as-is on these new ones? I mention this because Bluetooth is still generally speaking very meh.

Pebble and Basis Peak (https://www.engadget.com/2016-08-09-basis-peak-obituary.html) are the two biggest smartwatch losses, and probably top 10 gadget losses of all time. Glad to see one of them might have a future.

I owned the Pebble OG, the Pebble Steel and the Pebble Time Steel and despite all my attempts, I couldn't fill the void the Pebble left. I tried the Amazfit Bip, The BangleJS 2 (that one got pretty close IMO) and now rocking a Casio watch that does bluetooth but still work on a CR2032 (GBD-200), and more than a year on the same battery, which is quite a feat when you think about it.

The software UX of the Pebble was on point, and the animations surprisingly smooth for such a device. I'm still convinced that after all there years, the Timeline UI is unrivaled.

I'm eager to see what you'll come out with :)

I’m wearing my Pebble Time Steel right now and the biggest issue I have with it (maintaining the app) is arguably mostly Apple’s fault.

I was originally pissed that Pebble never sold replacement parts (actually I still am), but at least this hardware has been holding up extremely well.

This guy is now behind two of the products that I wish the most: the Small Android Phone and the Pebble watch. I hope they succeed! :)

Looks very interesting to me. There are a couple of features that are especially important to me.

- Good accuracy sleep tracking

- GPS ( I know this uses up a lot of battery but could be off by default)

- Self-hostable servers. (I'm a very privacy conscious person, and also I don't want to be bound to an ecosystem that might disappear one day)

I'm gonna keep an eye on this project. It really looks very interesting. I hope it gets far.

I'm glad. For a decade I felt like an outsider because all I want is a very simple wearable device that doesn't require charging more than once a month and can display simple notifications from my phone, and the time.

I loved the Pebble Time. After that I went over to Fossil Hybrid, which is pretty decent actually. I'm sure the app steals everything it can but at least the device works.

So excited for this! No other smartwatch comes close to the UX of pebble OS. Tiny touchscreens are demonstrably a bad idea.

Garmin and Casio have plenty of button-only devices, but they seem to not really understand how to make a UI flow well. They all feel kludgy and arcane to use. Whereas pebble was a very simple layered menu system without any over-complication.

I was a huge fan of the Pebble. Had an original Kickstarter model and a Pebble Time (well, I still do, but they need battery surgery). Loved the epaper/10-day life design so much more than the Apple Watch.

I'll be first in line for a new generation watch!

Be great if you could get @Pebble onto BlueSky, for those of us who have left Twitter/X.

This is amazing and I'm so glad this is happening. Please consider keeping the version of the Pebble OS running on the new watches open source to preserve access to it going forward, and if you can keep the hardware designs OSHW as well that would be even better.

I love my Pebble and want them to stay available for as long as possible!

Does this mean things have worked out with Beeper? What will happen with that? I noticed development seemed to have stopped. It's nothing like it was before.

So cool that you were able to make this happen. I backed Pebble on Kickstarter in 2012 and no smartwatch has ever really appealed to me since then.

The screen on my original Pebble died a long time ago and I've always wondered whether I should try to bring it back to life. Perhaps now is the time!

lol image creating a beloved tech product, growing the company to the point where it gets acquired by a tech giant, and then waiting until they spit it back out so you can start it all again.

Congrats to Eric. This whole thing is so funny to me and I can't wait for my new Pebble.

Just my Pebble lament:

I caught onto Pebble too late, and bought a used Pebble Time Round after Pebble had already been shutdown. The app was still in the App Store, and Rebble.io worked perfectly to replicate the missing services. Everything was perfect (1), and I was so happy every time I looked at my wrist. It was thinner than anyone else's ugly smart watches, and longer battery life, and more soul in the OS. Nothing else was close, and it was old when I got it! There was a looming fear of the battery dying, but with such a long battery life, I could do my best to balance it as close to 50-60% as I could, and still have longer battery life than most smart watches.

But then I bought a newer phone (another iPhone) and everything clouded over. I couldn't install the Pebble app again, or even restore it from backup. After much messing around with side-loading, I bought a Nokia Steel HR (same as Withings, but with Nokia branding), and got by for a year or two. But with it occasionally missed notifying me of calls, the whole point for me was really defeated, and I recently finally give in to buying an Apple Watch. LTE is nice, but this whole time, I still miss my Pebble! I dream of a newer, slightly updated Pebble Time Round!

1) To be honest, with the possible exception of the dated, large bezel.

Sleep (and nap!) tracking precision in Pebble is still waaaay ahead of Apple Watch.

Apple Watch is packed with sensors that Pebble never had, but it can't reliably detect when I'm sleeping. It even woke me up once with a go-to-bed reminder! (only once because I turned that off immediately).

Apple's tracking naively uses my configured "Downtime" start time as a reference for when I'm "in bed". That's not a measurement, that's made up data!

Reposting the comment I made when Fitbit acquired the hollowed-out shell of Pebble, which still applies today:

I liked Pebble as a company because they knew how to make just the right engineering compromises to make their product work. The smartwatch everyone wants has a battery that lasts for weeks, a high contrast always-on color screen visible in daylight and total darkness, no bezel, and a round case only a few mm thick. That perfect watch is impossible to build, but Pebble found compromises that worked. They chose different compromises than those of Apple and Google, and IMHO better ones. The Pebble Time Round is a tiny little triumph of smart engineering compared with any other product on the market, including the Apple Watch.

In particular it's incredible what the Pebble firmware team was able to accomplish. They built a bespoke OS that's extremely reliable (certainly more reliable than Android Wear), with an app SDK and store, plus a well thought out user interface with a striking visual design and even fun little animated flourishes, despite running in a fraction of the power budget of Apple or Android smartwatches. The Pebble has 256 kilobytes of RAM! How many companies could have done all that in 256 KB?

I still have my Pebble Time Round in a drawer somewhere. I've long since switched to an Apple Watch but despite all the extra features I still consider it to be an inferior complete product to the Time Round. I really hope this works out.

Note to self: Cortex-M3, 64 MHz, max resource size 96k, app size 24k, 144 x 168, 4 buttons[1]. Probably in theory doable with nRF5x SoM + cheap OLED.

