We're bringing Pebble back • Hacker News Board

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#411

Post by dariosalvi78 » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 7:08 AM UTC

djur wrote: post #344

mrinterweb wrote: post #26

I noticed my mouth had been hanging agape for a while while reading this. This is huge news. I feel like Pebble is the smartwatch that got it right the first time. So many smartwatches try to replace the phone instead of being an extension of the phone. Pebble seemed to better understand what is important than most smartwatches by being the extension of the phone, a focus on battery life and always on displays.

The Fitbit watches are the closest thing I've gotten to a Pebble (and I'd be wearing a fitness tracker anyway), but they're way more locked down.

BangleJs is totally hackable

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#412

Post by dariosalvi78 » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 7:12 AM UTC

katspaugh wrote: post #408

Pebble was amazing! Whimsical, useful and a loooong battery life. Strangely, there’s no alternative on the mass market. Or there has been no alternative. P.S. your homepage is terrible.

BangleJS

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#413

Post by karel-3d » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 7:14 AM UTC

uhhh are you sure you won't get a trademark dispute?

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#414

Post by shinycode » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 7:18 AM UTC

xyst wrote: post #245

mrinterweb wrote: post #26

I noticed my mouth had been hanging agape for a while while reading this. This is huge news. I feel like Pebble is the smartwatch that got it right the first time. So many smartwatches try to replace the phone instead of being an extension of the phone. Pebble seemed to better understand what is important than most smartwatches by being the extension of the phone, a focus on battery life and always on displays.

The Apple Watch Ultra has worked wonders for me in terms of battery life and “always on display”. My only wish is for an easily serviceable battery.

And not that expensive :(

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#415

Post by teetertater » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 7:21 AM UTC

morsch wrote: post #114

insane_dreamer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Withings ScanWatch was the right fit for me. Unfortunately the HR sensor stopped working recently and the water resistant seal broke, and it's out of warranty, so it's in a drawer. But IMO that was the right idea: analog time, discrete notifications, ppg/ekg sensors, 2-week battery life.

I like my Fossil watch. Similar to Withings, less health features, marginally smarter. Analog watchface in front of an eink display, 3-4 weeks battery life. Of course they got discontinued as well.

These are truly the best! And I've done a lot of research. Nowadays there are some smaller luxury brands that are closer with feature parity but not quite. The original Fossil team spun off to develop some kind of general watch platform, so I'm hopeful we'll see a remake by the time my fossil kicks out.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#416

Post by fitsumbelay » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 7:22 AM UTC

I like what happens when you click "No" to "Do you want a new Pebble?" and I'm glad the decision doesn't persist across sessions.

Never stopped thinking about Pebble whenever a similar product got announced so this is a really great piece of news to start the year. I never got into hacking my Pebbles when I first got them however now I'm fiddling around in C and more smol hardwares generally so I'm psyched to get it on.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#417

Post by andrewflnr » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 7:25 AM UTC

erohead wrote: post #391

rzazueta wrote: post #341

I LOVE My Pebble and even got Rebble working on it not long ago to revive it. However... If you want to make it TRULY HACKABLE as you claim, you will not encumber it with cloud dependencies like you did last time. Let ME self host my own Pebble server if I choose. Go ahead and default to your servers and sell services and whatever, but let me host my own and switch the base URL to my own domain, preferably with open…

I'm 100% with you! No VCs this time...no mandatory cloud subscription. But I'm not really sure that this fear is grounded - before we sold to Fitbit we 'unlocked' the Pebble mobile app so you could use it with any cloud you wanted, including self hosted. So...it already meets your definition

Possibly that's a good thing to mention on the homepage. :)

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#418

Post by primozk » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 7:26 AM UTC

seanhunter wrote: post #405

ctkhn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta be honest I feel like Garmin is the perfect balance of pebble vs apple watch

Garmin is the perfect solution if you want a smart watch with a gps that takes 5mins to possibly sync 50% of the time and a touchscreen-only interface that doesn’t work if it gets wet or say sweaty. Ie during most of the activities it’s supposedly designed for. When I got a garmin smartwatch I was astounded by how poor the basic ux is in almost every single way. If I’m swimming, how do I stop my work out? The touchsc…

Which Garmin to you have? This isn't my experience. And you have option to buy Garmin watches with actual buttons, I agree the touch-screen only are useless.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#419

Post by Justta » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 7:31 AM UTC

You shouldn't have stopped when there was no alternatives.

Re: We're bringing Pebble back

#420

Post by jesterson » Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 7:34 AM UTC

Interesting. I wish there would be someone doing reBlackBerry, but even if it happens, there will be narrow pool of users I imagine. Kids are too used to brainless videos as opposed to thoughtful information exchange