Pebble crushed the competition, so beating Samsung is all it took to be the Smartwatch King?

So, several days have now passed since I told you all about how the Fossil Gen 6 Venture Edition seemed to have a hidden feature in the form of its ability to act as a miniature stove. But we're not done yet. 

Done with what? Well, with trying to figure out why most modern smartwatches suck. I think I have a pretty good idea at this point, though. It feels like Big Tech has been trying to convince us that we need products that we don't really want. 

In my quest to prove the statement above to you, I decided to spent some time with each of these smartwatches:

You should probably read the prequel stories before you move on. Because it's where I establish how the curse works. 

I need something simple, reliable, and actually fun. Because I didn’t love tech for all the issues and the stress, but for the fun of it. The innovation and excitement: my drug of choice, the dopamine rush that I require.

Ruminating on that thought while drinking a cold lemonade and gazing at the sunset, I felt the aroma of nature around me. It was one of those “Glad to be alive” moments. And when the nostalgia peaked and in a blinding blaze, I remembered something important.

That’s right! Pebble existed!!

Pebble was a kickstarted product, but back in 2012, when that still meant that someone was passionate about something. During that time, I was a student, so it took a couple of years — and the release of the Pebble Steel — for me to get one. It was my first smartwatch and I loved it.

Why? Because it could be as smart as I wanted it to be. Because it ran on an open-source system, which allowed people to come up with all of these crazy and fun watchfaces, apps and even games that were actually impressive. 

Here’s the one that got me most impressed: a location tracker that works while the watch isn’t connected to your phone. Mind you, the watch doesn’t have GPS or anything like that. How does it work? Well, it memorizes the general location of something and then uses the accelerometer in combination with the step counter in order to veer you in the thing’s general direction.

Sure, it won’t help get you out of the woods when you are lost. But I used this one tons of times when I parked my car in huge parking lots and it worked flawlessly. So much so that my dad used it too. And you know what? He used it up until very recently and that was only because I got him an upgrade in the form of a Garmin watch, with proper GPS.

This is the type of creativity that I think true tech innovation feeds on: limitation. Because when the parts that you have is all you have, then you start getting creative with what problems you can solve through them.

And this is a process that just works.   

So it was obvious: I had to get a Pebble again! After a few rounds of the “waiting game” I won an auction and got myself the best Pebble model out there: the Pebble Time Steel. And since some time has passed since Pebble was officially around, here's a TL;DR on why I chose this one:

But then it hit me: the Pebble app was no longer available on the PlayStore! Because Google bought Pebble and inserted it into Fitbit so hard that it basically stopped existing. But after a very quick Google search, I found out something that made me smile with childlike wonder:

The community kept going. The original store is still running and there is a fully-functional companion app. New watch faces, apps and games are released monthly. And all of this is completely free and done out of love for Pebble.

Also, it’s really cool that the store is called Rebble. And this rebellion? I could get behind instantly. So to the sound of Sex Pistols, Rancid and Misfits, I did the deed and set up my Pebble Time Steel.

Of course, there was an issue. I mean, that’s become the entire plot of this series, hasn’t it? But this one was solvable and understandable: I had to pair the watch with the phone, before the app could see it. Why? Because it’s from 2012! Tech was different back then.

Here’s how the experience went: pure bliss. I didn’t have issues with heart rate or blood oxygen tracking, because the Pebble knew it was a watch and not a medical device. So it did not offer such features. I just learned again to trust my body. And you know what? The anxiety went away almost instantly.

What I did got was a plethora of creative, nostalgic and well designed watchfaces, which actually made me get back into step count tracking. 

I could decide what notifications I wanted to get and what to ignore. I didn’t need any modular, extra software installed. I could control the media on my phone through physical buttons, meaning that I didn’t have to play around with fiddly touchscreen controls — which, let’s be honest, aren’t that great on small screens. 

And I could play a really cool text-based endless runner whenever I was bored. I got really into it, because it wasn’t there to convince me to play. It was there for me to play when I felt like it.

Of course, with the watch being equipped with a colored e-ink display, battery life varies heavily depending on the user. Personally, I just put the watch on airplane mode whenever I didn’t need it to be smart, which makes sense.

I don’t need notifications or the ability to control my music while I’m working. In fact, I need to be concentrated, but still have access to my alarms and timers, for example, because that is what works best for me. The Pebble lets me do that without fear of it suddenly forgetting that it's a watch.

So, I managed to extend battery life beyond a week. Which, in all honesty, isn’t something that modern smartwatches can’t do. The TicWatch 3 and 3 Pro can do that and those even run on wearOS. Then you have champs like the Huawei and Xiaomi watches, which run on a dedicated OS and thus can reach up to two weeks on a single charge.



The Pebble just felt right. Because it was a smart watch. Not a smartwatch, aiming to also be a fitness band and a health-tracking device, and a media-consumption center and a remote control for my smart lamps and… All of that.

It is just a very well built, beautiful watch, which also happens to be capable of being as smart as you need it to be in a way that is truly fun, whenever you want that to happen. Of course, I didn’t take this one off. It’s on my wrist as I write this sentence.

So with most of my journey almost complete and a lot of answers uncovered, I still had to face the most threatening question: why did things turn out so wrong? 

Also, can we just take a moment and admit to how sad it is that pebble.com now redirects you to fitbit.com? Like, Fitbit is great, but it doesn't have anything to do with what Pebble stood for. Well, it is difficult to name a watch that has, honestly...