The Pebble Watch once made quite a splash compared to its namesake when the early smartwatch launched in 2013.
There was a massive Kickstarter campaign, an eagerly awaited and delayed launch, and ultimately a dedicated fan base that gobbled up the plastic and E Ink original and then the tri-color Pebble Steel a year later.
I was one of the Pebble Steel owners and fans, getting the device in stainless steel just after my 50th birthday. Pebble wasn’t the only smartwatch maker back then, but it was easily the most forward-thinking. Reviews and hands-ons were almost always positive, which was kind of shocking considering how little the first Pebble did. Instead of a collection of apps, there were custom watch faces and the screen was black and white.
However, it still felt like a traditional watch upgrade with phone-based access to email, notifications and calls. It took power—lasted a full week on a single charge—and was practically waterproof.
What it lacked in fashion it made up for in its $149 price tag and adorable looks. The style matched its cool name. My Pebble Steel, which cost $249, was something else. Instead of plastic, I got a steel body, a Gorilla Glass screen cover and a tri-color display. Apps like Glance and Evernote were starting to arrive.
I remember wearing steel pebbles almost every day. It was the first smartwatch that enticed me from my extensive collection of analog watches.
Pebble finally released a full-color Pebble Time, but it arrived just as Apple was launching the original Apple Watch, a device that traded days of battery life for a full-color touchscreen and, among other things, extensive health and fitness tracking capabilities. . It did almost everything the Pebble Watch could do, but was much closer to a wearable smartphone than a simple watch.
A year later, Pebble went out of business. That’s only four short years for the company and only two years into the life of my beloved Pebble Steel, barely enough time to get the first scratch on the watch face.
Within another few years, all software support would cease. I don’t remember such a quick fall from grace. The Pebble Watch went from tech industry darling to wearable in record time. But what about all those millions of pebble watches and pebble steels sold?
My Pebble Steel still stands next to my favorite collection of everyday watches. Since reviving my vintage Casio LCD, I’ve started wearing all of my old watches, still occasionally wearing the ultimate smartwatch (that would be the Apple Watch).
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I wondered all these years if I could start wearing my old Pebble steel again. As I mentioned it is in perfect condition. First, though, I had to find the MagSafe-style charger. I never throw anything away, but it still took me a day to find that proprietary charging cable, but that turned out to be the least of my problems.
The pebbled steel charged as if nothing had happened, and I almost felt bad for my watch, not knowing how to tell it that the world had changed and was no longer important.
On the bright side, the watch accepted a full charge and showed the date and time. Hit him. Pebble Steel shows a date and time. It is not the right data and time; the clock thinks it’s January and every time I turn it on, it’s midnight. Well, it’s midnight somewhere, but not here, not now.
It would take a working smartphone connection to get my Pebble to tell the correct time. This would be easy if it were 2014, but it’s a challenge in 2024.
In fact, getting a Bluetooth connection between my ten-year-old Pebble Steel and the not-a-year-old iPhone 15 Pro Max was easy. The phone saw that the watch was ready to pair and I got a message on the watch and my job there was done. However, this link turned out to be useless. It didn’t adjust the date or time, and without a Pebble app on the phone – pulled from the App Store years ago – I’d hit a dead end.
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After Pebble folded, the IP was sold to Fitbit, which was then acquired by Google. What those companies did with Pebble’s technology is a mystery. However, a group of dedicated Pebble fans launched Rebble in 2016 to “preserve and advance the functionality of Pebble”.
When I posted images of my Pebble Steel on social media, most pointed to the Rebble as the solution to resurrecting the dying smartwatch.
Rebble has software you can load onto an iPhone if you’re willing to follow detailed instructions that sometimes feel like they might break the watch, your iPhone, or both. They also have similar tools for Android.
However, none of these solutions are yet functional or practical. On the Android side, the APK is not compatible with the latest version of Android. On the iOS side, the situation is probably worse. Most browsers don’t trust the Sideloady app that Rebble instructs you to use, and even if all nearly a dozen steps worked, I’d have to redo a third of them. every single week just to keep Pebble Steel operational.
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What I’m agreeing with is that unless someone builds an App Store app that can work with this old device, the Pebble Steel is nothing more than an artifact, a nice museum piece that reflects the first flush of true smartwatches useful.
It’s a shame that I can’t revive it and perhaps an even bigger shame that something so new and still beautiful is headed for the landfill or recycling plant. I’m not the only one giving up on Pebble. Rebble keeps some statistics on its current user base, and a rough estimate puts it at 24,530 active users. According to Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky’s calculation, Pebble sold 2 million Pebble watches over five years. This means that most of them are sitting unused or, more likely, thrown away.
I don’t blame Pebble. The company tried but could not compete in the face of the world’s most important technology company entering the market; Migicovsky noted in his Medium post, “I shouldn’t have aggressively grown the company without a stronger plan.”
That FitBit and later Google didn’t see a way forward for the Pebble brand and device is less forgivable, but also understandable. Who wants to rebuild someone else’s wearable technology when the market is moving so fast and anything they might have built from it is likely to be years behind the next Pixel Watch or Apple Watch?
Goodbye Pebble Steel and thank you for paving the way to practical wearable technology.