[Music]
This is a review of the Pebble Time 2.
This is the coolest
smartwatch I've ever used.
It's a cute and competent, if niche,
smartwatch. It's
everything I want from a wearable,
and that means it probably won't be a
good fit for the average person.
Let me explain. Back in June, I
pre-ordered the Pebble Time 2, the
long-awaited follow-up to the
Pebble line of smartwatches, a brand that
people thought was dead. So
back in 2012, Pebble basically
kicked off the smartwatch craze with a
Kickstarter campaign that was, at the
time, the most funded
campaign to date. There was huge demand
for this Inspector
Gadget-looking device, and seemingly
everyone wanted one. The company turned
down multiple acquisition
attempts until, in 2016,
they became insolvent, which means they
weren't able to actually pay their debts,
and they were acquired by Fitbit. Now,
after Fitbit announced the
discontinuation of support for Pebble
products, a bunch of renegade enthusiasts
picked up the slack and
created Rebel, a community-made
suite of services that replaced Pebble's
online connectivity,
including the App Store for more
updates and other support functions. Now,
most of these were free to
use, but the dictation feature
and the weather service actually cost
about three bucks a month. And guess
what? People used it. Even
this many years on, people have still
been using and paying for the use of
their original smartwatch
from Pebble. That's amazing, and it's a
testament to what Pebble
created, and the community that
now is founded. Now, in 2021, Fitbit was
acquired by Google, and all of the Pebble
IP was subsumed too.
In January of 2025, Google ended up
making Pebble OS open
source. Shortly thereafter,
Eric Medjikovsky, the founder of Pebble,
announced new watches
using Pebble OS. In March,
Medjikovsky's newly founded Core Devices
unveiled the Core 2 Duo,
which is a familiar name for
everyone who's into CPUs, and the Duo
here was actually meant to mean "due
over." Then, they also
announced the Core Time 2. They were soon
made available to pre-order, and in July,
Core Devices recovered the Pebble
trademark. They renamed the devices to
the Pebble 2 Duo and the
Pebble Time 2. By December, Core Devices
had open sourced the Pebble
Companion App, and in January
2026, the Pebble Round 2 was announced.
Three new watches, a
bunch of open source software,
all of which started shipping earlier
this year, 2026. Now, I never owned a
Pebble, but I had always
really wanted one, so the announcement of
a new Pebble device
truly caught my attention.
And not being the kind of guy who takes a
gamble on a new and
unproven company that often,
I decided to wait. Once devices started
landing in people's hands and the
consensus was mostly
positive, I got in line for my Pebble 2,
and I got it right here. Now, getting
started with the Pebble
Time 2 was an absolute breeze. You just
install the open source app on your
phone, in this case,
it's GPL3 licensed. Then, you give the
app the requisite
permissions it needs. You scan the QR
code on the Pebble screen, and then
confirm the pairing with your watch.
Boom, it's that easy.
I don't even know if you need to make a
Pebble account, honestly.
Like, it's that freaking simple.
But I do know you don't need a Google
account to kick off the pairing process,
unlike my Fitbit 2. Now, people might be
saying, "Why do you care
about having a Google account
or not with a device?" Well, it's because
I don't trust Google, and I
don't want them having any of
my biometric data.
So let's talk about
the design for a second
because the design here is terrific.
And first and foremost,
it's not an enormous
gaudy chunk of glass and metal
precariously mounted to my wrist.
No, this thing is sleek.
It is elegant.
It is understated.
And it comes with all of
the charm and retro aesthetic
of like a Casio digital
watch from my childhood,
yet with some modern upgrades
and a professional fit and finish.
It comes in four colorways. Now, I opted
for the black and gray variant here,
which I feel is the classiest personally,
though I also do like
the silver and gray.
Again, this is understated. If you as a
casual observer on the
street didn't know that I was
wearing a smartwatch, it wouldn't really
jump out as one. I've used many
smartwatches before,
and always. The silicone band just pulls
on my arm hairs. This
one is really not that bad,
and because of that, it's actually
surprisingly a good band to wear. It's
also easily replaceable
with any standard 22 millimeter quick
release strap. Now, I've been
eyeing a few, and I actually
bought this one recently. I would love
some suggestions in the
comments of straps that you
like to use. They don't even have to be
for the Pebble Time 2. As
long as they're a 22 millimeter
quick release strap, they will work. The
last big piece of the
physical puzzle is the screen.
