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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

I loved, loved, loved my Pebble Time. It did everything I wanted out of a smart watch, especially eliminating my phone-checking habit, because I was always on top of whether new emails were worth reading, it was a sanity saver during an intense M&A process. Also, it somehow had a super long-lived battery, and it had so much more personality than most electronic devices, with its little 8-bittish animated icons, reminded me of a Gameboy Advance or something. Thanks for making one of my favorite devices of the last decade, Eric.

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And the battery life!! My first Pebble still had about 7 days of battery life after ~6 years of use, just unreal. I think it was rated for 10 at launch. Seeing 10% battery usually means I'm good for a day, maybe two.

I'm on my second Pebble Time Steel now - I only had to get a new one because the waterproofing failed while I was surfing!

I've had two separate instances of strangers (in Sydney) coming up to me and bumping their wrist to my wrist, because they also had a Pebble and recognised mine. Really lovely community.

Oh, that's crazy that it still lasts 7 days. I guess it's had a lot fewer cycles than a smartphone battery typically gets in that time, because of the long battery life.

And looking on eBay, used Pebbles are actually surprisingly affordable, like $20-50.

used Amazfit Bip cost also nothing and will still last you 3 weeks with always on display and Bluetooth enabled, Pebbles are overrated

Same. The Bip has a 30 day battery life. There's no SDK though so it's not as tinker friendly but when used with Gadgetbridge I get the privacy and some neat features on top. Plus there's a pretty big online community around hacking it.

Overrated? By who? The amazfit came out like 2 years ago, Pebble launched with 7 day battery in 2012...

overrated since 2018 release of Amazfit Bip, yes, it has more features than Bip but they are hardly usable on such small screen anyway

No 3rd party apps for the watch of any kind, it has no ecosystem. I had one, and yes the battery time was good, but everything else about it was sub-par.

And how useful is that on Pebble sized screen? I can read all notifications on Bip (that's reason I bought it for), answer/reject calls, track all my vital signs, use it as navigation, use it as flashlight in night (that's second most used feature besides checking the time/date) and with little hacking I could use it as remote control for music player.

Please list useful apps I am missing and which are usable on small watch screen, because anything requiring typing is certainly not useful and it's horrible experience and I never use some predefined quick replies.

Obviously Bip with open system would be ideal, but if I have to choose between expensive abandoned old thick Pebble with crappy battery life but abandoned dead ecosystem of apps and cheap ultrathin light Bip with amazing battery life in weeks with all basic features one can require, it's easy choice and reason why nobody knows Pebble besides few nerds, why the company failed, but Bip is much more known about ordinary people and its brand still going strong (sadly with transreflective displays and amazing battery life abandoned).

One app I used quite often on the Pebble is a TOTP app, where I could retrieve my code from anywhere, even if I forgot my phone that day. Since the battery life was awesome, it was comforting knowing I wouldn't get locked out of my stuff easily.

I also used an app to see a camera preview from my phone and as a remote shutter, I also relied on NavMe to see the Google Maps direction while walking or while riding a bike.

Another app I was using was to send HTTP requests to toggle some of my IoT stuff, that was quite handy too.

IIRC the quick replies could be entirely customized, and I found myself using them quite often.

fair enough, TOTP ain't possible on Bip, though camera shutter and navigation are both available

but those things you described as not available are extreme niche, so Bip would be still winner for most of the people

I'm actually shocked that battery life wasn't mentioned at all in this article. A watch that you don't have to charge for a week+ was Pebble's #1 differentiator. No other smart watch had that feature, and (almost) no other smart watch has it today in 2022.

The super lightweight C-based runtime and eInk display combination was a genius move. But I'm not sure they realize it, even in hindsight, other than alluding to the "geeky/hacker user base." As one of those geeky hackers, I didn't buy the watch because it looked like an off-brand Casio calculator, I bought it (and came back to buy the Pebble Steel and Time 2) because I don't have to plug the damn thing in every night. And I'd buy another one today if I could.

> No other smart watch had that feature, and (almost) no other smart watch has it today in 2022.