1: https://developer.rebble.io/developer.pebble.com/guides/tool...

I am extremely excited for this. It would be amazing if it had wireless charging so it was completely sealed. The battery life on my Pebble was amazing, the customization was great, and I really hope this new iteration works well with iOS to deliver notifications. NFC for unlocking things would be a bonus too of course. But no matter what, I am very excited especially since the OS will be open source.

Please consider making an e-ink bank. I have a Sony FES with that feature, and it would be a dream to have a watch with a hackable band.

I was really hoping the Flipper team would champion something like this after they came out with that weird desktop busy panel. I've never understood the value proposition of a high pixel density, power hungry display on a watch. Can't wait to see what these guys can achieve with modern tech!

Could you add social media links that aren't on X (preferably Bluesky or Mastodon)? I'd love to follow the project, but not enough to use X.

When Pebble Watch was released, I was a 16 year-old child, and I was so fascinated by the watch, that till this day, I haven't bought any smartwatch, because deep in my mind, I knew they were nothing aganist a Pebble Watch. After I grew-up, I tried to look for any second hand pebble watch, but couldn't find any in my country. BUT I would love to get a new one now!

> The new watch we’re building basically has the same specs and features as Pebble, though with some fun new stuff as well.

why use the same specs? they are almost a decade old :-/

Please ship to my country, India, I will definitly get one. and please don't change some hefty shipping, most of the time, the shipping charges are more than the product itself :-(

Obviously not the same sort of rock-solid, daily driver but if it's the hackable aspect that's got you jazzed, The BangleJS is a fun & cheap experiment

https://banglejs.com/

This is awesome. Pebble is still the best so many years later! I also have the Garmin, but Garmin thinks UX design is a waste of money or something, its horrendous. Pebble is the absolute undisputed King here.

Can’t wait to get my hands on a new Pebble!

Please include the pebble round format! That looks so much better to me than square formats (including all the apple watches)

I still remember how sad I was when my third Pebble died. It's great to hear that Pebble is back again but the market has certainly changed. There was nothing like Pebble last time. Now, while not as good as Pebble, there are still alternatives. I'm using Amaze Bip, for example.

I hope the new Pebble will open up more hacking opportunities. Zigbee devices have been getting really tiny nowadays, so having a watch that can send a Zigbee signal when tapped on an NFC tag will be so much more convenient than pulling out my phone. LTE presence detection is another.

I have been using the Garmin watches after I used the Apple Watch but detested having to charge the watch almost everyday. I started with the Forerunner 255 (7 day battery life, then upgraded to the Fenix 8 solar with battery life of 18 days. I can certainly entertain getting a Pebble watch since I loved the timer feature that calculated the time the timer would go off so you did not have to do the math in your head. I have yet to see another watch do this even though I have asked many times :). Here are some must haves….bigger display with minimal borders, thinner than leading watches and 30 day battery life. Godspeed.

Sounds fascinating that you essentially "rented out" your company through a sale that got you profits and just waited a few years for big corp to sunset the product and recognizing its value you're now rising it from the ashes?!

How does this work out on the IP and legal side? A portion of the OS is now open source, but that doesn't make google surrender the trademark does it?

I've been meaning to sell my Pebble's but never got around to it. Don't know if anyone would even be interested in them as the screens on neither of them work. The first was the Kickstarter edition which was then replaced but the replacement eventually had the same issue. I loved the battery life on those things compared to my Apple Watch but I do prefer all the additional functionality that the Apple watch offers.

I need more news!!! Give me some info drops

I've wanted this to happen for so long and only gave up on Pebble last year after the latest version of Android made the watch not work for the second time in a row... At the time there was no workaround and it was getting frustrating waiting around for an workaround to use my watch. There also had been a large decline in posts on Rebble,I thought the magic was dying. So glad things were going on behind the scenes!

I ended up getting the one+ watch 2 which was by far the best android watch I've tested and the focus on battery life and always on display were very nice... But still couldn't meet the speed and ease of use of my Pebbles. I've got around 6-7 Pebbles, have done repairs, battery replacements, button replacements, screen replacements just to keep these bad boys working. They've been incredibly reliable overall and I don't know the last time I've purchased a tech product that still works 12 years later and still functions better than the most recent tech in every way I care about.

With this news I took the adb route, started up the Rebble subscription again (even though it hadn't been long enough to actually expire) and started using them again... Blows my mind that it's even better than I remember. There were things I was forced to live with with the one+ that I forgot worked fine on my Pebble.

So excited by this news, but I need more news!!! I've scoured the Internet for anything I can find, no new sources in the last 15 hours I need new info!

Thank you so much for doing this! I can't wait. If it is possible to just get the Pebble Time 2 that I backed on Kickstarter I'd be more than happy. The only watch that had build issues was the Pebble 2, it was an amazing watch, but the rubber sides didn't age well. If you go with that design again, maybe a silicone or something stronger.

Thank you again! Please give any information you can! I need a weekly fireside chat

The features I need on a smartwatch:

- eink or lcd display, for always-on and long battery life.

- brightness adjustable LED, for night usage of the watch and as flashlight at night.

- physical buttons, for controls including music volume, skip to next or previous song.

- bluetooth calls and notifications.

- nfc payments.

- functionality allowing to COMPLETELY DISABLE all those fitness functions, such as step counting or heart rate measuring. FU Garmin, I hate you.

- app for plotting tides and moon phases.

- app for voice memos, then transfer to Android/iOS for converting voice-to-text and further editing.

- if the display is touch-enabled, make sure to make it LOCKABLE, otherwise it does self-activates in the shower if the message is received. FU Amazfit, I hate u2.

- solar panel on the sides or even maybe behind eink/lcd display.

At the moment I am using Tissot T-Touch Solar Connect: No nfc payments, no bluetooth calling, no flashlight at night, no tides/moons, no music control But, I never need to charge it!!!!! And I dont need to use my second hand to press the led button to check the time at night, because its a hybrid watch with luminescent arrows.

I'd love a fully offline smartwatch with an offline GPS, calculator, wikipedia and other utilities.

Knowing you have a map on your wrist that covers your local area with 2 weeks battery is a huge value. The two big reasons I don't trust my apps are (1) all of them can lock you out at any time (gaia, alltrails do this) and (2) half day battery is a liability for any map.

