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I bought a watch in 2003 or so and it cost about £120.

I have never worried about powering it - the face is a solar power trickle charger. I can barely generate enough vitamin D for myself but my watch can power itself from the sun here!

My watch's time is accurate to within my perception. I run a little fleet of stratum 1 NTP devices and I set my watch roughly bi-annually, whether it needs it or not! The day of week and day of month indicators have gone a big shag. I think a tooth might have been sheared off but I simply ignore them.

My eyes are a bit 50 something on top of short sighted and astigmatism, yet I can still read the time at any time of the day or night.

I get that I can't read my email on it, nor can it take my pulse but I'm not too sure I'm missing anything.

For me the #1 feature of a smartwatch is it allows me to take out my phone a lot less and keep it entirely silent without missing important calls or texts. I can filter down my notifications to just the essentials and when one comes in I feel the vibration on my wrist and can tell at a glance if it is important or not. My phone never makes a sound, not even vibration.

Other things I enjoy are having weather/stock prices on the watch face, using Android's "Extend Unlock" feature to reduce the overhead of unlocking my phone, turn-by-turn directions displayed during navigation.

The fitness sensors/features are just toys IMO. I'm convinced people spend money on fitness trackers in a vain attempt to guilt themselves into exercising, rather than because they're actually useful. Unfortunately the market for "exercise guilt trip talisman" is larger than the market for "small, comfortable phone companion" and so nobody makes a watch without protruding sensors anymore.

I got a google pixel watch, and thought, "Oh Cool I can use it to pay with my watch!".Unfortunately, for that to happen it requires a pin which means it's locked all the time.

If the watch is locked while riding a bike say, it's near impossible to unlock it.

"it allows me to take out my phone a lot less and keep it entirely silent without missing important calls or texts"

Fair enough - there are rather more nerves on your wrist than wherever your phone is situated near to. I suppose that might depend on pocket shape and deployment and a few other factors!

OK so a vibrating watch will trump a vibrating phone in most cases - for notifications. That sounds like a compelling thing but not enough for a device that needs charging and care.

Now, how important are those calls and texts? At least you are old school enough to worry about a phone and SMS. Most kiddies are ... ...

Each social and comms app that you use can notify you but what is actually important and which should be able to shake your wrist? I personally think my physical person is nearly sacrosanct. I'll allow a phone to shudder in a pocket and no more.

Counterpoint, but I use the fitness tracking in reverse, as I have CFS and have to be careful about how much energy I spend. When I get a notification that I've reached my "goal", I know I need to rest so I don't overdo it. It's also useful for tracking how much sleep I get, so I can get a sense for how much I can do that day. Not the typical use-case, but it's really helpful for pacing!

> The fitness sensors/features are just toys IMO.

Not completely wrong, however they're very useful for tracking trends and that's a useful thing to do.

is it a g shock or casio variant? the new ones can read email and take your pulse too

It wouldn’t be HN without a comment like this.

“Why even use the internet? You can live just fine without it. Pen and paper doesn’t crash like a computer does. Electric lights? Candles are fine.”

I own an IT company. Why not read my comment for what it was and not assume what you think I am or are or whatevs?

> The smartwatch everyone wants has a battery that lasts for weeks,

I have both a Garmin and an AW S10. I really don't get why Apple doesn't get this. They insist on putting over powered SOCs in their systems and then shrug off the battery life with, "well now you can charge it to 80% in 30min!" Sure, but that still sucks.

An e-ink/cholesteric LCD Apple Watch Air would really be an out-of-the-blue product.

There would be a bit of an existential crisis for customers to figure out whether they wanted basic timekeeping and motivations, or real-time fitness tracking.

> "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."

The Garmin watches that have a MIP (Memory In Pixel) display already cover most of that, provided you avoid using some of the more power hungry features that the Pebbles never had anyway. What is the Pebble Watch's value proposition in 2025?

I gave up trying new smartwatches after three or four bad ones. I haven't tried the recent Garmins. But looking at the current products, they seem like giant ugly bricks compared to the Pebble Time Round, which I believe still wears the crown of thinnest smartwatch ever made (and not by a little bit either). I very much doubt the software compares either (either on the watch side or the phone side).

Compared to _Garmin_? The Pebble UI and OS will run circles around it. Intuitive, fast, and amazing.

Do you think Garmin watches are displaying the seconds late or something?

The aesthetics are different enough that a comparison doesn't seem that interesting.

I use Linux daily; the Garmin interface is painless by comparison, dohohoho.

More seriously, yeah it could be more intuitive and consistent. But I sat down, read through the manual end to end, and now I'm fine with it.

I use a Fenix 6X Pro and it's a great exercise tracker with notifications. I don't see it as a smartwatch though. You can't reply to messages beyond stock replies or visit an url. I'm yet to find an interesting app and I find the UI cumbersome whenever you want to do something.

I still think it's a great watch and I love the battery life. I just believe it's possible to make something so much better. I don't know if Pebble is the answer but I welcome them trying.

I was rocking my Pebble 2 until the iOS app finally rotted out of the app store a few years ago and switched to Casios.

I agree with the above. The limitations are what made Pebble so special. I recommend everyone take a crack at writing an app for Pebble someday; it's a ton of fun to write with such a limited C API.

I can't wait for the comeback. Now that it's open source, I hope we see open competition on the hardware front as well (the way we have retro handhelds and e-readers).

Time to dust off the code for that Time-Round Pong app I started in 2015...

pebble the company reminds me of teenage engineering

Except reasonably priced :)

But not financially solvent either. Maybe at higher volumes their pricing model would have worked but that wasn't the reality of the market.

They weren't that far off though. They basically just didn't have any funds to use in case of (strategic) emergencies, couldn't outmaneuver a few mistakes they made.