In 2008, a team started working on what many today still consider to be one of the best wearables of all time; the Pebble e-Ink smartwatch. The company, unfortunately, failed and the guts of it all was bought by FitBit, and ultimately Google. Today, the original founders have announced that Google has open-sourced the operating system behind the watches; PebbleOS. And now, there’s a new Pebble e-Ink smartwatch coming, apparently.
Isn’t this exciting.
What is the Pebble e-Ink Smartwatch?
My first smart wearable was a Pebble e-Ink smartwatch. I loved it. It was the OG conversation starter. I worked in a phone shop and had countless people asking about this nigh-on impossible to buy in Ireland piece of tech.
In fact, I’m sure I still have it somewhere, buried in a box of old tech. I could never bring myself to throw it out because it was a Kickstart Founders Edition. Full transparency, I bought it second hand and wasn’t actually a backer myself.
The watch was amazing. The battery life, thanks to the e-Ink technology, was incredible. None of your “charge every night” Apple nonsense.
This shaped my expectation for wearables for years to come. Huawei wearables, with week-long batteries, or my wearable of choice now, Garmin which uses a similar approach to watch faces, cut the mustard.
The Pebble was as simple as it was genius. But it failed, despite millions of units being sold and the founder, Eric Migicovsky, stating he still knows people with functioning Pebbles today (I think my cable broke).
Pebble to Make a New Smartwatch
Owing to the simple fact that to this day no-one has made the perfect smartwatch in his eyes, Migicovsky has said he is bringing back Pebble, which you can learn about at rePebble.com. He plans to make a watch which is almost identical, “in almost every way”, to the original Pebble.
That means an e-ink screen, really long battery life, simple user experience and physical buttons. He promises that the new Pebble will also be “hackable”, allowing users to create their own watch faces, taking aim at several features expensive Apple Watch’s omit today.
One massive change I expect to see after reading his blog post on this, is that the new Pebble won’t use proprietary charging ports. Leading me to believe this will simply be a smartwatch that charges via USB-C. However, smartwatches are typically exempt from EU law requiring USB-C, so that remains to be seen.
Regardless, I’m really excited to see one of the OG gadgets that I was playing with right back at the start of my Goosed journey, is coming back for seconds.