> Startup founder lesson learned — never forget to define and talk about your long term vision for the future.

What's the long term vision.

I get a week of battery time out of my Fitbit Charge 5 with really good sleep tracking as well as reasonable tracking of exercise including swimming and GPS tracked runs. The screen is really nice but not always on e-paper and I can't really program it, so I guess there's some space to improve but was the pebble really that much better?

Thank you! I have 4 Pebblea that I refuse to part with because they do EXACTLY what I need. In the meantime I found Bangle.js Gadgetbridge and it paired with all of them and at least I have basic function again. My phone is the Samsung S22 Ultra.

I'm hoping that you can revive some of the fitness tracking features of the Basis B1/Peak smart watches. I especially loved the galvanic skin response and skin temperature monitoring with the air temperature sensing. It was amazing to be able to identify stress by comparing these values.

I could literally identify when I was in an job interview or going dancing without just relying on my heart rate. My heart rate during the interview was relatively flat but elevated; however, my galvanic skin response spiked hard (sweating) and my skin temperature dipped without a similar air temperature change. On the other hand while dancing, I had reactive heart rate, varying galvanic, and rising skin/air temperature (lots of warm bodies).

Very cool! Looking forward to the future developments! :)

Even as it stands today, all the old Pebbles can still be used and are still great. On Android, it's easy using the Gadgetbridge app or even the original Pebble app. On iOS, you currently have to install the ipa-File yourself - meaning you have to have the iOS device in developer mode and re-sign the App regularly. Pebble apps can easily be installed via rebble.io. There is even still some developer activity - for example, there is a relatively recent Home Assistant app - so you can totally control your 2025 smart home with your 12 year old smart watch (even by voice).

I got my Time Steel used something like 5 years ago for around 35€ and use it most days. In a previous job, I could use different Apple and Android smartwatches as much as I wanted but I always kept the Pebble as my main and personal device.

I'm very happy, I will buy it if it has the same spirit has the previous ones. I loved my Pebble Time, I am not sure why I sold it. It was just what a smart watch was supposed to be, not a mini smart phone on your wrist. Buttons instead of touch screen. Long battery life. Always on display. Simple to use.

I am excited about this but one of the main reasons for the success of the original Pebble was the accompanying software support. The web sites "Watchface Generator", "CloudPebble" and the "Canvas" Android app.

If they or equivalents don't return then I don't think this new Pebble will survive. The return of the Sparkly Code Princess would help enormously.

I'm very glad to hear that the goal this time isn't growth and not to try to expand/pivot into other avenues at any cost. As a triple backer it was gutwrenching to see a company producing such a great device desperately chase investor money by trying to move into oversaturated mass markets instead of sticking to its strengths. I still have a Pebble Time (actually I inherited my uncle's after he learned that I had lost mine because it had fallen apart after I took it for a swim) and although it's been degrading visibly over the years (and the limitations like poor integration with Outlook for Android and other non-stock apps for e-mail, calendars, etc), I still find myself refusing to get a different smartwatch because none of them serve this exact niche.

Wearing my OG Pebble on my wrist as I read this, having just dropped a fresh battery in it about a month ago. It has been a faithful companion for many years (thanks in part to the Rebble.io community) and will continue to be. This is pretty happy news, to me and I am looking forward to the next generation!

ironically when I had a pebble time, the battery life was so good I'd get used to not charging and would have days where the battery would die due to forgetting. now that I have an apple watch I've never had that happen, and ironically it's because the battery doesn't last a long time.

Australia and Nea Zealand are "other" ?? Ok, I guess. If it's about economy scale, makes sense.

Please note that the source needs quite a few changes before being built as all the proprietary code has been removed. It lacks (from the readme): all of the system fonts, the Bluetooth stack, the STM peripheral library, the voice codec, ARM CMSIS, the heart rate monitor driver.

Amazfit Bip was an amazing watch (even if not strictly “smart”) with near ideal balance of battery life, features and screen.

Unfortunately the company wasn’t smart enough to develop this direction and followed the leaders like apple with their shitty smartphone-on-hand rather than real watch philosophy.

I'm somewhat confused to why Google needed to open source the original Pebble source code for this project to exist?

Was it not possible to already create a comparible e-ink screen, long life battery, smart watch without the source code? Is it the pebble branding itself that is important somehow?

Tangentially related: I have been having a ton of fun programming for the sensor watch lately: https://www.sensorwatch.net/

Granted it's far from as smart as pebble, but that battery life... ♥

My very first 'smart wearable' I owned. Amazing watch. Also used it to build my first home automation project - Built a garage door opener and status monitor with a Arduino Yun , relay and magnetic switch. Was able to trigger it with a button mapped on the pebble that would trigger something in tasker on a android phone that would make an http call to open the garage door and also to get the status.

I'd be completely ok if they keep the new pebble as simple as possible. Using the same e-Ink display and functionality. One of the most memorable things about the original watch was the battery life. Didn't have to charge for days.

I always loved my Pebble! I only went to Fitbit when Pebble was sold. Can't wait for a new version!

Things I'd like to see:

1) transflective screen with a backlight which turns on when you raise and rotate your wrist (like the Fitbit). I think Pebble supposedly had this but it didn't always work very well and many times the screen was hard to see.

2) Contactless payment (I use it on my Fitbit all of the time!)

That's all! Everything else about the Pebble worked great!

Can't wait for updates! (I'm following your blog as well as the Discord)

So much nostalgia for my Pebble. Got it right as I was seriously getting into programming. I still remember how magical it felt writing the C code to build my first watch face and how proud I was to show people. Amazing news <3

OH HAPPY DAY! I loved my pebble. It was the perfect balance of features and battery-life.

My favorite watch face inspired me to get into may e-ink projects.

  Horizon by JR Mobley
  https://store-beta.rebble.io/app/5616d36a6ddd7fea8800001f

Man, I'm a gadget guy, and I have been all my life, but this is one bit of tech nostalgia I don't get.

I had a Pebble. It never came close to being a watch I wore normally; I just used it when cycling, as a "notifications screen" -- that way, if I felt my phone vibrate in my jersey pocket, I could steal a glance at my wrist to see if it was important enough to stop (which basically meant "is it my wife?").