That's not really true, unless your definition of a smartwatch is limited to Apple/Android devices with LED displays. I use Garmin Fenix with a transflective display which lasts about 2 weeks on a single charge. However, like with Pebble, there are some tradeoffs: the display is not as bright (but clearly visible in the sun), it has less colors, and the screen resolution is lower.

There are two definitions of "smart" :

- having a wide set of capabilities

- being sufficiently open so that an "ecosystem" of third party developers can form

I assume that Garmin Fenix succeeds at the first one, but fails the second ?

It may not be as open as the Pebble, but Garmin does have a development ecosystem - :

https://developer.garmin.com/

> The super lightweight C-based runtime and eInk display combination was a genius move.

Pebble didn't use eInk. It used transflective LCD.

Personally I think it was a mistake to market the transflective LCD as "E-Paper" when eInk was already an established product. They're very different technologies and people still get them confused.

I agree. I suspect someone at Pebble did that on purpose because I asked specifically about this during their kickstarter and they declined to change their wording.

Numerous Garmin smart watches sold since at least 2019 have over week of battery life. Mine would probably last 2 weeks if I didn't use the GPS every day.

I have a Garmin Instinct, the battery life is insane. Using the GPS for on average an hour a day I get a week to a week and a half on one charge. Without using the GPS at all it can go 3-4 weeks.

I've always thought it ludicrous that a smartwatch (like the Apple watch) should have to be charged daily - makes it pretty much useless to me, especially if it can't even tell the time! I realise that the latest Apple watches last longer but I still find them overengineered and ridiculous.

Since nobody else seems to have mentioned it, I'll mention that I've been delighted to have an AmazFit Bip (with a 176x176 colour e-ink transflective screen) on my wrist for almost 4 years now (I previously had a Pebble) and it still goes at least 3 weeks between charges (previously more like 4 weeks) despite being connected to Bluetooth, taking my pulse every few minutes, and selectively relaying notifications to my wrist.

See https://m.gsmarena.com/amazfit_bip_review_another_shot_at_th... for details but many models have been released in the years since 2018, with higher resolution screens, they last even longer between charges ("up to 45 days") plus allow you to reply with preset messages and control music (sadly lacking from the model I have especially since the Pebble could do that) so perhaps I should treat myself to an upgrade sometime.

> with a 176x176 colour e-ink transflective screen

Citation needed. afaik no such technology as "e-ink transflective screen" exists yet although there were some startups trying to propose such concepts.

I think you mean "transflective lcd screen" which is not e-ink.

I often hear about the great battery life of the Pebble watch, and that there is no smart watch with a comparable one. Thats kind of true, depending what one wants from their smart watch. But there actually is an alternative if you only need basic smart watch capabilites: Sport Watches. I personally only want notifications from my phone, which my Garmin Forerunner 245 can do perfectly well. And it has a battery life of up to 2 weeks, depending on how much I use the GPS of the watch.

Yeah but the issue with a lot of sport watches are they have a "tacticool" look that doesn't look very fashionable, the Pebble had the unique aspect of having models that looked stylish while still maintaining their battery life.

Fashion is what you define it to be.

Also, maybe a customer will remember the sporty watch contrasting with the formal suit, and call you instead of a competitor.

Also, Zuckerberg wears t-shirts and jeans.

Nobody would want to fuck Zuck though.

Are you implying Zuckerberg is fashionable? I'm not sure I've ever seen a positive comment about his appearance, in fact he's usually said to not even look like a living human

you have the venu sq, that looks nice, not the best battery however, but 5-6 days it's not bad.

Withings wins that particular narrow field handily, their watches do about four things: notify, tell time, track steps, and heart rate.

But they have real hands, and the 'smart' part is subtle enough that most people just see a watch, a couple weeks battery is realistic as well.

Pebble hit a sweet spot in terms of how much you can do with it, while being good looking with a hardy battery. If we limit the comparison to the last two of those things, Withings is in the lead, not to mention still actively sold and supported.

> I often hear about the great battery life of the Pebble watch, and that there is no smart watch with a comparable one.

