In between all sorts of panic about DeepSeek and an ongoing fight over what Google Maps should call the Gulf of Mexico, we had a bright spot of news this week. Pebble — arguably the gadget that led to our modern smartwatch — is making a comeback. Eric Migicovsky, the original Pebble founder known lately for his efforts with Beeper, announced the return of Pebble alongside a blog post from Google, which received the company’s remains as part of its Fitbit buyout. Not only is PebbleOS going open-source, but we could be looking at new hardware very, very soon.
Over at RePebble, you can catch up on the jist of the news shared this week, and sign up for future product announcements should it catch your curiosity. Basically, after a year’s worth of effort on the part of Migicovsky and some internal Google employees, PebbleOS is now available on GitHub for anyone ready and willing to work on it. On the hardware side, a small team is working alongside Migicovsky to develop a spiritual successor to Pebble, without all of the overhead from the original company.
The thoughts shared in this blog post are no joke. Alongside my AP Podcast co-host Daniel Bader, I met up with Eric Migicovsky during CES, and while he wasn’t so quick as to hint at any Pebble news coming down the pike, he was wearing a Pebble Time Round, nearly ten years after its initial launch. Eric has made it clear he’s looking for an experience that rivals what Pebble delivered a decade ago — an E Ink display, long battery life, buttons, and so on — and he feels like this new push is the only way to deliver on those demands.
Count me in as someone who’s pretty excited at the promise of all this. Smartwatches have largely followed in the footsteps of smartphones, transforming a Wild West of weird gadgets, failed operating systems, and exciting startups into a hegemony of just a couple of brands. Google and Samsung dominate the Android space, Apple holds its own monopoly, all while the handful of remaining companies — Garmin, OnePlus — attempt to find space for their own wearables. These watches are objectively better than ever, but they’re also so, so boring.
Pebble — or whatever the new name for the watch ends up being — has the opportunity to make things exciting again, and based on Migicovsky’s blog post, we’re on the right track. I agree with my former Android Police colleague Rita El Khoury when she writes that this smartwatch needs to be nerdy, built for enthusiasts who don’t mind rolling up their sleeves with an open-source OS. Even the idea of making the watch modular has me excited, though, naturally, I’d like to see a safer product out of the gate — say, perhaps, the Pebble 2 lineup that never actually came to fruition.
Hell, while we’re at it, I’d love to see plans for the Pebble Core brought back. It promised a modern iPod Shuffle experience, with cellular data, GPS, and Spotify support for just $70 (at least at its initial Kickstarter price). It’s the exact kind of dedicated gadget I’d love to see make a comeback in 2025 and beyond — products that don’t look to replace your smartphone, but to supplement it to keep you connected without a million distractions getting in your way.
Migicovsky’s blog post makes it clear that this new, reborn iteration of Pebble will be focused on making watches, period, but I hope some amount of success allows for some flexibility in that goal. Not just for some rebuilt Core, either — build a new iPod Classic-like MP3 player, or some kind of crazy Playdate-esque gaming handheld. There’s a quiet demand out there for a return to fun technology, and frankly, I don’t think anything remotely focused on AI is going to deliver. Maybe a revived Pebble can.
But those are just my thoughts — what do you think? Would you buy a new Pebble watch, or are you happy with current Wear OS offerings? I’m keeping the poll simple this week, but feel free to expand in the comments on the current smartwatch landscape.