When it died, and Pebble was gone, I replaced it with an Apple Watch, and it's that class of hardware that proved so handy that it mostly has supplanted my collection of fancy mechanical watches.

In the meantime someone suggested Bangle.js Gadgetbridge for basic Pebble functionality and tonight I brought 4 back to life on my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra!!!

I'm a very happy Pebblelite!

Guys, I am still running my P2HR every day.

I, like most of us I believe (and we are dozens :), am using it with GadgetBridge.

I wrote my own watchface for it, in C. Also wrote some automation that periodically exports and backs up my data off GadgetBridge.

I would like to keep using GB, but my aging P2 might die any time now (already had to replace the side buttons, the plastic disintegrated after a few years) and I have been looking for a replacement watch that allows exporting my sleep data into GB.

NONE of the hardware currently supported by the app appears to make sleep data available in the way Pebble did?!

Please make new Pebbles, and keep them compatible with GadgetBridge.

Cool. I wrote a few watch faces for this back in the day. One of them - ruler watch face was moderately popular.

Not sure what it is about the subsequent breed of smart watches (android, apple etc), but none of them seemed to scratch quite the same itch.

> Aren’t you the guy who screwed this up last time?

> Yes, the one and only. I think I’ve learned some valuable lessons.

I'm glad Eric is self-aware. I was PISSED when Pebble shut down JUST after the Kickstarter. I was in the process of porting the UI from my favorite Nooka watch to Pebble...oh man, now I just remembered the founder of Nooka spent a decade working on the Sa umbrella that never released.

These guys are a huge reason I don't back Kickstarter projects anymore.

I signed up for updates only so I can get a modern Pebble but I'm not keeping my hopes up.

Looking forward to it ! My first smart watch was a pebble and the interface was/is still the best. Current smartwatches try too much to be like phones ( just like the earlier smart phones tried to be too much like PCs)

I backed the first Pebble on Kickstarter. I didn't like its industrial design but voted with my wallet for the _idea_ behind it. I had high hopes for subsequent iterations but IMO it never evolved into a sufficiently beautiful industrial design. From the same era, Vector was better-looking with similar screen tech, but never captured meaningful mind-share or market-share.

I'd love to have a small watch with long battery life, reflective always-on hi-dpi grayscale screen, and classic industrial design using a metal case and small bezels. For now I'm (reluctantly) making do with a Withings ScanWatch Light.

If I may be allowed to add a suggestion. Please make sure new Pebble is a watch for all time (hah!). I currently wear a $30 Temu (?) watch that is indestructible (you can take a drill to the face without scratching), but ugly as all get out! I would like a watch (note Pebble already ticked most of these boxes) that is light, attractive, comfortable, easy to read in all circumstances, long life, hardy, reliable, and has a weather app that actually works correctly and consistently. All the fitness stuff is secondary, but a step counter is fun.

Bought a Pebble in 2018 and used it with Rebble. Loved the OS and interface - but the device was far from robust. The rubberized buttons eventually cracked and it became unusable because I could no longer press them.

A new version needs to have better buttons and please, please offer the option of a steel wrist strap. I've had Fitbits rendered useless because the plastic/silicone strap cracked and there was no way to replace it.

I have a Withings watch which has about 30 days battery life. Granted the display is tiny but I love that it looks like a normal watch and gets out of the way.

I'd buy a Pebble if it hit 14d+ battery life with health tracking features.

I looked at this page on my Quest 3. For some reason, that banner image looks 3D!

I was a backer for the original and then again for your final run. Sadly you never delivered on the Pebble Core... The product I'd been dreaming of for years.

I hope something similar is in the works as it hit all the right notes for me.

I'd still be wearing my Kickstarter edition to this day except it succumbed to the screen pressure issue and couldn't be opened to fix it without destroying the screen. Note: please don't glue this version together.

A modern Pebble would be very interesting. An e-paper display smartwatch that runs whatever I want it to would be great, with the benefits of modern batteries and e-paper. Maybe use those advancements to build it cheaper so I could have a smartwatch that does the things I need (text message display, media control) which being cheap enough I don't have to be constantly scared of breaking it while doing manual labor.

If enough people are interested, we'll build it

I'd remove that line from the website. That's a line from a bad Kickstarter.

I personally hope they stay well away from fitness stuff. I think all those big companies having a go at it for years has sufficiently proved that a wrist device can not be accurate enough at tracking steps, sleep or even heart rate. While GPS is better served by a phone which has a more accurate chip and also the battery to sustain it.

And orienting towards fitness means compromises for size, weight, comfort and battery life. The original Pebble was slim, light, didn't have a sensor bump, wrapped nicely around the wrist.

Yeas! I moved over to the Garmin 265 since it felt like the most pebble-like watch. But the controls aren't nearly as immediately intuitive. Pebble nailed the OS and nothing has ever matched it.

Forgot the year of the Linux. It's the year of Pebble! I had a blast on last Rebble hackathon creating watchface named pRebble inspired by Pebble original UI design which I found amazing in how it manifested through work of designers within limitations and constrains of this platform. I can't wait to explore it even more on second hachathon. Looking forward to see Pebble rising from the ashes \(^-^ )

Pebble Time is still my favourite smartwatch design ever, I really hope the new one will have similar design (and yes, more like 1st one) but just bezel-to-bezel screen

This is great news. As much as I love my PineTime watch, its getting a little long in the tooth and I'd love to see some upgrades to it, hardware-wise..

That said, there are a lot of other open-source watches in the pipeline that could use a bit of motivation to update their designs .. The TT-Watch situation is pretty fruitful .. I have a Watchy in my drawer somewhere that I should probably get working again .. all of these options, and maybe Pebble can learn something from them ..

I love my Apple watch because it does so well with tracking fitness stuff (particularly swimming) but it's a few years old now and is starting to get that laggy feeling interface that seems to be a hallmark of older Apple devices after they've gone through enough OS upgrades. I'm dreading the idea of spending a couple hundred bucks on another watch.

Are the sensors/fitness programs on Pebble on-par with apple watches?

I wonder if there's a way to migrate over my years of recorded data over.

