Eric Migicovsky, leader of the revived Pebble, is making smartwatches for himself. You’re just along for the ride.
“Apple makes it incredibly difficult for third-party devices to interact with things like iMessage or Siri or any of the built-in features on iOS,” Migicovsky told Gizmodo in a freewheeling video interview. “And that sucks. That sucks for competition. That sucks for innovation. That sucks for price.”
Pebble is back?! I used to have one, back in the day and was super happy with it. Then it was swallowed and shut down by Fitbit to reduce competition… Best thing about it was: it actually had watchglass, so it was impact proof and water resistant, while also looking elegant. I don’t need a touch screen on my wrist: Give me a versatile, intuitive button layout and a watch that I don’t need to replace every half year!
Edit:
I love this man.
I’ve got the new watch, the Pebble Time 2 and I love it. I also have an OG Pebble which is fully supported by the new Pebble company and app, and they’ve open sourced everything. The whole thing is as good as you hope it is. I’ve pre-ordered the Pebble Round 2 as well, which will be my classy watch.
It actually never left :) the acquisition wasn’t to remove competition, pebble as a company just grew too fast and didn’t manage to survive well. I think Migickovski has been really open about the mistakes they made and where they think they failed. The acquisition by fitbit was mostly to save the leftovers and allowed to save all that was done for the community and allow the devices to keep working. Fitbit was quite nice towards the pebble community, and then google came to buy fitbit. And even that didn’t end up being an issue. They even open sourced what they bought for the community to use.
You can also look into Rebble, which is the effort done by the community to keep all devices running even after all these years. So overall, the devices were still alive, and that was thanks to a lot of people. Thanks to that now the new release was easier and they are keeping all of it open for the community.
Thanks for the detailed timeline. I seem to remember that my watch stopped connecting to the server and I found a lot of mostly negative press about the acquisition, so I kinda stopped following it. I also didn’t really have the capacity to get into the weeds of it. Good to hear that it was not as bad as I perceived it at that time, after all.
Well the way I put it is too optimistic in a way, easy to do now knowing how things have ended. Back in the day there were a lot of open questions and indeed periods of down time with the services. Also long periods of time when no one knew if the next android or ios update would break something… or worse, completely break the app without a way to get it working again. So your perception at the time was probably correct.
I just wish he hadnt moved the charging contacts to the bottom. The Steel 1 could attach the magnetic charging cable while being on the wrist!