My new smart watch is ten years old and I like it a lot.
Background
I got my first “smart” watch in 2018. Although I’ve managed to keep it running, I’ve wouldn’t say I’ve ever really loved it.
The TicWatch Pro is handsome, and has a nice display. I genuinely like some of the watch faces out there. It also has an LCD layer that’s shown most of the time, and as a result can typically go 2-3 days on a charge.
The problem is, even in 2018 it was slow, and it hasn’t gotten better. It’s also a hassle to charge, mostly because of the maddeningly bad Mobvoi charger that doesn’t always seat properly. The charger also tends to die if you use a power supply that can provide more than 1 Amp (I’m on my third charger at this point).
But it works. It keeps time, shows me notifications and calendar reminders, and has a heart rate monitor. I want to keep it running for as long as humanly possible, as I would almost always rather repair something I have than get something new.
Speaking of breathing new life into something old, the last time my Mobvoi charger died, it was actually cheaper to buy another entire unit and charger used, so I did that. Since I had two watches, I spent a while trying AsteroidOS on one of them.
AsteroidOS is much faster, there’s no litany of privacy warnings and permissions for the heart rate monitoring, and you can in theory make your own watch faces if you’re willing to learn QT. The biggest problem is that you can’t sync with the calendar on your phone.
So I ended up using Android Wear on my old TicWatch Pro again as my daily driver, and I’m still not loving it.
Welcome Back to the Stage of History
A couple of days ago, the news came out about PebbleOS being open-sourced. The more I learned about it, the more I knew I had to give it a try.
The idea of a cloud-backed “smart” thing outliving the interests of the people who sell it is something I really like. (I say this while glancing at the Google Stadia controller on my desk).
I also like being part of a community trying things and contributing back where possible. I figured if I had an existing Pebble, I’d be in a good position to try out updates to PebbleOS based on the legacy codebase, and maybe develop apps and watchfaces at the same time as other people I can learn from.
On top of all that, I also just liked everything I’d read about using a Pebble without modifying it.
Not New, but New to Me
So, the same day as the article came out, I found a used Pebble on Marktplaats (“the Dutch eBay”, at one point actually owned by eBay). I ended up getting a Pebble Time (Champion edition), which was a Kickstarter reward for people who backed them twice.
The Rebble community has gone a long way to keeping the Pebble alive, and my setup experience on Android was fine. First, I needed the old Pebble app for the initial setup, and the app isn’t on the Google Play Store any longer. Thankfully, Rebble provides a detailed setup guide to help you sideload the app and pair it with your device. The main sticking point is wrestling all the permission tick boxes and warning dialogs to the ground, once you do that you can just follow the prompts in the Pebble app.
Once I had the device paired and set up, it was time to get it set up for updates and apps. Rebble provides a URL I loaded on my phone to reconfigure the Pebble app to use the community servers. Given that Android App links like this require you to have access to the app’s signing certificate, they must have worked closely with Google to set this up. Doing this immediately gave me access to tons of apps and watch faces.
Once I had the app set up and updated the Pebble, I was ready to start actually wearing and using it.
What’s It Like?
First impressions, the build quality is good, it’s not quite as handsome as the brushed metal finish on the TicWatch Pro, but presentable, especially if you already have a matching watch band. Speaking of watch bands, the Pebble works with the same 22mm watch bands as the TicWatch Pro, which is great, as I have quite a few of those at this point.
I’m used to the TicWatch Pro, which has a bigger screen, a thick metal body, and a 415 mAh battery. By comparison, the Pebble Time has a smaller screen, a thinner body, and a 150 mAh battery. As a result, it’s much lighter, but it doesn’t feel like a toy. The polished metal back on the TicWatch Pro can be a bit bracing when you first put it on on a winter day. The Pebble Time is a bit more comfortable in that respect. In fact, it’s so comfortable I’m willing to wear it to bed to try their sleep tracking.
The display is ePaper with a backlight. I like reading text on it, it reminds me of the Kindle in that respect. The display is fine in normal overhead lighting and much better than a normal display in sunlight. It’s a little hard to read in low light, but is fine once you turn on the backlight (or if you have a reading lamp).