Still rocking my Time Steel since 2015, still running the same official version of the software on both watch and phone - as far as my Pebble is concerned nothing much has changed in the last decade except the app store mysteriously went offline, and the battery no longer lasts two weeks (shutting it down every time I get home).

Really awesome to hear by the time this little guy gives up the ghost there might already be a legitimate/official successor available to switch to.

I like what happens when you click "No" to "Do you want a new Pebble?" and I'm glad the decision doesn't persist across sessions.

Never stopped thinking about Pebble whenever a similar product got announced so this is a really great piece of news to start the year. I never got into hacking my Pebbles when I first got them however now I'm fiddling around in C and more smol hardwares generally so I'm psyched to get it on.

That's absolutely good news. The only thing I hope is to keep it thin design, which basically means no pulse measurements. But I also understand that maybe there are ppl that want this.

I tried Garmin Forerunner 245. It was the closest but OS and button placement were less intuitive. And it was thicker. Pebble time has a much sleaker design that doesn't give sport vibes but an everyday watch style. PTR looked great too but battery life wasn't great

Pebble was amazing! Whimsical, useful and a loooong battery life. Strangely, there’s no alternative on the mass market. Or there has been no alternative.

P.S. your homepage is terrible.

I really appreciate the innovative spirit behind the Pebble watch! It was groundbreaking to have a hackable device that allowed users to customize their experience. The ability to run a step detection algorithm and see real-time data was a game changer for health tracking. It's inspiring to see how the Pebble platform paved the way for future wearable technology. Kudos to the entire team for their dedication and vision!

Great news!

Is there a smart watch that would connect to two phones at the same time? I’d immediately buy one which showed notifications from my personal and work phones.

My Garmin Forerunner has everything the author claims doesn't exist except the hackability: Long (10 day) battery life, reflective screen (plus background light), physical buttons, all the features (step count, notifications, music control, weather, etc. plus lots of additional sport functions and even a pulse and oxygen sensor.

However, I still get the point of having a hackable device.

I have worn my Pebbles (yes, I have several) every day since I bought the first one at initial launch. Right now I have 3 Pebble Time's going (2 black, one gold). All I want is the Pebble Time 2 that they were so close to launching. It had the very few upgrades I wanted (larger screen, healty monitoring). That's ALL I need and I will be a very very happy man. I'll even buy several just to support the cause.

"I don’t envision raising money from investors, or hiring a big team."

How does one do this, though? Is he planning on self-financing presumably out of some personal wealth? I've been working in this industry for almost 30 years and I still can't figure out how people are making things happen that aren't of the "Hey VC, I went to Stanford, I'm going to make Uber, give me money bags" variety

Very glad to hear the Pebble dream lives on! I only switched away from my Pebble Time two years ago when I started to need heart rate monitoring for health reasons. The Pixel Watch is good, but in many ways I still consider the Time the optimal smartwatch design in many departments!

The UX especially is something l look back fondly on, especially the timeline interface was such a natural way to use a timepiece for me.

Excited for this—was NOT expecting it to tell me to follow them on Twitter after signing up! That one sure hits different than the last time…

Please for the love of all that's holy pay attention to us, swimmers. We may not be nearly as large a group as runners but we are very underserved by the tracker watch market. The world needs only so many glorified pedometers.

I know that tracking strokes, laps and swim distance is much harder than steps. But it's doable because Apple mostly gets it right. Yet nobody beside Apple seems to have nailed the simple pool lap count algorithm (remember some prefer to flip turn while others prefer to turn above water especially at the shallow end) but the iWatch is so crap in so many other ways that the world really needs a competent swim tracker that doesn't need to be on a charger every 20 minutes.

EDIT: Better yet, make it fully open with access to gyro/accel data so I can develop my own perfect, swimmer's app and maybe make some money as an added benefit.

Has anyone used it in the past ? Was it any good? I have never heard about this from anyone missing it after it was gone from the market.

I went on a long journey trying to find a pebble replacement. If you are looking for the closet smart watch to the pebble experience then https://a.co/d/6hEwdmc check out the Garmin instinct 2. 28 day battery life. Gets notifications from phone. Eink like screen. Its my daily wear

I have kept my Pebble WAITING for this day! Horayy!

Amazfit and Xiaomi is now dominating this market with its superior riscv based architecture and 2x longer battery time and 2x less cost. I don’t really know how pebble can compete now given when it was acquired it was already going downhill in market share.

I’ve never earned a pebble only an Xiaomi band many years ago so I maybe missing something.

First, let me say it is always fun to see people having fun with hobbies like this. Cool to see them making headway and having fun!

I'm curious what the specific pitch is on this device? I have, so far, avoided Garmin in the watch space, but I'm growing very short on justifications for that. Would love to hear what the general value add for other options is.

Watches are cool, I wish I was a watch person but I am not. Pinetime for example seemed neat.

edit: there is one use case I'm considering it's for sleep tracking since my ideal life I sleep whenever and it seems my ideal operating mode is to be slightly sleep deprived (about 5 hours each night) so it knows when I fell asleep and sets a 5hr timer from there.

How is this going to affect the Beeper / Beepberry project? Are you involved with the hardware side of that project still?

"The new watch we’re building basically has the same specs and features as Pebble, though with some fun new stuff as well "

While I don't mind the same feature set, I would sure hope you upgrade the hardware for something to last 5 years. Update the design while keeping the spirit of the original and focus on a user replaceable battery.

Makes sense, it's too strong of a trademark to just disappear.

Also, for me it signifies the golden age of hardware startups. There was a time when all the cool kids started hardware companies, especially wearables were really hot for a short time. Weird to think that was almost 15 years ago now.

I'm so stoked. Pebble was the only smart watch that I actually liked and used.

My apple watch just sits on a shelf. My fitbit I only wear when sleeping. My pebble unfortunately broke, but it also sits on a shelf as I haven't been able to admit to myself that I'd never get around to repairing it.

Excellent idea. Time, notifications, step tracker, media control, less is more. No AI unless there are very justifiable uses... Battrry is top priority. Bright and sharp. Simple is good.

