The Pebble Time!

Today I finally managed to get my hands on the Pebble Time! I’ve been looking for a watch to fulfil my three main needs, without all the wacky account creation, data collection, and general annoyances sprinkled in for a while now, then I found the Pebble Time. And now about a year later, here’s my first impressions/review of the Pebble Time (only 9 years late…)

My Three Wishes

Timekeeping

This seems quite stupid to put as a requirement for a watch “review” of sorts. But with all these watches coming out, less and less of them can do what they were originally designed to do—show the time. Instead, they’re packed with features nobody will actually use that drain the life of the watch, barely get a day of battery life at times.

The Pebble Time, when released, was advertised to have 7 days of battery life, and it performed as advertised! But nearly nine years later, does it still hold up? I can only answer after a few days of use, so watch out for an update!

But how could Pebble do this? Through the smart optimisation of their PebbleOS and the use of an E-Ink display (which I love)

Notifications

This will make me sound old, but I hate having to pick up my phone constantly to check for notifications. It drives me insane sometimes with the amount of stuff that tries to get my attention, even with most apps’ notifications disabled.

Being able to quickly check if I should care to pull out my phone from my pocket is really handy, and something I missed when my Samsung Gear S2 Classic finally kicked the bucket.

The Pebble Time does a great job at it, and I’d hope so since this was one of its main advertisement points. When do I get a notification, it stays on my screen until I acknowledge it, which it can only do through the funky technology of E-Ink.

Quick Controls

Similarly, I don’t want to have to take out my phone for some more simple things, like quickly changing the music I’m listening to or toggling my desk lamp as I’m running for the train in the morning. Having access to Home Assistant from my wrist is quite a lot more useful than I thought at first. Though can be quite slow being written in JavaScript.

With the Samsung Gear S2 Classic, I didn’t have such controls, due to the bloated TizenOS hogging down the limited 512MB of ram and slow Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 CPU, along with the already dropped support at the time when I bought it.

Annoyances

While there is many things I can say about the watch and the interface, like its funny little animations, cool design and physical buttons to navigate. I have already experienced crashes when trying to reply to notifications and “you are not connected to the internet” block when trying to set up the watch, which Rebble does cover how todo, but still, it took me 3 attempts.

What I miss from the Gear S2

While there isn’t much here, I do want to point out just how useful the rotating crown of the Gear S2 was. It was a really nice way of interacting with the operating system, similarly, I like the physical buttons on the Pebble Time. We need less touchscreens in this world, not more!

Final notes

I will probably post an update post for a more long-term review of the watch. I also want to try to write an app for the Pebble, and I’ve been meaning to learn C, and with the extensive guides that are available for the watch, I think it’s a good time as ever to get into the land of low level!