Twelve years ago, I was traveling to the UK in the summer with my wife and then-tiny kids. And on my wrist was a Pebble watch.
I still go overseas each summer to visit my in-laws, but my kids are taller than me now and my beard is grayer. But this year, I had the chance to put a new Pebble Time 2 on my wrist for a while during the trip, and it brought back a lot of the old smartwatch feelings from the 2010s. Now that I’m back home, it has found its way onto my wrist again. That surprised me, because Pebble’s comeback is remarkably well done. It also turns out that smartwatches haven’t changed all that much over the past 12 years — or have they?
The $225 Pebble Time 2 is part of a new wave of Pebble watches that includes a round model arriving in about a month. But it isn’t like the Pebbles of old. It’s a nicer piece of hardware, done up to look and feel retro. In that sense, nostalgia may be playing tricks on my memory. The Time 2 has a backlit color screen and buttons on both sides to control the interface, but it also has a touchscreen (which old Pebbles never had). It also offers optical heart-rate tracking and basic step and fitness features. More importantly, you can download a vast selection of classic Pebble apps and watch faces for free.
A new Pebble mobile app syncs the watch up, and it’s refreshingly clean and easy to use. I got on my feet fast via an iPhone and was able to load up watch faces and apps quickly, too.
Scott Stein/CNET
Goofy watch faces are back, baby
Watch faces were the best thing about the earlier versions of the Pebble — and they still are. There are plenty of clever, weird, janky, useful and downright ugly Pebble faces to try, many of which play fast and loose with copyright. (I found Kirby and Sonic watch faces; please let them stay.)
The Pebble displays the weather, counts steps, automatically tracks walks and sleep, and quickly syncs notifications. It’s all very functional, but I miss some of the Apple Watch’s finesse. Simple tasks such as muting notifications or silencing vibrations require more taps and fiddling on the Pebble. It’s swim-friendly, and its silicone band fits snugly. I like the clean steel case: It gives me a bit of Pebble Time Steel throwback feelings.
The Pebble has stopwatch and timer features, but while grilling one evening, I missed the voice-activated timer I frequently use on my Apple Watch.
Scott Stein/CNET
I also oddly missed making payments with my wrist, something I started doing by default on vacation — and everywhere else in my life — via Apple Pay. Sure, I could pay with my phone or wallet, but I missed having the Apple Watch as my easy go-to.
But I really got a kick out of the Pebble’s massive collection of watch faces again. I searched for “Adventure Time” and found a whole bunch of fan-made faces. Jake was smiling on my wrist seconds later. Then I found a tarot watch face with cards showing numbers, followed by one with a wrist-activated cubic time layout and another with a cool minimalist dial. And then I found some watch games. It’s all here, just an app search away. All the developers ask is that you perhaps make a donation later, if you feel like it.
Scott Stein/CNET
Surprisingly functional, delightfully quirky
I love the indie spirit of it all, and suddenly it all flooded back to me: This is what the world of smartwatches was once like. Before Google, before Apple. Before Fitbit acquired Pebble and Google acquired Fitbit and buried Pebble deep in the belly of nested tech giants.
Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky’s little labor of love — a rescue mission to bring the Pebble back — really works. And now that I’m home in New Jersey, I’m enjoying wearing it around the house. As I write this, my wrist is buzzing with Signal notifications, and I find myself wondering: Where exactly is my Apple Watch? Did I leave it upstairs to charge?
The battery on this Pebble lasts almost a month, depending on how often the backlight comes on or heart-rate tracking kicks in. I got a few weeks from my first charge, so I’m unlikely to need the little charging dongle very often. It plugs into a USB-C cable and snaps magnetically onto the Pebble. I just hope I don’t lose it.
Whatever I miss, I love this battery life
And as long as I don’t care about voice-activated timers — I manually set a one-minute timer for my coffee today, and it was fine — or Apple Pay, there’s not much else I’ll miss. (The Pebble Time 2 does have a microphone, but it isn’t used for core features and doesn’t seem to work with messages or anything else on the iPhone.)
In exchange, I get these fun watch faces that make me smile, and I’m getting a kick out of having a Pebble on my wrist again. But most of all, I really, really love barely having to charge it.
I don’t think I’ll wear the Pebble Time 2 all the time … or will I? I admire its battery life a ton, along with its fun approach to watch faces. In the 13-plus years since the first Pebble, neither the Apple Watch nor Google’s Wear OS watches, for that matter, have done it better.
What’s a watch for? Sure, the future is full of ever more advanced, sensor-studded wearables, from watches to rings. Add the ways watches now work with earbuds and upcoming smart glasses, and it’s a lot. Then there are AI agents doing increasingly interconnected things, while finger gestures, voice commands and near-field taps turn these devices into keys, payment hubs and health monitors. But — deep breath — The Pebble Time 2 has turned back the clock and reminded me that watches can just be watches, too. I don’t know whether it will become my everyday watch, but right now, I’m really enjoying the comeback.
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