So let's get into it, because I have a
lot to say. It's large with
a minimal bezel. The screen's
glass sits slightly proud of the housing
by a few millimeters. This has led to
reports of the screen
breaking among some enthusiasts, though
Eric and his team have said
that this has only led to about
50 or so devices needing to be replaced.
It is a bit of a concern
for me. I'm looking into 3D
printing some kind of way to, you know,
keep this secure and not
smashing. Now, while I'm out in
direct sunlight, the screen absolutely
sings. I can't fully describe how
wonderful this looks
in daylight. Direct sunlight makes
e-paper pop, and it is an e-paper
display. Don't confuse that
with e-ink. They are two entirely
different technologies. To put it
succinctly, this screen
looks like an LCD minus the persistent
backlight, but with a
mirror behind the display.
That's really how it feels to me. I don't
know if that's actually how it works.
Colors are fairly muted
and there's only 64 of them.
There's very little in
the way of contrast either,
but it looks amazing
under the right light.
The screen is less OLED
and more Game Boy Color,
complete with a 200 by 228
resolution, and that's fine.
In fact, I love it that way.
It absolutely sips power.
Apps and watch faces are built
with this limitation and mind,
and it has everything
it needs where it counts.
Well, in dark environments,
it's impossible to read this screen
without the backlight.
In my first 24 hours
with the Pebble Time 2,
I found this really disappointing.
However, I quickly learned how to
actually use this thing.
A quick and deliberate flick of the wrist
will actually turn the backlight on.
And if you have the other hand free,
a double tap of the
screen or a press of any button
will do the same thing.
After a brief timeout, the
backlight will fade to off.
The always on display
doesn't seem to have
any perceptible
impact on the battery life,
which I really like.
I've been using this
device for eight days already,
and I'm still at around 63% battery life.
Meanwhile, my old Fitbit
would use about 1% of battery
anytime the ML lead display
was activated for more than a second.
I need to mention that while
the battery life is impressive,
with the features that I
personally have enabled,
I am nowhere near on
track to actually hit
the advertised 30 day battery
that Pebble lists on their website.
My experience tells me
that if I completely disable
the backlight or remove most of the apps,
I might get close to
30 days of usage here,
but it feels like that
would make the Pebble Time 2
far less usable, if
not entirely unusable,
at least the way I want to use it.
What will use up the battery, and quite
quickly I might add,
is the screen's RGB backlight.
Yeah, RGB.
While I haven't seen any
rainbow breathing patterns
for this thing, the backlight's color
is fully customizable from
within the companion app.
Kind of neat, I guess,
but I prefer a static,
neutral to warm white for mine.
Plus, the aforementioned low saturation
of the screen's colors means that
any strongly tinted backlight
will make the colors basically illegible.
Now, this watch ships with
a little magnetic charger,
and it's the same actual
connector of its older brother.
Charging takes just a few minutes,
though keep in mind I've
really only charged this device
once since I unboxed it.
The charging adapter also
comes with a little lanyard
so that you can hang it on a key chain
or maybe hang it on
your luggage or something
where you're gonna be
carrying around a backpack perhaps.
Put it somewhere with
your everyday carry, right?
Let's talk about the software though.
Pebble OS, which is open
source under the Apache 2.0 license,
has incredibly cute animations
that give the device a
level of both charm and polish.
They're unique to Pebble OS
and feel somewhat Looney Tunes-esque.
I've never seen anything
quite like the animations here.
They seem to be dynamic
and icons look to be animated
in real time and I would be surprised
if these had bespoke animations.
Now let's talk about some
other parts of the software
like the timeline.
This is a super neat feature
and it's one that I never
really knew that I needed.
It's also one that I
hope will gain new features
and become even more useful over time.
From your watch face, you
can press the down button
to scroll to today in the timeline.
And it will show you today as it stands.
It will also let you scroll through
the next two days worth of events.
