For me, its value lies more in nostalgia than anything else. I don't expect it to ever compete with the likes of my Apple watch for smart features, or a Garmin for activity tracking.
That said, it's an e-paper display so battery life is pretty good. Plus it had (and probably will have) an active community of small apps and watchfaces, which kept (and probably will keep) it from becoming stale quickly.
I may be mixing terms in my brain, though. Happy to be corrected.
Yeah, other wearable manufacturers who use the same display technology usually call it MIP instead. Pebble are pretty much the only ones who call it e-paper, which has led some to think theirs is a distinct thing, but it's just MIP.
Yes, or more precisely: reflective displays without backlight. There were many such display technologies a while ago (when the Kindle took off and various companies tried to compete with E Ink), but most have since been abandoned.
Pretty much all colored e-paper screens have much lower contrast than color printing on paper, since they mix colors by using can conventional RGB sub-pixels and darkening them individually, just like regular lit screens, which reduces the amount of reflected light.
Isn't that how color images printed paper works, too? We use inks (often in CMYK coloration, but a galaxy of other options exist) to subtract light from what would otherwise be reflected by a plain white paper.
What makes e-paper screens worse in this way?
No. When you print a piece of paper some color, e.g. red, it will be completely red. But most e-paper screens will only be 33% red (optimistically) and 66% black. This is because physical pixels usually can't change color themselves, only brightness, so you use three of them, and darken the RGB components, to produce a colored pixel.
For displaying white on color e-paper screens you will have three non-dark RGB sub-pixels, but each color component only reflects at most a third of the incoming spectrum, either red, green, or blue wavelengths, while white paper (or monochromatic e-paper screens) will reflect all three wavelengths everywhere.
But nonetheless, that is a rare occurrence, and I don't think for me it's worth paying the battery life and complexity cost of an Apple Watch (or similar full featured wearable) for that 1% use case. I'd rather have a simpler device that just focuses on health tracking and a few notifications, basically what FitBit was if it had a better battery and didn't suck.
That it's hackable and there will likely be lots of community-maintained apps that link into services I use is gravy on top.
That’s exactly why I have it. It’s hard to get distracted by it as yet another screen in my life. Plus since I use an iPhone it currently doesn’t do text or calls, it just alerts me if I have a call coming (and calendar alerts). Basically I call it my “advanced beeper.”
Having to write C on the watch-side isn't everyone's cup of tea but they are actively working on a replacement for rocky.js so that you can write everything in JS.
It's like trying something so good it ruins every other one for you. The UX was just so well thought through i don't know how to explain it.
I was an original Pebble Kickstarter wearer from 2012, then got the initial Time, then the first Android smartwatches (Moto 360!) then basically every Apple Watch from then to now. Even used Google Glass a few months in 2013.
I like my wearables. I use features on my Apple Watch constantly: NFC payments, voice reminders, fitness and sleep tracking, make my iPhone yell out so I can find where I put it, etc.
But not a single damn wearable I've had has captured a fraction of the charm the original Pebble and Pebble Time had. Their UIs are low-res by modern standards, and greyscale or largely solid colors, but wow.
Dug up some videos as reference. Here's one that highlights what the core system UI aesthetic is like. Notice the transitions as you use the UI. I remember it feeling really snappy too, and it feels great to use a UI that moves like that with physical tactile buttons, as opposed to scrolling a Digital Crown or using the touch screen on an Apple Watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdRENEQcymQ
And aside from the system UI, the community of apps that existed for it back then and no doubt will continue to grow now has a lot of charm too. The creators of all the apps are making them out of love, not to be a Top 10 on an Apple app store. And they don't exactly have a strong cohesive system UI to comply with unlike Apple. Human Interface Guidelines are wonderful for phones and tablets and for serious app ecosystems I depend on, but watches are Not That Serious as far as I'm concerned so the individuality and love within each app just fills me heart with joy every time I look down at my wrist.
For Pebble fans most of other watches sound like that. Pebble, o.t.o.h., is focused on doing well just the essential: always on reflective screen, long battery life, easy to develop, UI based on buttons instead of touch screens, being easy to program to,...
The thing I like about Pebble is the fact its not trying to do a million other things. The two things I really want in a smart watch is to be able to triage a notification/get an update without having to actually pull out my phone and have easy media controls on my wrist. Optimizing for that means it gets excellent battery life and comparatively low prices, because it doesn't need a ton of compute and giant screen and a million sensors constantly taking measurements to accomplish it.
Its nice being able to still get messages and change the music and what not while you're doing something dirty or whatever and aren't about to pull out your phone. Doing yard work, wrenching on the car or motorcycle, lounging in the pool, riding a bicycle, etc. That's all I really want.
The app store is delightfully quirky and adding a watchface is just a matter of drag and drop. There's no Gatekeeper, or hundred of pages of Terms of Services and Privacy Policies and GDPR disclaimers you have to fill out. You don't have to sacrifice your first born child to Big Tech and nor do you have to beg for root permissions on your own hardware. Whatever goes, caveat emptor. If you install malware and brick your device (a very difficult thing to do given that it's a watch), well, that's also entirely on you.
It's similar to why OpenClaw went viral; you can do whatever the fuck you want with it, nothing is wrapped up in carefully sanitized corporatism, with everything locked down to a t and filled with cover-your-ass privacy and permissions declarations that are not worth the pixels they are displayed on.
Nobody's around to nanny you and play authoritarian daddy with what you do with your watch. If you want to share offensive, pirated, or DMCAed watchfaces — go wild. If you want to build a protest app to track government thugs and civil servants — all the power to you! If you want to turn it in to a sex toy controller to use during long boring church services — well, that's between you and your faith, there's no Big Tech between God and your bedroom. It's just like the old days of Android and APKs and jailbroken iPhones. A return back to simpler days of open computing.
Your grandma won't get as much out of this watch versus an Apple Watch, but if you are a real hacker at heart, this is the device for you.