I still keep around my pebble time (which I mostly use as a timer because I love the UX experience) and I'm surprised about how well the battery still works. Seeing devices such as the mi band 9 having a battery that lasts around 20 days, I can't help but wonder how much longer could last a new pebble

Wonderful news! Still getting ~ 5 days battery on my Pebble Time, but was quite disappointed that the Time2 never made it out into the wild.

Looking forward to what new hardware is on the way -- have had the same experience where I kept looking at alternatives but nothing met the Pebble bar.

I would love to help with making the robots to test this stuff. I often joke that one would think that testing buttons would be a solved problem by now, but then we keep inventing new buttons. I'm looking forward to seeing all the new buttons the Pebble team are working on!

The Pebble got pushed pretty hard, the demoscene even got ahold of it.

https://youtu.be/j_GJfSTz6Dg

https://youtu.be/UC-ru1P3GVo

The opening animation is so so so good.

I'm on my second and last Fitbit— both have had wretched build quality and ultimately failed on the screens. I had resigned myself to holding my nose and eventually getting an Apple Watch, but maybe I'll instead hang on for the new Pebble, whenever it arrives.

This is great news, Eric.

I still have an old Pebble 2 Flame edition that I Kickstarted somewhere. Unfortunately the rubber/plastic on it has started to degrade rapidly a year or so after I bought it so that was a shame.

I'll definitely be watching this, but it will take a lot to make me replace my Apple Watch.

Answering "Do you want a new Pebble?" with "No" redirects to https://www.apple.com/watch/. I want neither.

I'm curious why they stopped in the first place. It seemed fantastic when it was out, and everyone loved them. Apple and Android watches are battery hungry and over-fluffed with features I don't want or need.

I'd like to think that this time, it won't go away again?

I loved my pebble. Closest I've found is the Garmin platform, with a MIP display. My Fenix 5x works pretty well, and there are certainly apps available for it too.

Pebble was something special though, so I'll be looking forward to what comes of this.

I can't wait, I never got a Pebble but it was the most interesting smart watch style to me.

quite excited for this. i had two pebbles back in the day (the original pebble, and the pebble time steel, which i still have in a drawer at home).

i've been using my pinetime as my only watch for several years now, and it does everything i need it to do. however, i will happily pick up a new pebble again if this happens. the battery life on each of mine was awesome, the buttons were handy for things like quick music playback without having to look at my watch, and it had a great little 'app store' with tons of cool watchfaces and stuff from the community. looking forward to this hopeful 'pebble resurgence'. :)

I bought a Pebble watch long after support stopped because I wanted to have something I considered a piece of technology history. Never thought it would come back and I could change the faces, update it, and make it last. This is wonderful news.

Was an OG backer of Pebble. I then doubled down and backed time 2, which never shipped. :(

I still have yet to find anything quite as good as the pebble. Fossil hybrid came close, but now fossil shut that down.

I am beyond excited to get a pebble back. Please let this happen.

Will you have nice looking ones? or will they all be "sporty/plastic" types?

Coool. I remember when the OG pebble launched but I couldn't get one for myself (it wasn't available in my region and my pocket money didn't allow for it either ;) ). Looking forward to this #bitesNailsFuriously

Should they have launched crowdfunding right now?

I think this is the peak of interest in the new Pebble, especially with the announcement just being made. Maybe they don't need crowdfunding, which is great, but they still need buyers.

I'm excited and hope that the open-source nature of this leads to an ecosystem of a lot of different devices all running similar software. I'd kill to have a garmin-esque pebble with fitness + gps tracking.

I loved my pebble and ended up backing the original product and buying a second. Both broke and when I reached out to support they said there was nothing they could do...

I loved the devices but that put a pretty bad taste in my mouth for longevity

I still have mine and wear it from time to time. Can't wait for an update lol.

So people still use watch? I gave it up since I got my phone and I don't miss it yet

I loved my Pebble al the way up to when the first Apple Watch came out. Yes, the battery life is nowhere near as good but the integration into the OS was way better and they have steadily added health features that I appreciate (fall detection, afib, etc). Maybe the Pebble could match some/all of that but I have my doubts. It was a great little device but longer battery life is just not that compelling to me.

I mean sure, if you offer me hours/days more of battery I'm not going to turn it down but for me (and my lifestyle, which is not yours, I get that) I don't need more than ~16hrs. Anything longer than that just helps "catch" me if I forget to charge. And that right there gets to the crux of why >24hr batteries rarely matter to me. The only battery charging processes that work for me are either:

* Every day

* Only when it's dead or I know I'm about to use it

With my Pebble I would regularly find it dead because I lost track of how many days it had been since I charged it and I'd have to charge it at an inconvenient time. I fixed this by just charging every night. So since I'm already in that habit, a longer battery doesn't do much for me. And in case you were wondering what types of things fall in the second category for me, it's things like USB battery packs, flashlights, smart house sensors that aren't wired, Airtags, etc.

I don't use it anymore, but I still have my og pebble, and miss how well it did what I care about.

Here's hoping we can get a color screen pebble time successor, maybe with one of the buttons upgraded to a dial + button.

Whoa, amazing! I still have my OG Pebble and its RMA'ed replacement in the shelf behind me! I've always hoped for a smartwatch that comes close to it, but nothing has. This is the most awesome news! <3

This is exciting news!

There aren't many smart watches out there. I've loved what Garmin has done. I had always hoped something which would open up an ecosystem to build on. This looks promising on that front.

Such great news. I still wear the OG Kickastarter Edition every day, years after the battery on my 2nd Pebble, the Time, died. I even still sync my old iPad to it to at least keep the time in sync.

A bit once bitten twice shy for me on this one, cool though it may be.

My Pebble was not very good. The display glitched all the time, the connector to load the watch was fidgety and the display too dark. I hope the mechanical construction will be better for the new ones

Super exciting. I just found my Pebble Time again last week, and configured it with Rebble. The animations of this OS still feel so great, I hope whoever was responsible for them gets hired again.

This is fantastic! I hope you can foster a truly open, high quality, light and fast operating system that draws in multiple hardware vendors each with their own take on what a watch should be.

My pebble (my wife’s pebble that she never wore) has lost some of its plastic cover a while ago (wear and tear) and won’t turn on anymore. Truly looking forward to this project succeeding in its intent!

(could you make an account on the Fedi/Mastodon and/or Bluesky?)

