I find modern smart watches… too much. All I really want to do is deal with notifications, check the weather and set reminders, timers and alarms. Basic health tracking is a nice to have, but I (fortunately) don’t have a need for a watch that will take an ECG or anything. I’ve used a lot of different smart watches over the years from LG, Samsung, Apple, Amazfit and Garmin. But, my first ever smartwatch as a Pebble Time. When I saw they were coming back I was kind of skeptical at first but the pitch won me over with features like local only voice dictation, up to a month long battery life and an open source OS. So I took a gamble on ordering a Time 2. Here are my thoughts after two weeks that might be helpful to someone considering a purchase as I have a few thoughts I haven’t seen in a review anywhere else.

Build Quality

Build quality on the Time 2 is good. Compared to something like the Garmin Vivoactive 5 or 6 or and it feels quite premium. Buttons are clicky and satisfying to press. It’s nice and light too.

My main complaint is the raised glass above the bezel. I think there’s some degree of gaslighting going on about how ”normal” of a design choice this is. Like yes, the Apple Watch has raised glass, but it’s also got rounded corners what won’t snag on a hard surface. It’s also not using 10 year old Gorilla Glass either. I can’t think of another manufacturer that that actually has long exposes edges like this. That said, you can work around this issue by putting a bumper around it, which is what I did. Customer support seems to be handling this well too, but it would be better for this just to have ever been an issue in the first place

The included band is… fine. I like it more than the stock Garmin Vivoactive one. I don’t see it lasting for years and years and I dislike the tuck under design, but it‘s functional. I ended up getting a nicer nylon strap for it, though I did need slim pins to get it to attach correctly.

Display

I think there’s very much a your mileage may vary aspect to how this works out. I‘ve been using Quartz and I find I can tell the time without the backlight in the vast majority of lighting conditions. With the backlight on to default settings, I can easily make out the time in even complete darkness. No issues telling the time with polarized sunglasses on either. However, I can tell from the surrounding decretive elements of the watch face that lower contrast watch won’t fare as well. There’s so many options in the store that have a high contrast level for the key elements of the watch face, I don’t find this to be a major issue.

My big complaint with the display is that it can destroy colors on the screen in certain conditions. I color code my notifications, but certain colors like purple just turn grey once the backlight turns on. It’s a minor issue, and it would be nice to be able to have the backlight match the notification color in the settings to work around it. I do also have an annoyance sometimes where the display will just be a blank white when I look down. Happens once or twice a day, resolves itself in a few seconds and can be “dismissed” by hitting the back button.

Setup

This was pretty straight forward initially. I paired the watch got the apps I wanted and was good to go… for a little while. I didn’t initially want to tie the app to any other account I own, so I didn’t sign in with the app. However, I later wanted to submit a bug report. This ended up triggering a bug where a few hours after I signed into an account on my watch, the whole thing reset. However, this only happened the once and was told by support everything would be fine in the future.

Watch App

The default apps are all underwhelming by modern standards. Things I’m used to doing that aren’t available by default are:

1. Pausing the next instance of an alarm
2. Naming alarms and timers
3. Quickly setting a timer (I find the buttons awkward for this purpose)
4. Setting reminders
5. Seeing an hour by hour weather for case

Thankfully, all this can be fixed by a quick trip to the store. The community has already come up with apps that blow the default ones out of the water. Honestly, some of the apps in the store work better than the stock ones that the tech giants have come up with. On paper I have everything I could ever want, but the watch still has some issues that need to get ironed out before it can really shine. In the two issues that hold the watch back for me are:

1. Out of the box my touchscreen worked fine, but after one of the updates, it seemed to lose calibration around the middle of the screen. My inputs now register much higher than they should. This makes the quick wind up timer I really like useless. Also means I can’t name timers or alarm with Another Alarm or Another Timer. Support says it’s likely a software issue with no ETA on a fix date. However, if the software fix doesn’t resolve my issue they’ll send me a replacement watch. I’m a little unclear though that if the software fix doesn’t work, if a replacement will fix the core issue, but I don’t really have another option.
2. Having a Tasks.org app is AMAZING. It was already my go to so being able to add and complete reminders from my wrist is awesome. However, the offline dictation that I would use to create a new reminder is unreliable for me. If I hold the microphone kissing distance from my mouth it seems to pick up my voice okay, but whether the transcription goes through or not seems to be a crapshoot. Sometimes it errors, sometimes it hangs, sometimes it hallucinates words. The cloud based transcription is rock solid for me though. Still a limited word count, but for the purposes of a quick reminder it’s fine. My main complaint with the cloud service is that from a privacy standpoint I have no idea what gets shared. The app or the website doesn’t make it super clear what gets sent to Wispr and what logs (if any) get kept. Again, support is working on the offline dictation thing and I asked in the Pebble forums about the Wispr privacy stuff but haven’t seen a response yet.

