Pebble Watches Are Coming Back (Kind Of)

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You can now pre-order a brand-new Pebble Watch, which is a sentence that will confuse a lot of people and excite others. Pebble was one of the first smartwatches, launching even before the first Apple Watch. We wrote about it here on Lifehacker in 2013. Now it’s back in two versions, running $149 and $225, both expected to ship later this year. 

Some quick background on Pebble

Pebble was an early smartwatch brand whose devices featured an e-ink display (like the kind you might see on an e-book reader). Its Kickstarter launches broke records for the platform. I had heard that the Pebble Time was the most successful Kickstarter project ever at the time of its launch, so I checked Kickstarter’s list of its 12 most funded projects to see if it still holds that title. Pebble’s three generations hold the #2, #6, and #12 spots. People loved this watch. 

And they continued to love it, even after the company was bought by Fitbit in 2016. A project called Rebble did its best to maintain the old watches’ functionality over the years, providing app store updates and replacing some of the old cloud services. As the years went by, it got harder and harder to keep using Pebble watches. Both the Android and iPhone apps disappeared from phones’ official app stores, and “how to set up a new Pebble” guides got more complicated, but some users persisted. 

Google now owns Fitbit and Pebble users managed to successfully lobby Google to open-source the Pebble OS, opening the doors to new Pebble watches.

Who is making the new Pebble watches, and why? 

Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky is leading this project. He wrote: “I've tried pretty much every other smartwatch on Earth, yet I still wear my Pebble every day—nothing else matches its features and long battery life. I really, really, really hoped someone else would create a proper replacement, but no one has stepped up, and my stash of old Pebbles is dwindling!” 

In an AMA on the Pebble subreddit, Migicovsky mentioned several times that the team is small and that they’re trying not to bite off more than they can chew. Since the OS is now open source, several questions about features were met with answers like “No, but that sounds like a nice feature for someone to add to the open source PebbleOS!”

The new watches aren’t going to be sold under the Pebble name, though, since Google still owns that trademark. They are called the Core Time 2 and the Core 2 Duo. A redditor asked what is “duo” about it, and Migicovsky replied: “Du-over