Pebble was my first smartwatch, all the way back in 2015. It was fun and quirky back when it was first released. Then it stopped production for many years while smartwatch category grew. Now they're coming back with same/similar models as before.

For me, its value lies more in nostalgia than anything else. I don't expect it to ever compete with the likes of my Apple watch for smart features, or a Garmin for activity tracking.

That said, it's an e-paper display so battery life is pretty good. Plus it had (and probably will have) an active community of small apps and watchfaces, which kept (and probably will keep) it from becoming stale quickly.

Focus on longevity and extensibility. Lots of people still use their original Pebbles from 10 years ago and the community continued to release content for the platform. Also, the batteries last a really long time.

I never had an original Pebble but was always a curious observer. To me, the attraction is a device that is clearly complementing a modern smartphone rather than trying to be a second phone on my wrist. I know lots of Apple Watches are sold sans-eSIM, and I get the appeal in very specific situations like a water park where I have to leave my phone in the locker but I can still wear a watch... the watch is now my gateway to texts, calls, Find-My, etc.

But nonetheless, that is a rare occurrence, and I don't think for me it's worth paying the battery life and complexity cost of an Apple Watch (or similar full featured wearable) for that 1% use case. I'd rather have a simpler device that just focuses on health tracking and a few notifications, basically what FitBit was if it had a better battery and didn't suck.

That it's hackable and there will likely be lots of community-maintained apps that link into services I use is gravy on top.

Longtime pebble user here. The main things are the always-on ePaper display, long battery life (they claim this new gen's battery will last a month!), and the hackability. I personally love the user interface and charming animations!

Besides what others already mentioned, it's the only smart watch with an open source OS supported by the vendor themselves (that I know of anyway).

On top of what others have said, the Watchface/App dev experience is pretty great. The OS provides a lot of compositing and animation features that encourage really lively and cute designs, and the Pebble app has a JS runtime that allows apps to do whatever phone-side stuff you need without having to build separate Android and iOS apps (or, as a user, install a ton of companion apps). Spin-up and iteration is really easy because pebble-tool manages building, deploying to QEMU, and running the phone-side code in Node.js so that you can launch and test your app end-to-end with one command.

Having to write C on the watch-side isn't everyone's cup of tea but they are actively working on a replacement for rocky.js so that you can write everything in JS.

Pebble was sort of the first/only smartwatch that are common+open enough && uses simplistic lightweight OS such that it'll last couple weeks per charge. Its competitors either didn't exist, weren't open(Xiaomi), or burned enormous amounts of power that they required daily recharges(Google/Apple).

I still wish other smart watches behaved like a pebble, the interface was so intuitive you could use it to do the basics without looking at it most of the time.

It's like trying something so good it ruins every other one for you. The UX was just so well thought through i don't know how to explain it.

Privacy, it does not push data to the cloud. And also the ease of access to the data.

For me, charm and character.

I was an original Pebble Kickstarter wearer from 2012, then got the initial Time, then the first Android smartwatches (Moto 360!) then basically every Apple Watch from then to now. Even used Google Glass a few months in 2013.

I like my wearables. I use features on my Apple Watch constantly: NFC payments, voice reminders, fitness and sleep tracking, make my iPhone yell out so I can find where I put it, etc.

But not a single damn wearable I've had has captured a fraction of the charm the original Pebble and Pebble Time had. Their UIs are low-res by modern standards, and greyscale or largely solid colors, but wow.

Dug up some videos as reference. Here's one that highlights what the core system UI aesthetic is like. Notice the transitions as you use the UI. I remember it feeling really snappy too, and it feels great to use a UI that moves like that with physical tactile buttons, as opposed to scrolling a Digital Crown or using the touch screen on an Apple Watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdRENEQcymQ

And aside from the system UI, the community of apps that existed for it back then and no doubt will continue to grow now has a lot of charm too. The creators of all the apps are making them out of love, not to be a Top 10 on an Apple app store. And they don't exactly have a strong cohesive system UI to comply with unlike Apple. Human Interface Guidelines are wonderful for phones and tablets and for serious app ecosystems I depend on, but watches are Not That Serious as far as I'm concerned so the individuality and love within each app just fills me heart with joy every time I look down at my wrist.

You know the proverb: "jack of all trades, master of none"?

For Pebble fans most of other watches sound like that. Pebble, o.t.o.h., is focused on doing well just the essential: always on reflective screen, long battery life, easy to develop, UI based on buttons instead of touch screens, being easy to program to,...

I had a couple of Pebbles in the past that are now broken, I'm considering buying one of the newer ones. One Pebble Steel which had a defect for a bunch of them where the screen would gradually start corrupting and a Pebble 2 where the rubberized buttons turned to mush after all these years.

The thing I like about Pebble is the fact its not trying to do a million other things. The two things I really want in a smart watch is to be able to triage a notification/get an update without having to actually pull out my phone and have easy media controls on my wrist. Optimizing for that means it gets excellent battery life and comparatively low prices, because it doesn't need a ton of compute and giant screen and a million sensors constantly taking measurements to accomplish it.

Its nice being able to still get messages and change the music and what not while you're doing something dirty or whatever and aren't about to pull out your phone. Doing yard work, wrenching on the car or motorcycle, lounging in the pool, riding a bicycle, etc. That's all I really want.

The e-ink display is the killer feature. Week-long battery life and always-on readable display even in direct sunlight. Every other smartwatch is a tiny phone screen that dies in a day. Pebble chose the opposite trade-off: less flashy but actually useful as a watch. The open SDK and hackable firmware are the other half - you can write watchfaces and apps in C, which attracted a dev community that most wearables never get.

The attraction is that it's like the early versions of Android, you can do whatever you want with your hardware and there's nobody to tell you no.

The app store is delightfully quirky and adding a watchface is just a matter of drag and drop. There's no Gatekeeper, or hundred of pages of Terms of Services and Privacy Policies and GDPR disclaimers you have to fill out. You don't have to sacrifice your first born child to Big Tech and nor do you have to beg for root permissions on your own hardware. Whatever goes, caveat emptor. If you install malware and brick your device (a very difficult thing to do given that it's a watch), well, that's also entirely on you.

It's similar to why OpenClaw went viral; you can do whatever the fuck you want with it, nothing is wrapped up in carefully sanitized corporatism, with everything locked down to a t and filled with cover-your-ass privacy and permissions declarations that are not worth the pixels they are displayed on.

Nobody's around to nanny you and play authoritarian daddy with what you do with your watch. If you want to share offensive, pirated, or DMCAed watchfaces — go wild. If you want to build a protest app to track government thugs and civil servants — all the power to you! If you want to turn it in to a sex toy controller to use during long boring church services — well, that's between you and your faith, there's no Big Tech between God and your bedroom. It's just like the old days of Android and APKs and jailbroken iPhones. A return back to simpler days of open computing.

Your grandma won't get as much out of this watch versus an Apple Watch, but if you are a real hacker at heart, this is the device for you.