And it's great to wake up
first thing in the morning
and see a quick summary of your day,
with a screen that doesn't
immediately assault your eyes.
This will pull in your Google Calendar
or presumably on iOS,
your iCloud Calendar events.
It will also show other
things like sunrise or sunset
or reminders or alarms
that you've set for yourself.
It shows weather forecast
for your location and more.
Now I've asked the dev team
to support CalDAV compatible calendars
because I much prefer
Proton or NextCloud over Google.
And they said that that's actually
a planned feature going forward.
The home screen is
your chosen watch face.
You can select from a huge
collection of watch faces
on the repel store.
And you can even add
custom Pebble app repos.
My favorite so far is TimeStyle,
which has a gorgeous
native feeling weight
of presenting the current time,
as well as a column of complications
that can be fully customized.
My personal setup from top to
bottom has weather displayed,
which shows the current
conditions and temperature.
I also have selected the
step counter for the middle
and the date for the bottom.
Another really fun watch
face is Royale by Evie Finch.
It's a bit of a skeuomorphic design
that resembles the Casio
watches I mentioned earlier.
It's a really fitting and fun throwback
for this form factor specifically,
but it also uses a bit more
battery than the TimeStyle does.
And it doesn't comport with the rest
of the Pebble OS aesthetic.
And me being who I am
as a designer by trade,
I'm sticking with the TimeStyle.
I'd really like a
stylish watch face though,
something like TimeStyle that
displays my blood glucose data.
But all the ones that I
could find in the app store
rely on internet connectivity
for some unbelievably asinine reason.
The data is already on my phone
in Android Health Connect locally.
So why should the
watch face have to log in
as a Dexcom or Night Scout follower?
That doesn't make any sense to me,
especially since out here
in rural Maine where I live,
I lose connection all the time.
Literally the biggest reason I wanna have
my blood glucose data on my wrist
is so I can check my blood sugar
just at a glance while I'm driving.
And yes, I side loaded X-Trip Plus's
built in watch face for Pebble,
but it just is too basic for my taste.
It's not just the watch
faces that are customizable.
In fact, there are
seemingly hundreds of settings
that you can tweak to
your heart's content.
And a big one that I
have found invaluable
are the buttons that can be
mapped to perform any action.
Taps, holds, presses, hold combos.
They can all be
customized to launch an app
or to trigger actions
that will put your watch
into quiet time, for example.
Speaking of apps,
installing apps is really simple.
You just need to open up
the Pebble Companion app
on your phone and head into the store.
There are a huge number of apps
and I have found quite a
few of them quite handy.
For example, there's a guitar tuner,
a medication tracker and
indispensable apps like this,
you know, something that
Leslie Nielsen would love.
One of my favorite features of Pebble OS
is the music app.
If you're listening
to music on your phone
or if you're like me
and you have KDE Connect
set up on your phone and
it's connected to your desktop,
when you're listening to music,
you can play, pause, skip tracks
and even adjust the volume on your phone.
And the music app doesn't
close until you quit it.
So if you're out on a walk or a run
and you don't wanna pull
your phone out of your pocket,
you can just press the
middle button on your watch
or up or down to skip forward or back.
And what's really great about this
is you don't even need
to like be coordinated.
You don't have to like find
the play button and tap it
because there is a touchscreen
but that's not
supported in the music app.
You can just grab your
wrist and hit the middle button.
Why did we ever move away from buttons?
All right, now it's
time for a couple of gripes
that I have with the
device, namely notifications.
Notifications will stay on your screen
until you manually dismiss them.
And I actually find
that to be really cool.
That's even true if you open your phone
and dismiss the notification,
which I find less intuitive.
And that's my biggest
bone to pick with Pebble OS.
In fact, it's not just
an active notification
that's currently being displayed.
All notifications stay in the
notification app on your watch
until they are manually
cleared from your watch.
What's even more puzzling is that
if you select the open on
phone option on your watch,
it will open it on your phone
and that will clear the
notification on your phone
and it will open the app on your phone.
But it doesn't clear the
notification from your watch.
And not only that,
it still lives in your
notification history.