My Fitbit Versa 3 has a week long battery life, can do Google/ Alexa Assistant, Google Maps, Spotify, GPS, health montoring, voice response to text messages although it does use its own Pay system. I think what they mean is that Samsung and Apple don't have watches with comparable battery life.

I would still switch back to my Pebble if they made it again.

that's pretty horrible battery life, with original Amazfit Bip you can have easily 35-40 days battery life out of the box and even after years 20-25+ days with always readable display, always on Bluetooth, I'm now on my second one since first one fall apart, then I had short stint with OLED smart watch which lasted only few days and had problem to read it outdoors until I gave up and after few months bought used Amazfit Bip for 20USD, which serves me until now

actually main reason why not go for Pebble instead Amazfit Bip would be for me extremely short battery life (and huge bezel mentioned in article) and price, while hardly offering more useful features worth the disadvantages

Sadly, mine last only a day now, so I switched to the "Bangle.js 2" which I ordered during the Kickstarter. I believe it's based on the SMA-Q3 but with a reverse-engineered firmware (Espruino) and apps are all JavaScript-based.

https://hackaday.io/project/175577-hackable-nrf52840-smart-w...

https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2

My Pebble 2 still has 7 days of battery life to this day :-)

I managed to procure a couple of cheap spare Pebbles over the years in case this one ever gives up the ghost but I'm unlikely to ever give the platform up so long as GadgetBridge supports it, I also wrote some software for it that I still use every day to track my working hours (it had a C SDK).

I'm also stunned at how much better it was at connecting and staying connected to every single phone I've owned.

Every other smartwatch I've tried (a couple fitbits, fossils, etc) has been absurdly flaky. It's common for all of them to just not react to notifications for a couple hours. Or they'll connect to some wifi but not others (why wifi anyway!?? it's insane! it's SO much more complicated!). Or their apps have utterly monstrous installation and/or permissions setups (looking at you in particular, Fitbit) and any connection they use breaks randomly every few days.

If I could just get another, I'd stick with a pebble time for probably a decade. It did almost everything right.

You're right, the connection was rock solid in a way that bluetooth basically never is. And I don't know how that didn't wreck its battery life. Even my Airpods give me grief every now and then, and those are often held up as the exception to the rule that is bluetooth being crap. I think that was why I liked it so much, it was a tool I could trust to just work consistently. Tech doesn't have enough of those outside of Unix CLI tools.

I just looked them up on eBay, looks like you can get another for <$50.

I wonder if there's going to be a Pebble maintenance scene in 20 years, I wouldn't be too surprised if there was.

Sort of like how retro IBM Thinkpads have all sorts of modifications from new motherboards to screens? I can see something like that happening, I was on the verge of purchasing a Pebble when they announced their doom ^W acquisition via Fitbit.

I really hope so. I wear my Time Steel daily and will probably continue to do so as long as I can get parts for it. I've seen some guides out there on replacing the screen and battery, but so far I haven't had to crack mine open.

I'd estimate I still get about 5 days of battery (depending on how much solitaire I play, or how long I use the speedometer app).

(ex Pebbler here) Pebble had - I believe - the most stable Bluetooth stack out there. This was due to two things:

1. Extremely talented Bluetooth engineers. Chris and Martijn were second to none.

2. Very good diagnostics tools built in house. When a user complained of connectivity issues, we could take a snapshot of the state of their Bluetooth stack. This gave us amazing insights into what was going wrong- more often than not we found that iOS and Android were doing something unexpected (we had lots of workarounds for their bugs). FWIW a few of us went on to start a company to build more of those hardware debug tools: Memfault (W19).

Thanks for building something I loved for many years. I rocked my round pebble until the screen finally died. Such a lovely decice

Now how can we get the all-buying eye of the Garmin acquisition strategy team to look in that direction?

If Memfault ever want to end the standalone external tool supplier gambit and return to being in-house expertise, sounds like they could be very useful there. Not because Garmin's BT is so terrible (it has improved a lot but still far from perfect), but because Garmin seems to be the smallest living company that still builds their own stack down to the lower levels instead of hitching a ride on something like an Android fork.