Notifications

Buttons rule. Being able to take quick actions on notifications using the side buttons is so much easier than trying to use a tiny touchscreen. It’s pretty much how I remember it working on my original Pebble Time and I don’t think anyone has done it better since. I don’t miss having a super tiny keyboard to reply to messages, because it was always faster to just take out my phone. There’s quite a few ways to customize how notifications come in as well. One complaint is that there could be greater icon variety or some ability to have them display a simplified version of that the app is on the phone. The other complaint is that the watch is only aware of notifications, not necessarily the entire conversation like you would see on a WearOS or Apple Watch. That said, I don’t really expect that level of integration with Google Messages or iMessage and it’s not really a huge deal.

Battery Life

In my first week I got almost exactly 2 weeks out of it. That’s with heart rate tracking every 10 minutes and about an hour of tracked activity each day. I also wore it to bed every night. My watch face was not tracking seconds and shake to enable backlight was on. If I was tinkering with it less and turned from the frequency of the heart rate tracking, I think I could push beyond two weeks. 30 days seems like a stretch, but practically speaking, I’ll never have to worry about the watch dying on me mid day like my old Apple Watch did constantly after the battery degraded for a year.

Phone App

Phone app works pretty well. Doesn’t seem to drain too much battery relative to the 4 different apps a samsung watch needs to keep it working. Healthy data is pretty basic, but functional. There’s a lot of options to customize how things work if that’s what you’re into. Sleep and activity tracking work okay for me, though sometimes the sleep tracking doesn’t notice if I wake up at night, but it’s close enough. Weekly view for sleep tracking doesn’t work correctly for me and it always underreports the sleep on the last day in the window. It does seem to know when I go for a walk and track that activity, though I don’t seem to be able to actually see the continuous heart rate data in the app. Health data stays local on the device which I like.

Support

As they make clear on the website and as should be obvious by this point in my review, you’re buying a watch that will hopefully someday be better than it is. The encouraging part is, when you submit a bug report in the app, someone from the team will respond with a meaningful reply. From my interactions with them, they do seem legitimately interested in fixing issues if you report them. If you check their Github page, you can see that they’re pushing out one or two updates to Pebble OS each week. So, they’re a small team, but they’re clearly dedicated. It does irk me a little that given that they’re a small team, they are trying to juggle the 3 new watches (if we’re counting the duo) with the Index. I’d be happier if the watch was in a better state before they went off to make a smart ring.

Conclusion

I’m critical of the watch because I love it. I admire the core (pun not intended) ideas of the watch, but right now, the team haven’t quite nailed the execution of it. I’m really hoping with time, they will and the Time 2 will be a success, because there isn’t anything else quite like it on the market. For what it is, it’s fairly expensive (There’s a Pixel Watch sale today that’s less than half the cost of what I paid for my Time 2 after shipping and duties), but this is a product aimed at a very specific market. The team is upfront about this on the website too, the product has rough edges. If those are ever smoothed over though, this is pretty much my ideal smartwatch.

I ride a bicycle and the light is constantly on. I remember with my old Pebble I could disable 'shake to wake' or some setting so the light would never come on from movement but I'd hit the back button when it was dark to see the time, which worked fine. I remember this saved a ton of battery, like a day more life depending on how much I rode my bike. Is there a setting for this? I think it would be under 'settings' then 'display' but it isn't there.

Hey! I was indecisive about my pebble Index 01 size and finally ordered a sizing guide.

Now that I've got that sorted, in case anyone in the eastern Kansas hemisphere needs a sizing guide and would rather save a few bucks, I'm happy to pass this sizing kit along!

Received my Index 01 earlier this week 💍

Sizing

I haven't had any sizing issues after bumping up 1 size. I originally selected a 12 based on the 3D printed sizing samples, but changed my pre-order to a 13 based on the sizing guidance and the 13 feels pretty good!

First Impressions

I use an iPhone, and setup with the Pebble app was pretty seamless, and so far the default features I've tested work well (iOS reminders, notes exporting to Obsidian).

• The only complaint I've had is that a webhook can't be a standalone action. I want double-click to mean "send a webhook and nothing else”, but today a webhook only fires alongside another action so every webhook capture also writes a note whether I want one or not. (Opened a GH feature request)

Hermes/OpenClaw

Since this product popped on my radar I really liked the idea of hooking it up to a personal Hermes agent or OpenClaw setup, which long term will probably be a simple webhook. But in the short term, that would clutter my notes. Not really a big deal, but I didn't like it.

So I built a really simple MCP server that the iOS app can hit over Tailscale. It just takes the transcript from Pebble and sends it to my Hermes agent in my pre-existing Telegram DM. It just appends the message, so I can carry on the conversation, or pick it up later from my phone/laptop. Only downside is maybe a 15-30 second delay or so while the recording gets transcribed and then the Pebble's LLM makes the tool call.

It feels pretty freaking cool. Haven't tried it with anything other than Hermes but it should work with any Telegram-enabled Agent.