When I hear “ePaper” I worry about latency, but I have an animated watchface and haven’t noticed any artifacts or odd behaviour. I’m not planning to watch movies on the thing, my one concern was whether it could scroll and display something like a second hand properly, and it can.
As mentioned, the display does have a backlight, which is not motion activated. When the watch is displayed, the left button activates the backlight, and it’s just bright enough to read the display, and no brighter. This sounds small, but is really nice in the evenings and during the night. I find that it’s not nearly as harsh as checking my phone for the time.
Speaking of buttons, the display is NOT a touchscreen. There are four physical buttons, one on the left, three on the right. The left button seems to be mainly the “back” button. The top and bottom right buttons tend to be used for up/down scrolling or to let you pick from a two-option dialog. The middle right button opens the list of apps and picks an item when you’re scrolling through a list. We’ll see how natural it feels after a few days, but so far it’s fine. Quaint, even.
The Pebble is pretty fast. It boots in a few seconds, and updates are pretty zippy compared to Android. It responds very quickly when you hit a button. Notifications also seem to come through very quickly.
The Pebble doesn’t include GPS and heart rate monitoring. GPS isn’t much of a problem as long as you’re willing to keep the Pebble connected to your phone. Heart rate monitoring is a bit more of a bummer.
The Pebble does support adding functionality using smart watch bands (“smartstraps”). I can see a few commercial efforts from the glory days of the Pebble, like this “smartstrap” that adds heart rate monitoring, but I haven’t found anything that’s still for sale or available used.
I also see community projects from back in the day to make your own smartstrap, like these hackathons and this instructable project. Again, there’s nothing recent and nothing that’s a product, or a kit, or a even a good guide to doing this yourself today.
Customisation Options
This brings us to the broader topic of customisation. As mentioned, there are old examples of customising the hardware with a smartstrap or smart dock. If enough people start working with old Pebbles or whatever new hardware comes out as a successor, maybe this will be a better option for hardware hacking in the future.
Without changing the hardware, you can still customise the user experience by configuring your device. On the Android Wear side, I’ve configured my own “tiles”, which appear when you swipe right from the watch face (you can have multiple tiles). I’ve heard there are watch faces that act as a launcher to give you the option to change what happens when you swipe in other directions, but haven’t tried them yet. Like Android, Android Wear supports the ability to disable built-in software, and I definitely use this to turn off stuff I don’t use like voice memos.
PebbleOS is a similar mix of things you can change and things you can’t. It doesn’t let you change what happens when you press and quickly release the “up” and “down” buttons from the watch face. “Up” goes to the health data, “down” goes to the timeline. However, you can assign a “quick launch” app to a long press on each of the four buttons, which is arguably comparable to Android Wear’s “tiles”. However, PebbleOS doesn’t let you disable or hide the built-in apps, or even change the order to move the calendar further down in the list.
Of course, there’s a chance the commercial Pebble successor or the open source community might provide alternative versions of PebbleOS, or provide instructions for “rolling your own” version, like AsteroidOS does. We’ll see.
You can also install or write your own apps for both. Although I’ve developed for Android before, I never got interested enough in Android Wear to try writing my own watch face, especially since there are so many polished ones I already like.
Making a watch face on the Pebble seems more realistic to me. You can use C or even Javascript. Given that I’m mostly working in C now and previously spent years writing Javascript, it seems a bit more plausible than picking up Java again or learning Kotlin.
Conclusion
I really enjoy using the Pebble so far, and plan to stick with it. The lack of heart rate monitoring is not great, but I still have the TicWatch Pro for that. My plan is to swap off between the two whenever I have to charge the one that’s on my wrist.
Speaking of charging, while writing this up and searching for info about the Mobvoi charger, I found this (I say it with love and admiration) nutcase who made their own charger they can use without taking their watch off.
We’ll see which I get to first, a new charger for my TicWatch Pro, or maybe a custom watch face for the Pebble. Stay tuned.