Ex-Garmin engineer here. There are pockets of the company that use Android, and a bunch of the larger-scale systems have moved to using embedded Linux with Yocto.

The proprietary RTOS that runs on the watches is a super cool embedded system dating back to the earliest days of the company. It grew across all the product lines - watches, nav units, aviation equipment, marine chartplotters/sensors, etc. I remember once stumbling on some code written in the very early days by an engineer who went on to be the CEO while I was there.

It was a fun system to work on, and had an impressive amount of code sharing at the OS-level across platforms as tiny as Cortex M0 systems up to large multi-core ARM SoCs from TI and other vendors.

Thanks for the glimpse! My personal Garmin angle is cycling, which eventually that also "infected" my left wrist. When they first came under pressure in cycling from leaner competitors that are deep into the outsourcing game, I was interested to the point of pre-ordering. But since then I've learned more about the company and have come to respect them in an entirely unexpected way, for being that almost anachronistic twentieth century remnant that just keeps staying in the high tech innovation game. The mix of continuity and openness to change you describe sounds just right for that.

No kidding. What's even more amazing is that the Bluetooth is still that reliable today, more than 5 years after support ended, communicating with new devices with new Bluetooth chips and new OS versions. Every time I get a new phone or upgrade my version of Android I expect it to break, and somehow it never does.

Curious, have you owned an apple watch? I’ve had exactly zero problems with connectivity, never even occurred to me until now.

Since it only works with iphones, no.

This. People underestimate the challenge of making a Bluetooth device compatible with hundreds if not thousands of different Bluetooth enabled phones.

You can always still run you Pebble Time with Rebble [0] :) I still use mine to this day!

[0] https://rebble.io/

I pulled mine out of storage a few weeks ago to resurrect it as a display for my EUC, and was surprised by it yet again. The fast refresh and good visibility is just so pleasant to use. Rebble was much easier to set up than I had assumed it would be, and isn't missing anything as far as I can tell.

Thanks for the link! I actually stopped wearing it at the end of the M&A process, because of how stressful the the M&A process was. As much as I liked the device, I started getting a bit of a negative Pavlovian reaction to the wrist buzzes, because the contents of the emails tended to be pretty stressful. I intended it to be a short digital detox, but since then, I've only worn the dumbest of dumbwatches. But maybe it's time to give it another go, it'd be great to have it help kill off my phone checking habit again. It's truly awesome that the fact that it was so open has allowed it to live past its parent company.

Yeah I turned of email notifications on my pebble (and quite a few other apps), but I still use it for a quick check if someone texts or whatever.

Oh cool! A friend worked at Pebble and I volunteered to run a Pebble hackathon in 2014 (sticker is still on my old macbook) and for my time they gave me a Pebble Time Steel and even a little wood panel sticker for the front. I knew they ceased operations but I did not know about rebble! I will have to check it out. I think I know exactly where my pebble is.

Unfortunately only if they still work. I went through 3 of them that failed due to the screen corrupting.

This might be helpful in that regard https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Fix+E-Paper+Tearing/6470....

This was the end of both my kickstarter Pebble and my Pebble Steel. I adored my steel - it was such a great watch.

I struggled for years to find a replacement and eventually settled on a Skagen Jorn Hybrid because the long battery life, notifications for calls and always accurate time are the most important features to me. I don't need to read notifications, I just want an accurate and long lasting watch with critical notifications only. They look like classic watches as well, so they fit in very well in corporate environments.

I'd recommend them to anyone else who feels a little lost after their pebble died.

I loved my pebble time, but it has been absolutely infuriating that I can't manually set the date and time on the watch. I no longer have an android phone and I can't use Rebble. I would continue to use this watch if I could change the damn time but alas, another piece of waste in my life. I am going to get rid of it

At least resell it. Plenty of people out there still using them.

Same. I was devastated when I broke it. I would probably still be wearing it. My modern smart watch really doesn't do much more - except perhaps keeping track of my heart rate.

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