Similarly, if you clear a
notification on your phone,
it stays on your watch.
The notifications app on
your watch acts as a log
of all notifications
that you have ever received
since you last clicked cleared all.
Personally, I find this
behavior unintuitive at best
and more importantly, undesirable.
I mean, if someone
gets a hold of your watch,
they're gonna be able to read through
at least one side of your conversations
as far back as they exist.
I dislike that.
I wish the notifications app had a mode
where notifications were just cleared
when I dismissed them on my watch
or when I interacted
with them on my phone.
Or at the very least,
there was a way to
automatically clear notifications
after they became like
10 minutes old, let's say.
All right, let's talk
about health tracking.
I have a Fitbit Sense 2,
and I have hated it since day one.
It's ugly, it requires a Google account,
it's artificially limited,
and the screen was AMOLED,
which is the opposite of
healthy, as far as I'm concerned.
So when the Pebble Time 2 was announced,
with its sleep tracking,
its heart rate monitor,
six gyros and e-paper
display, I was really excited.
Admittedly, the Pebble Time 2
isn't billed as a fitness tracker.
Core Devices says that if
you want a fitness tracker,
you should buy a Garmin instead.
I kind of love that
self-effacing and realistic approach
to talking about the product,
but it's also got everything that I need
for fitness tracking,
while also having all
the watchitude that I want.
When I go for a run, I
just hold the up button,
which I have mapped to the run activity,
and then I press the up
button again to start it.
It continuously tracks my
heart rate, and I have a blast.
I can then review my heart rate data
in the health screen of the app.
I can see my averages, whatever.
Now you can see your biometrics
on a daily, weekly, and monthly scale,
and it's pretty neat in my book.
You can also totally
hide this tab in the app
or turn off all of these features
completely on your watch
to save battery life if
you don't want to use them.
The flexibility here is amazing,
and it's a refreshing throwback
to the early 2010s approach to gadgetry,
one that respects your autonomy
and keeps you
completely in the driver's seat.
There's even an optional
setting to sync this data
with Android Health Connect,
which is how I'm able to get this data
into Home Assistant.
Do note, though, that if
you have the Google Fit app
on your phone and you have the Health
Connect option enabled
in the Pebble app,
these biometrics will
probably be uploaded to Google,
and they, meaning
Google, will in all likelihood
violate HIPAA and use
these data to target you
with malicious advertisements.
Now keep in mind that as with all
consumer health gadgets,
there's no guarantee that the pedometer,
the heart rate
monitor, or the sleep tracker
will have any degree
of accuracy whatsoever.
For what it's worth, these
numbers are mostly in line
with what my Fitbit Sense 2 was saying,
though, again, there's no guarantee
that the Fitbit Sense
2 was any good either.
I just find them to be more broad strokes
that help keep me motivated.
Plus, I can do fun home
automation things with my data,
which is kind of the whole
point of all of this for me.
So the Pebble Time 2
is an open source watch
that is standards compliant,
and it leaves me 100% in
charge of my experience
with this device.
That immediately sets
the Pebble Time 2 apart
from all of its competition.
To me, it's best in class.
The e-paper display is
more energy efficient,
not to mention healthier to look at.
The companion app is 100% open source.
The operating system is 100% open source.
The community is amazing.
The device is just fun to use.
The Pebble Time 2 is
the most gadgety gadget
the market has seen in ages.
It's not trying to sell your watch's
screen to advertisers.
It's not looking to
exfiltrate your health information
and weaponize it against your mind.
It's not trying to make you addicted
to a never-ending
feed of algorithmic slop.
It's not trying to sap
your attention with rage bait.
It's just a watch that gives you control.
It puts the smart back in smartwatch.
The king is back, and it's here to stay.
But the question is,
will the Luddite consumers
who want something that just
works see the value in this,
or will the display feel too
dated for consumers' tastes?
Given the pace of development
and the relative
affordability of the new Pebble devices,
I'm hopeful, though
it is still admittedly
a small batch product.
We just need to make sure that there are
resources available,
like my website, The Bryant Review,
to help people have more
fun with their devices again
and reclaim their digital autonomy.
(upbeat music)