The Pebble smartwatch is making a comeback

this is great news for me, specifically

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Heck yeah! Mine died a couple years ago and nothing else on the market appealed to me. One of best tech purchases I’ve made. I’m ON that waitlist.

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Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be easier to do the same thing again a second time. “But then I was like, what if I just asked Google to open-source the operating system?” he says. It felt like a long shot, but he knew the code was just sitting dormant inside Mountain View somewhere. So he asked. A few times.

To Migicovsky’s surprise, Google agreed to release Pebble OS to the public. As of Monday, all the Pebble firmware is available on GitHub, and Migicovsky is starting a company to pick up where he left off.

Honestly, baller move

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I’m extremely interested. I liked having a smartwatch when I had a fitbit but was not a fan of… a lot of the elements of fitbit.

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Intriguing. I didn’t own one, but this kinda sounds interesting. Other smartwatches haven’t ever slapped, but this seems cool.

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No smart watch hit like the pebble did. The eInk screen was awesome and you could make your own watch faces and tinker with it so easily. It’s like the Linux of smartwatches but not as immediately impenetrable lmfao

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I like the old galaxy watch (3, so a bit older and running Tizen rather than WearOS) and found its watch face creation tools quite intuitive, but actually loading faces onto the device in 2024 is tough since the signing and uploading tools are basically deprecated (you can no longer connect to your phone and upload through it to the watch; you have to put the watch on wifi and then find the phone on the device running the face tool).

Before I got it, I was wearing a pebble steel, and there’s a lot I love about the device including the fact that the screen, since it uses classic LCD watch tech, can be always on and retain its battery life for several days. It was a bit of pain to keep synchronized with my phone, though. Never created a face for it, but I had a few that I adored – most notably a Mario one where every time the minute rolled over he’d hit a block and update the time. It really does hit different. Were it not for the connectivity issues I would definitely still be wearing it

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i will say i like my Galaxy 6 Classic because of the bezel, but it looks like that’s gone again with the latest version?? so if this thing dies i guess i’m just not getting another one until the pebble comes out lol

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