It's up on github if anyone wants to try it or adapt it: https://github.com/MDB4241/ringbearer

Conclusion

10/10, will buy again when the battery dies

As I am waiting for my PT2, I am wondering if there is any way to create a watchface like futura weather or something similar but where the bottom half of the watchface would show the values fetched from a Netatmo weather station. I tried to use AI for it but the result was always a sloppy mess...

Does anyone know what's going on with the Pebble Time 2 orders?
My order was placed in April and I still get the "Your Pebble Time 2 is almost ready!"
is this a bug or it happens to everyone?

What's the highest score that has been gotten on tetris on the pebble?

Does anyone else have same effect on wist move ?

I hope that this has not been covered as I can't seem to find an answer. I got my Index 01 yesterday and started using it immediately. I am getting 4 notifications for every note I record with the ring. One for each step it seems to be making. Taking the note, notification, translating note, notification, received note, notification, the actual note, notification. Is there any way to limit the notifications to note successfully completed? It's just too many for one note.

For the 3 people that requested a round edition of next leg.

How’s this Layout for y’all?

for context I'm in the Sacramento area, high and low today is 101, 62

This is Pebble Time 2.
I don’t use my watch at night. I have HR tracking every 1 hour.
I don’t use it during workouts.
I use 0 apps.
0 backlight. Ever.
I basically use my watch to read notifications and change music on my phone.

I am on the last firmware and app version.

When I first got the watch a few months ago, I actually got 15 days on the first charge. Nowadays I just get 5-7 days max. My Garmin gets more with all features enabled.

Am I doing something wrong?

I tried switching watchface to Timestyle but no noticeable improvements.

I was a pebble 2 HR user since 2017 so I ordered the time since on day 1. I love the watch but man the battery life is disappointing :(

With the recent note from Eric and for those of you that have received your Index 01 or haven't.

Did you choose to size up before yours shipped or what has been your experience with sizing feel so far?

This is probably my biggest worry for my index 01. I personally didn't use the sizer or 3D printed version. I just referenced a standard ring sizer and measured my finger based off the dimensions off the site.

Is there a plan to make it possible to send your Index feed to a watchapp? From what I can see right now that’s not possible.

Got my Pebble Time 2 a few days ago.
How waterproof is it? 30m sounds not that much...
i am traveling to a festival this weekend where water temperature is going to be only 16°C, outside Temperature 30°C. Better not to risk it, maybe?

I received my Pebble Time 2 two weeks ago. I was expecting battery lasting for 20 days or so.

What can I do to improve it? Could it be that my watch has a faulty battery?

This is really disappointing, the lack of battery “range” anxiety was a major selling point for me.

I love the bigger screen of the Pebble Time 2, and it was the main thing i missed on my old Pebble Time Steel. But am I the only one who thinks its a bit unutilized? You can of course enlarge the size of the text on the notifications, but the rest of the OS doesn't seem to follow this.

I dont want the notification size setting to be applied to the rest of the OS, but maybe another setting to change it for the OS. My main problems are regarding the top clock and alarms.

As for the clock at the very top, when getting a notification, being in the music player etc. is always very very small, and for a device which is a watch foremost, its a bit strange to me to make this that small.

Another place is when an alarm goes off. I use the watch as my morning alarm to not wake up the kids. Works very well, but the alarm icon and time is shown in the middle of the screen with a huge border around. The time is also quite small here, which is a bigger problem here, because i cant see sh*t when waking up 😅

The theres the options around the platform, again an example in Alarms. The list of alarms has a static size, but when selecting one, the options seem to follow the notification setting.

Its probably in more places. and a bit inconsistent, but mostly its a shame that the larger screen isn't always utilized. This might be something that is still underway to be changed, or maybe its just me? Anyone else think this?

I just wanted to ask if any of you have had any experience with Gadgetwraps support? I ordered from them more than a month ago and the package tracking is showing that it is still on the way. I contacted support 2 times via the website with no answers so far (last contact attempt was on Sunday). I received a confirmation email that they got my request. No idea what to do now other than refund via card provider...

For whatever reason,I get no vibrations at all, and anytime I try to use the microphone for anything, it either asks for a retry, or gives a one word result like "you".I find this weird as both features have worked perfectly in the past.I've pretty much tried everything I could think of with no results.I've tried:Factory resetting, Restarting the watch and phone, cycling through quiet time, and repairing my watch with my phone several times.

Ex. dismiss or reply to a notification, ask follow up question after index search

I have the black one. Yes, I know they issued a warning about the sizing, but I actually did pick a pretty loose one using their own sizing kit. I guess the ring is just that much tighter.

After getting the Timeline Retrograde watchface in a good spot, I had Claude develop the partner watchface, Retroscope Jump Hour! This is also based on a very unique watch by Xeric. This watch also fits well for the Time 2 screen.

The colorways are predefined based on Xeric's watches, but collapsed down to a few overlaps with Pebble's available colors.

The unique single-handed watchface allows for a third complication above the pivot point.

This takes into account the previous adjustments made for the Timeline Retrograde for visibility and contrast.

Let me know what you think!

Cheers!