This Is the New Pebble Smartwatch, and Yes, It’s Now Called Pebble Again

After more than a decade, the Pebble smartwatch is back, and it already looks enticing for those of us who can’t be bothered with today’s health data-obsessed, sensor-filled, and all-too-weighty wearables. The company behind the revitalized watch shared its final designs for what’s coming, and it may be the simple smartwatch we’ve been missing since 2016.

Last month, original Pebble designer Eric Migicovsky reported that his new company, Core Devices, was able to recover the Pebble trademark, meaning we no longer have to pretend the previous “Core 2 Duo” and “Core Time 2” weren’t an update to the older e-paper wearables. It’s a good thing the name’s back. Pebble is a brand name that fits the revitalized wearable’s identity so perfectly. It’s small and smooth, and anybody with fidgety hands can fiddle with it. On Wednesday, Migicovsky dropped pictures, renders, and specs for the upcoming smartwatches.

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First on the list is the Pebble Time 2. The smartwatch has a small, 1.5-inch color e-paper touch display with a bottom heart rate monitor, step counter, and sleep tracker. The update showed off the new smartwatch face frame and buttons—now both made from stainless steel akin to the 2014 Pebble Steel. The back is screwed on in case you ever need to access the internals (though it may also require some glue to hold it together). The head of Core Devices also said the new smartwatch will have a compass and a second microphone that could allow for better noise cancellation for any kind of assistant feature.

“Nobody really uses the compass,” Migicovsky said in a video accompanying his most recent blog post. “90-something percent of people haven’t used the compass on a Pebble, so I wasn’t feeling inclined to put another chip on it. But we found a relatively inexpensive chip… no guarantees how good it’s going to be.”

The Pebble Time 2 will potentially sport four colorways. Two of the color options are a silver or blackened shade of metal, but there may also be a blue and red polycarbonate option. The final colors haven’t been finalized, but Migicovsky said the company will email all customers with a preorder to finalize their selection. Similarly, anybody who wants to swap their preorder from a $150 Pebble 2 Duo to a $225 Pebble Time 2 can just wait for a survey that will let them choose the more expensive option. The cheaper, polycarbonate option is akin to a Pebble 2, with a 1.2-inch black and white non-touch e-paper display with a barometer and compass, though it also lacks a heart rate monitor.

Migicovsky has been regularly blogging his efforts in China to get the first Pebble units manufactured through his X account. The new images imply we’re getting closer to an actual launch. Core Devices still needs to finalize colors and polish, and the smartwatch shown in the video is still a “very early” rendition of the hardware. The smartwatch is running age-old PebbleOS with a few modern amenities, but there are still glitches to work out. The company still has to go through the process of engineering testing through design and production, so there’s no official word on a release date. Either way, it may be a more exciting wearable than the upcoming Apple Watch Series 11, which is likely to debut in little under a month’s time.