Why We’re Bringing Pebble Back

Eric Migicovsky, on his blog, Why We’re Bringing Pebble Back:

You’d imagine that smartwatches have evolved considerably since 2012. I've tried every single smart watch out there, but none do it for me. No one makes a smartwatch with the core set of features I want:

• Always-on e-paper screen (it’s reflective rather than emissive. Sunlight readable. Glanceable. Not distracting to others like a bright wrist)

• Long battery life (one less thing to charge. It’s annoying to need extra cables when traveling)

• Simple and beautiful user experience around a core set of features I use regularly (telling time, notifications, music control, alarms, weather, calendar, sleep/step tracking)

• Buttons! (to play/pause/skip music on my phone without looking at the screen)

• Hackable (apparently you can’t even write your own watchfaces for Apple Watch? That is wild. There were >16k watchfaces on the Pebble appstore!)

It doesn’t cease to amaze me how after all this years, people still expects hackability in Apple devices. Apple has been phasing out all things hackable for years, AppleScript being one of the last things I know of.

Other than that, this is a nice list of features for a new smartwatch device.

I myself have been looking for a good smartwatch, although my requirements are more modest. My diggings led me to the Casio DW-H5600, but after reading about its reliability in tracking steps and sleep, it seems that the good options are all in Garmin.

I don’t want something that expensive, and I don’t want notifications in my wrist. If anything, I want less notifications, not more.

The challenge has always been, at its heart, software. It’s the beautifully designed, fun, quirky operating system (OS) that makes Pebble a Pebble.

I want to see that