While I’ve had a lot of smart watches over the years, the Pebble is the one I enjoyed the most. It had a great mix of battery life and features and was a fantastic device. Even though it was first released in 2013 and then discontinued in 2016, I was still using it as my main watch more than a year later.
While Pebble did well for a few years, they were purchased by Fitbit in 2016, and then Fitbit was purchased by Google, and the Pebble smartwatch was dead. However, Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky has been pushing for Google to open-source the software behind the watch and they just did.
As a result, Eric has announced plans to produce a new watch using the Pebble software, and intends to make it as similar to the original as possible. He said:
“No one makes a smartwatch with the core set of features I want. I had really, really, really hoped that someone else would come along and build a Pebble replacement. But no one has.”
We’ll see what happens. Even though he’s done this before and now has the code to do it again, it’s a long way from “let’s do this!” to actually shipping a product, so I hope he’s able to succeed.
You can find more information and sign up for updates over on his new website repebble.com.
If he’s able to get it shipped and I get one, I’ll certainly share it here when the time comes. I hope he can pull it off!