I like the idea of a Pebble, but I already have a latest gen Apple Watch and a Garmin in a drawer somewhere mostly forgotten.

It’s too addicting to just buy small, cute, computer hardware. Very wasteful, not mindful.

Please please please put health tracking in it and open it up for people with chronic illnesses. There is a lot of good happening in this space for people dealing with Long Covid or CFS/MCAS

I just want to claim my bragging rights and say that I was backer #105 on Kickstarter for the original pebble. I’m happy that it’s coming back, it was such a great device.

It is so exciting, I never found anything better than my pebbles.

It would be great to have a good map system on the watch. Not a GPS but a good communication with LocusMap, OSMAND, Google Map.

How does the pebble compare to the pine time?

https://pine64.org/devices/pinetime/

Would it be possible to get news on bluesky in addition to X please?

I've got one. But I never got used to the idea of having a watch.

I'm still salty about Pebble being shuttered. Smart Watches have come a long way since then (I'm rocking Coros Pace 3 right now), but I'm excited to see where this goes.

This is amazing news, I loved my Pebble. It had such a wonderful UI.

I remember I bought a Round, and started hacking away a subpixel rendering library for it, and then it got killed.

I lost interest, but that's still the smart watch I most liked.

Why didn't the e-paper display make it in the market? It's so much better.

I also maintain an omron device with such an e-paper display to emit error messages. It's night and day

Thanks...

Great news! Loved my Pebble until it stopped working. I just hope for a new Pebble Round. The only smartwatch I really cared about due to its form factor and reduzed size.

This is amazing news!I’m glad I’ve kept my all my pebbles. The pebbles were my first smartwatches and still my favorite. Thanks for bringing them back. I wish you all the best!

I loved the idea of Pebble watches, but I found them too bulky for what they offered. I hope the relaunch focuses on the same core functionality in a much much sleeker design.

I want a screen that is always on and good-looking. Until then, it is worse than my mechanical watch. Color eInk would probably be ideal.

Besides that, I'm down for whatever.

hello I have 7 pebble watches... and a ticwatch 5pro. But that's not love. Since I'm over 50, my eyesight is getting worse. For me, the ideal would be a pebble 2hr, in a different size, with a 2" display. Good luck! Zoltan (Hungary)

I loved my pebble and still sad it died. Please use inductive charging. The metal connectors on my last one shorted when I was in a salt water pool.

The announcement from Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017

I am super excited about this! Thank you Google + Eric + everyone! My old Pebble is long gone, so the possibility of maybe buying a new one is awesome.

Exciting! I just missed the Pebble train. I’d be very interested in the resurrection!

Man, I got rid of my Pebble once they dropped support. I love my current smartwatch, but I would have loved the e-ink concept continuously iterated.

I wanted the original pebble so much when it came out but couldn't afford it.

Now, I can and still want it.

I don't remember, can it vibrate (for timer/alarm) ?

Pebble was the only smart watch that worked well with winter gloves on. I was outside a lot during university and it was a godsend.

Tangential: I haven't used a smartwatch ever. Do they have any utility in the gym? I would like to not carry around my phone in there.

Thanks! Thanks ! I love my old Peeble Steel... But my battery is old too... I would like to have pieces to repair it ? Phoenix Peeble !

cool, seems like the ideal device for something like Circa Solar as watch face

  https://www.circa.bio/

I always liked the idea of an "apparent solar time" watch face, and never did find a way to do that with Apple Watch.

You do not bring people back in the way that this website does not work in text mode.

Emacs-w3m just cannot acces it )':

That’s awesome - I worked at the pebble office a bit at one time helping with some launches. :). Good luck Eric!

Literally the best news I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Great job, looking forward to making some apps this time around!!

Please do, best smartwatch ever. If we get a LTE version so we can leave the phone at home, that would be magical.

Would be cool if it had a standard 20mm lug width so you could use it with mostly any mechanical watch strap.

If there are any devices in the future I would like a surface competitor. Not surface laptop. Just a tablet thingy.

Are all the keys for the bootloaders for all past devices available? Is all the firmware and boot code available?

This is going to make a great addition to my e-ink collection: - Remarkable Tablet - SOL Reader - Kindle

I discovered the Garmin Instinct last year, and was very happy to switch to it from my Apple Watch.

I’d actually wear my Apple Watch if I didn’t have to charge it every day. Battery life is paramount.

Love this! Wish you all would be active on BlueSky. I’d totally follow you there I can’t abide the X

I had my final pebble hardware failure just before they stopped trading. I'll give it a miss.

It's great to see them coming back! I adored my Pebble(s). 2 fun stories:

1. Pebble supported 3rd party watch faces based on a file. There was a great little site that let you use a visual UI to build the file and, if done from your phone, upload it right to the watch. Once, when out at midnight beer launch, I made a custom face for the beer and won a little keychain from the brewery. My Apple watch could never.

2. Once time in 2014, I ran into some Pebble engineers at an ice cream shop in Palo Alto, they spotted my watch, they bought my scoop! Fun, weird little Silicon Valley moment.

I’m so happy and excited about this. Garmin has been serving well but I want Pebble, now!

You need to press the "I want one" to even see how a Pebble looks like...

I'm guessing it couldn't possibly do navigation display for Google maps?

Eric going for the Steve Jobs speedrun. Risky but interesting to see how it plays out!

This is awesome. Also weird to be exited about replacing my Apple-Watch with my next Pebble.

Goodspeed!

Please, for the love of all things privacy, make this new Pebble work on Linux Phone

oh wow, I just bought a garmin a couple of weeks ago after it seemed like the rebble app was going to be increasingly unsupported on new android versions, but if this takes off I'll switch back without a second thought

Please, for the love of privacy, make this new Pebble work with Linux phones.

please add a button to start a GPT voice mode conversation or start dictating / recording an audio note -- too things I'd love to be able to do more on-the-go without having to dive into my phone!

Love how if you click no on the website it brings you to Apple Watch haha

Nice! Please consider a round watchface option too this time.

I already have 5 Pebbles and still use one of them every day.

And yes, I want more. :-D

You shouldn't have stopped when there was no alternatives.

Australia is missing from the list! We demand satisfaction!

