Earlier this week, Google announced that it had released (most of) the source code for the first modern smartwatch – the Pebble.
Google acquired Pebble and its intellectual property through its purchase of Fitbit but has now made PebbleOS open-source, meaning anyone is free to tinker with it. The person best suited to tinkering with PebbleOS, Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky, already has plans for the watch to make a comeback.
Pebbles on your wrist
We won’t blame you if the name isn’t that familiar, the company’s first product started out as a Kickstarter campaign in 2016 after four years in development and became the most-funded campaign at the time.
In a recent blog post, Migicovsky explained that he envisions the new smartwatch as mostly the same as the original Pebble, just with updated hardware to support the set of features he wants in a wrist-based wearable.
“The new watch we’re building basically has the same specs and features as Pebble, though with some fun new stuff as well.”
Migicovsky’s feature wishlist includes an always-on e-paper screen, long battery life, physical buttons, a “simple and beautiful user experience,” and the ability to easily create your own watch faces.
“I had really, really, really hoped that someone else would come along and build a Pebble replacement. But no one has. So… a small team and I are diving back into the world of hardware to bring Pebble back!”
The Pebble founder and his small team have their work cut out for them. “It’s important to note that some proprietary code was removed from this codebase, particularly for chipset support and the Bluetooth stack,” Google explained in its blog post, adding developers would face “a non-trivial amount of work” to replace the missing bits of code.
We’ll be keeping a watchful eye on Migicovsky’s progress and report back when more news surfaces. In the meantime, if you already have a Pebble smartwatch you should probably hang onto it. It might just receive a new breath of life in the future.
