Everything You Need to Know About the New Pebble Smartwatches That Just Launched

Everything that’s old comes back into fashion. Elephant-leg jeans, tie-dye shirts. Now it’s Pebble smartwatches. They’re back, and their re-launch happened sooner than I’d expected.

It was just late January when Google open-sourced the PebbleOS, which it owns through Fitbit. Now rePebble has unveiled two new Pebble watches designed by a team headed by Eric Migicovsky, the founder of the original Pebble.

Don’t remember the Pebble? When it launched in 2013, smartwatches were just in their infancy. The Pebble watch was eventually eclipsed by Pixel, Galaxy, and Apple smartwatches’ feature-packed models, and the original Pebble company folded in December 2016.

But there was always a cohort of people who missed the stripped-down cleanliness of its user interface. It doesn’t do as much as a Google Pixel Watch or an Apple Watch. It strips the functionalities back to the basics without it threatening to go HAL 9000 on your ass.

“It comes down to 5 key features: Hackable, always on e-paper screen, long battery life, simple and beautiful design, (and) physical buttons,” Pebble wrote on its blog when they announced the two new watches.

If you want a smartwatch that isn’t so smart that it takes a rocket scientist to operate, check out these two Pebbles, upgraded versions of earlier, pre-shutdown models, that are available to preorder.

the core 2 duo

The Core 2 Duo is, as Migicovsky plainly writes, an upgraded Pebble 2. “Don’t mess too much with the classics” seems to be his company’s motto. It features many similarities, and some significant improvements, namely battery life growing from seven days to 30. As Migicovsky says:

You can preorder a Core 2 Duo for $149, and they’ll begin shipping out in July of this year.

the core time 2

Like the Core Duo 2, the Core Time 2 is an upgraded version of a previous Pebble model, the Pebble Time 2. It’s got more features than the Core Duo 2, with a slightly larger display. Again, as Migicovsky puts it, the Core Time 2 features:

You can preorder a Core Time 2 for $225, and they’ll begin shipping out in December of this year.

The first batches of the Core Duo 2 have sold out, but batch 2 is still up for grabs. Although, as of the time I’m writing this, there are only 311 black Core Duo 2s left in batch 2 (and 2,918 in white). There are only 863 of the first-batch Core Time 2s left, too, so if you want one of these when they start shipping out to customers, you’d better get on it.