Will it have a decent heart rate sensor? I have a very expensive Garmin smartwatch, and the heart rate sensor is absolute shite. I mean it's pretty accurate on average during steady-state anything. But if you're doing any kind of interval training or weight lifting, the readings are often utter gibberish and completely inactionable.

Looking forward to seeing your progress.

What about who has the original one? What will be new for us?

Yay. The Pebble was my favorite smart watch by a long shot.

How about some screenshots, product galleries et cetera

So cool! So inspiring that you're bringing it back!

Been waiting for this day for too long! Welcome back

Please consider a round option too this time!

I hope they will support vanilla linux phones!

i would love to see a pocket watch version some day!!

What is new since last time is AI. Can Pebble act as interface here? Or would that be the wrong fit and its niche should remain the same?

Ooof, no hardware schematics? Also missing datasheets? This projects seems like a very tall task to me without these fundamental missing pieces. Will Google release them soon or am I looking the the wrong place?

Next, how do I degoogle my Pebble?

Hardware is hard. Great to see!

I miss PalmOS anyone else?

Finally some good news.

Allerta inPulse too? ;-B

Just get a OnePlus 2R.

we live in a great timeline, finally, pebble is back

Oh man. I own an Apple Watch, but I made it a point years ago to buy an OG Pebble off eBay to be my first smartwatch, and the sheer elegance of the UX is still something I pine for. I very dearly miss the daily timeline, which was sheer UX brilliance.

Only niggle: Portugal isn't on the list, but yeah, right... Other it is.

Please make a model with mechanical dials over the Pebble screen!

How were users left when pebble got sold? It's a little disappointing to read that the OS wasn't already open source. Did they provide any information that could allow other teams recreate services or update the firmware or were people left to fend for themselves?

Soooo.. I loved my pebble. And I still have my Kickstarter one.

I don't think I'd still want one now though. My Samsung smartwatch does a lot more. Heartrate, ECG, payments, GPS. And with an acceptable battery life too.

Ps so Eric Migikovsky works for Google now? I thought he was working on beeper.

The Apple Watch is just okay but sells like 25x per year Pebble's entire lifetime sales. I guess people love their Pebbles but this seems like a lot of effort for something most people probably don't want.

Interesting. I wish there would be someone doing reBlackBerry, but even if it happens, there will be narrow pool of users I imagine. Kids are too used to brainless videos as opposed to thoughtful information exchange

Congrats Eric!

Lets goooooooo

Still "daily driving" my burgundy[0] Pebble... hoodie/fleece!

(It's impressive quality company swag.)

@erohead, when you're at the stage of needing a kick-ass RePebble SDK developed & supported again[1], you know where to find me. :)

lol @ the FAQ: "Aren’t you the guy who screwed this up last time?"

Also, while looking through the repo, I'd totally forgotten the alphabetically ordered fast-food themed release code names which included the "Kiwiburger" (a global chain's local product that contains neither the bird nor the fruit) that I now wonder how many people it confused. :)

The "Kiwiburger" code name release also happened to coincide with the inclusion of "Simplicity" (a watch face I designed & implemented) as one of the standard faces shipped with each Pebble watch by default.

I was particularly proud of the inclusion of "Simplicity"--especially when Engadget subsequently said it was "...sure to make minimalists happy" which was what I was aiming for. (I seem to recall it also gave me the opportunity to say "Hey, I designed that watch face!" when I saw a Pebble watch on display at an airport duty free store once. :D )

Anyway, I should probably get this memoir off to the publishers[3]. :)

----

[0] Oh, sorry, apparently it's cranberry. :)

[1] I helped develop & support the very well-received initial SDK that enabled "Hacker Backers" and others to create their first Pebble watch faces & watch apps.

It was quite an experience to be working on the SDK remotely from New Zealand[1a] and then have the initial public SDK release immediately covered by the likes of TechCrunch[1b], The Verge[1c] and Engadget. (An SDK! :D )

There was a lot of pent-up interest/demand for the SDK so it was really great to see how excited people were when they successfully implemented their first watch face or (later) watch app. In many/most cases this was the person's first experience of anything approaching "embedded" programming--there was a lot of effort put into removing as many barriers from the development experience as possible, so it was really rewarding to see people succeed.

(Initially the process still required a locally installed embedded development environment, so even with all the effort invested to reduce barriers it still wasn't a simple process but turns out people were really motivated. :) It also turned out that I was really motivated to script/automate & simplify the process simply to avoid having to write documentation covering a more manual process. :D )

It was also super cool to see people then develop other (particularly web-based) tools to enable people with even less technical experience/skill to still create e.g. a custom watch face with their favourite sports team logo or the family dog featured on it.

I mention all this in part to reminisce and in part to convey some of what the mood around Pebble was at the time for those who may not have been around *cough* nearly fifteen years ago and were wondering what (part of) the "big deal" was...

An early version of the SDK documentation is archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130415083512/http://developer....

[1a] via this HN Jobs post IIRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4132957

[1b] https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/12/pebble-watchface-sdk-now-a...

[1c] https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/15/4228700/pebble-tetris-clo...

[2] https://github.com/google/pebble/blob/3b927684809fba173ee540...

[3] Okay, one last note: interesting to observe it was suddenly a lot more difficult to find Pebble/SDK related links from ~2012/2013 due to the amount of coverage the PebbleOS/RePebble announcements seem to have received. Read into that what you wish. :)

STL please!

HECK YES

I'm still disappointed that the pebble core was pulled. A pebble like watch with connectivity might get me interested again.

more data for Google

I honestly wouldn't touch anything these founders make. They're really good at hyping things up and then selling (Pebble & Beeper)

well, now everyone will know about the `show dog` command :)

...good memories working with the pebble team back in 2013 as a coop student <3

uhhh are you sure you won't get a trademark dispute?

More buttons please.

Hell yeah!

Google has become cool again!

Fool me once...

A man cannot step in the same river twice.

I like how clicking no takes you to a far superior product (apple watch)

> PebbleOS is now open source

> Proprietary source code has been removed from this repository and it will not compile as-is.

So much for “open source”. Must have been some nasty telemetry in this OS.

I don't understand the excitement. It's just a watch.

Whatever you get at the end of this is probably going to be overpriced and underwhelming.