The Return of Pebble: You Can't Keep a Good Watch Down!

Eight years after the demise of both the watch and the company behind it, at the tail end of last month we learned that the Pebble smartwatch is coming back from the dead.

Back in 2016 amongst rumours of Fitbit buying Pebble for “a small amount,” I wrote about the coming demise of Pebble as a platform.

Pebble was a pioneer of the wearables market, launching its first smartwatch back in 2012, which is two whole years before the Apple Watch was announced. But after turning down an offer of $740 million by Citizen back in 2015 the company struggled financially, eventually being acquired by Fitbit for just $23 million only a year later.

The story of the death of the company has been well documented, the company founder Eric Migicovsky was interviewed by Wired not long after the sale to Fitbit, and later wrote extensively on why the company failed.

While the demise of Pebble didn’t kill the wearables market, it did define it, and after a shaky start in the rubble of Pebble’s failure the Apple Watch has now gone on to lead the wearables market by focusing down almost exclusively on health and fitness as the killer application for the smartwatch.

After buying Fitbit back in January 2021 for $2.1 billion, Google inherited the intellectual property of Pebble and the announcement last week from Migicovsky that “we’re bringing Pebble back” was right alongside the announcement from Google that PebbleOS was being open sourced. Having had some exposure to Google’s internal politics, that’s not something that just happened  —  and I’m not the only one to think so — and it’s obviously a huge driver for the rebooted Pebble.

It’s unclear right now whether the rebooted Pebble will be a hardware and software clone of the original Pebble, or perhaps something based around the unreleased hardware from the company’s aborted final Kickstarter.

What changes there are they’re not going to be major. The new hardware will be an evolution rather than an revolution, “It’s going to be a Pebble and almost exactly as you remember it, except now with open source software that can you can modify and improve yourself. More hardware details will be shared in the future,” said Migicovsky, and while you might think that smartwatches, and the wearable market in general, has evolved since the demise of Pebble, it hasn’t.

What Pebble had and successors don’t seem to have imitated well, or honestly most cases at all, is what made Pebble beloved amongst those that bought it. Beloved enough that long after the company that produced it died, the hardware they shipped is still going strong.

Like Apple’s Newton before it, the abandoned Pebble hardware has lived on within an active community. For the last eight years the volunteer Rebble team has maintained the Pebble appstore and related web services. Harking back to the original Pebble hackathon in Boulder back in 2015, the Rebble team also hosted their own hackathon back in 2022, and preparations are underway for another week-long hackathon next month.

The reason that after eight years, which amounts to a lifetime in the industry, Pebble is coming back is everything to do with what made Pebble different to today’s smartwatches.

Most of the smartwatches we’ve seen since Pebble have been built around a flexible OLED screen rather than the electronic paper display used by the Pebble. But while those screens have advantages, it means that today’s smartwatches have much shorter battery life than the Pebble. The Apple Watch has an 18 hour battery life, meaning it’s going to have to be charged every night. The Pebble, with it electronic paper display, only needed to be charging once a week. The Pebble’s display was also “always on,” which meant that you could glance at your wrist and the time would be right there, no special gestures or button pushes needed. It turned out that knowing what time it was is something that a lot people wanted out of a watch.

The Pebble was also hackable, extremely so. Not only was it was relatively easy create new faces for the watch, and write applications, the hardware itself was hackable.

The company’s second Kickstarter even introduced the smartstrap that could well have become a driver for innovation in the wearable market, making Pebble a platform rather than a product, and it the hub for your wearables rather than your phone. Unfortunately, despite setting up a million dollar fund to encourage development, and running a hackathon, developer excitement was pretty muted.

So this time around Migicovsky intends to keep things simple. “I’m building a small, narrowly focused company to make these watches. I don’t envision raising money from investors, or hiring a big team. The emphasis is on sustainability. I want to keep making cool gadgets and keep Pebble going long into the future,” said Migicovsky.

