Chips & Hardware
The $225 Pebble Time 2 revives the smartwatch as a hacker's toy, not a mini-computer
Core Devices, founded by original Pebble creator Eric Migicovsky, has sold more than 25,000 units of its $225 Pebble Time 2 smartwatch across 93 countries.
The $225 Pebble Time 2 brings back the indie smartwatch brand with a color e-paper display, physical buttons, and long battery life instead of the touchscreen, OLED approach of devices like the Apple Watch. The always-on 64-color e-paper screen can be backlit with a wrist flick or a tap, and the watch lasts about 21 days on a charge.
Pebble started as a Kickstarter project before landing at Google through a Fitbit acquisition. Before that exit, the company had sold 2 million watches and generated $230 million in sales, but founder Eric Migicovsky — who has since co-founded the messaging app Beeper — has said Pebble’s financials couldn’t sustain the business on their own. Fitbit kept Pebble’s servers and app store running until mid-2018; after that, Pebble’s own user community kept the product alive.
In 2025, Migicovsky, with help from ex-Pebblers and Fitbit staff at Google, convinced Google to open-source the original Pebble operating system, letting him build new Pebble hardware under his company, Core Devices. Core Devices has since shipped a limited-edition Pebble 2 Duo and sold more than 25,000 Pebble Time 2 watches across 93 countries; a third device, the Pebble Round 2, is expected to begin shipping in September.
The device ships with more than 2,120 community-built watch faces and apps, including over 500 new ones from a spring developer contest — ranging from simple analog displays to niche tools like a train-schedule tracker or a Strava activity tracker, alongside games and utilities.
The watch mirrors phone notifications, controls music, and includes a “timeline” view of the day’s calendar events and reminders, plus basic step, sleep, and heart-rate tracking, though it doesn’t market itself as a fitness tracker. It carries 30m/3 ATM water resistance for everyday exposure, not swimming. Apple’s rules limit some iOS integrations, such as taking action on notifications directly, so daily alarms must be set on the watch itself rather than syncing automatically.
Why it matters
Pebble’s return shows a niche hardware brand can be resurrected on community goodwill and an open-sourced OS alone, without the venture-scale backing that originally sank it.