The Pebble Time 2 is an e-paper smartwatch designed by Eric Migicovsky and operated by Core Devices. The reality is that this is the revival of the original Pebble Time with better hardware. There is a detailed story not covered about the history of Pebble.

The pitch behind Pebble, probably in the past and currently, is that it's a hackable/open source smartwatch with custom watch faces, a custom app platform, and an e-paper display, which offers better battery life than traditional smart watches. In the past, when Pebble was first introduced, it was was considered the “the first smart watch.”

I kind of impulse bought my Pebble Time 2.

The deal is that I used to wear the original black-and-white Pebble, but I stopped. The reasons were that while I found the original novel, the battery life was “just long enough” (about 1 week) to be easy to wear, but not long enough to wear for a whole week on one charge with my usage. I found the notifications distracting too. At the time, the idea of your wrist vibrating with each message and notification was not something I was used to.

I ended up getting several Apple Watches, and used them for a variety of things. The main thing that happened lately is that my usage of the Apple Watch has been constrained almost entirely to the time, notifications, and Apple Pay. I've long since grown irritated by the fitness features and stopped using them. I used to be a “close your rings” person, but having moved to Tokyo, it just seemed entirely unnecessary. Even with a relatively high goal, being active is a default here. And I've lost my streak enough times due to sickness that it wasn't meaningful to continue it on other days. They added rest days, but my streak was something like 200 days, so just climbing back up to that is a chore.

So, that left my Apple Watch usage constrained. Apple Pay is something I just won't have on any other watch, and I know that. But the Pebble offers meaningful improvements in two categories: watch faces, and OS customization.

With the latest versions of watchOS, the previous photo-based watch faces I used have been deprecated. You can keep the existing faces and photos, but you can't add new ones. You're forced to get a new design if you want to add a new photo, which is upsetting.

A long standing gripe many people, myself included, have about watchOS is the obstinate refusal to add custom watch faces. Apple wants to control these for design and other purposes.

I tolerated this, but the fact that they deprecated existing faces I was using is really irritating.

watchOS has always given preferential treatment to Messages.app. It has a really nice, subtle two tap notification vibration pattern that only Messages.app gets. All third-party apps get a quite frankly stupid vibration pattern that is more disturbing.

As I have elaborated on in messaging_apps, I have a lot of different apps.

My desire has always been to have custom vibrations for different messaging apps, and ideally different people.

Just being real here, all of the watchOS apps kind of suck these days. The initial watchOS platform streamed apps from the iPhone, but even now that you can have native on-watch apps, they suck. Almost universally, they are useless or annoying to use.

PebbleOS is open source, and has custom watch faces and apps. It basically solves all of the OS issues I have with watchOS. The main downside I have here is that custom notification patterns aren't possible on a per-contact basis, but this is really easily doable (just requires some OS work, which could be done easily).

Even though Eric is critical of the iPhone experience, honestly it's not that bad on iOS.

You can't lock PebbleOS, at all? So if some random idiot has your watch and your phone is nearby, it will get all of your notifications and all data is unprotected if stolen.

Honestly, the biggest let down versus an Apple Watch is simply the hardware. E-paper is phenomenal in-concept, but the Pebble Time 2 display is just kind of sad compared to the latest Apple Watches. In dark environments, the Apple Watch always broadcasts light, whereas Pebble requires backlight triggering. The backlight triggering gesture is worse than the Apple Watch, which works much more reliably to activate. This probably can be solved with a lot of OS work. But I'm not the only one with this complaint, and the debug mode options that make it more sensitive come at a dramatic battery life cost (estimated 3 weeks to 2 days). The default is also far too dim, but the current settings don't leave much room for adjustment outside of turning off automatic backlight and turning on “blinding” mode.

The other thing is that the color e-paper display is just not that great at either color or contrast. Apparently, the Pebble 2 Duo (revival of the OG watch) has a much punchier contrast display, and maybe that was the correct move. My experience with the Pebble Time 2 is that the color is just so muted that it's probably not worth having color. Again, probably a case of my own expectations. But because of this, the fun I expected to have with custom watch faces is reduced, knowing that the colors are constrained in the way they are.

If I'm just being realistic about it, the hardware also has a relatively constrained chip. Writing apps that show a meaningful amount of data is difficult due to memory constraints.

Maybe. My custom watch face has deep night support. I am enjoying aspects of it, but for the same reason that I wasn't super committed to the Apple Watch, I'm not super committed either.