The new watch will run the newly open sourced PebbleOS, and will be backwards compatible with existing Pebble apps and watchfaces, all of which have been kept on life support since the original Pebble’s demise, and things seem to be progressing rapidly with the newly open sourced OS already up and running on new Nordic nRF52840-based hardware.

The progress is perhaps unsurprising given the general enthusiasm for the announcement and how that community has reacted to the news, with work getting put into tasks like the ability building Pebble watch faces on modern systems.

If you owned a Pebble back in the day  —  or even if you didn’t  —  and you’re interested in getting involved in the open source effort behind the new Pebble, you can. All of the software has been open sourced and spread across two GitHub organisations: the Rebble.io team repos, and the Core Devices repos  —  for bringing up PebbleOS to run on new hardware.

The community are mostly organising on the Rebble Discord in #firmware-dev for PebbleOS development, #mobile-app for iOS and Android development, along with #app-dev for applicaton and watchface development. There’s also that hackathon next month organised by the team at Rebble, so if you’re just getting started, and didn’t will be lots of people all in one space who can try to answer questions.

A lot of people are getting excited, and I’ll admit I’m one of them. Which I think tells us a lot about the current state of the smartwatch and wearables ecosystem.

Because, despite Migicovsky intentions, that “…the new watch we’re building basically has the same specs and features as Pebble, though with some fun new stuff as well. It runs open source PebbleOS, and it’s compatible with all Pebble apps and watchfaces,” I think the timing for the announcement is really rather interesting.

I talked recently at Particle’s Spectra conference about wearable AI, something that’s being advocated  —  at least by some  —  as the next form factor for computing. Something that could replace the ubiquitous black rectangle we all carry with us these days. We seem to be standing in a place, once again, where a small lever could potentially be made move the world.

However, while we’ve seen a number of recent attempts  —  most notably the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI Pin  —  so far things haven’t gone well.

Shrouded in mystery before it finally launched a product, Humane AI Pin is  —  or perhaps more accurately was  —  a fascinating case study in hubris, with a launch that reminds me very much of Kamen’s launch of the Segway or Google’s launch of Glass.

While the failure of Google Glass was down to its users pushing back against a product that didn’t do what they wanted, or perhaps more correctly, did things they didn’t want it to do. The failure of the Humane AI Pin was users pushing back against a product that just didn’t work.

The Apple Newton is perhaps the most well know poster child for the saying that, behind every successful idea is the same idea done by someone else, just too early. Interestingly the Humane pin wasn’t Apple Newton of the wearable AI category. That privilege goes to the now almost totally forgotten Pebble Core.

Part of the company’s final Kickstarter all the way back in 2016  —  well before large language models were a thing  —  and before the company was bought by Fitbit and stripped down for parts, Pebble Core was a smartphone in a box without a screen with access to Amazon’s Alexa allowing you to ask it to perform tasks on your behalf. It was supposed to serve as the hub of your personal computing, a platform for other wearables and device manufacturers to build around. The Pebble Core was a prototype that just never made it to become a product, but it was still there first, and you have to wonder whether this might be the “fun new stuff” that Migicovsky mentions.

Almost fifty years ago now two men named Steve built a business out of hardware that  —  at least for a while  —  was the most valuable company the world has ever seen.

But as time passed, hardware became more complicated, so much more complicated that it became that much harder to build a business around it.

The dot com revolution happened because, for a few thousand or even just a few hundred dollars, anyone could have an idea and build a software startup. Today building hardware is easier than its ever been, it’s still hard to do well, but getting from prototype to product is that much easier.

Brought down for the most part by totally misjudging the wearables market, Pebble had real potential and a track record of building usable devices. But today for the same money sort of money it took to build a software business a decade ago, you can now build a business selling things, actual goods, and the secret there is that you don’t have to train a whole generation of people into realising that physical objects are worth money the same way people had to be trained to realise that software was worth money. It’s going to be interesting to see what Migicovsky and his new company Core Devices is going to be able to do, and whether the return of the Pebble will be a reintroduction, a reinvention, or the next form factor for mobile computing.