The Pebble 2 Duo has no heart rate sensor, no blood oxygen monitor, no
altimeter, no camera, no cellular connectivity, no sapphire glass cover,
and no color display even. But it's been
making waves. Why? Because it hearkens back to a simpler time, specifically 9
years ago. And it sounds crazy in the tech space to re-release a nearly decade
old black and white smartwatch. But as someone who enjoyed the heck out of my
Pebble smart watches, I got to say I'm kind of here for it and it's exciting to
see it happening all over again. First, some history. The original Pebble was
kickstarted back in 2012. And the sales
pitch was pretty simple. super long battery life, cross-platform
compatibility with both Android and iOS,
physical buttons, no touchscreen tom foolery, and nearly endless
customization of watch faces and apps thanks to an incredibly vibrant
community. They actually had a pretty good run, even releasing a sequel to the
Pebble with a color display, which at the time was a pretty big deal. Then
disaster struck. They sold out, acquired
by Fitbit in 2016, who were then subsequently gobbled up by Google. Then
something incredible happened. The community took the reigns and against
all odds managed to keep Pebbles functional through the Rebel app. Haha,
see what you did there? Very funny. Then in 2025, something even more incredible
happened and Google opensourced the original Pebble software for anyone to
use. Since then, the original founder of Pebble, Eric Mijakovski, has come back
into the scene, reacquired the trademark, and relaunched the Pebble.
All right, enough history. Let's talk about what it is now. Starting with
what's in the box, you get your Pebble smartwatch, which has 20 m of water
resistance, a little magnetic dual contact charger, three buttons on the
side for up, down, confirm, and then one
on the other side for back. You get a little charging brick that um how do I
put this? Is just plain not as good as the old one. It's USBC now, which is
nice, but the magnetic connection is like I don't know. Maybe I'm just maybe
this is nostalgia lenses, but doesn't seem like it grabs on as good. And I
guess I don't know. I can't tell if this is a feature or if this is just an
accident, but if you put it on your nightstand with the charger, it's kind
of angled up a little bit. So, that's something. Yeah, not a huge fan. I like
that the cables disconnectable. Mine came with a little white wristband, but
you're not married to that. You can change it out for any standard watch wristband that you like. Let's see if I
can pass this IQ test here real quick. And that's it. In line with the modern
trend, you get no wall wart and not even a cable, which is fine as long as you're
getting a discount for them not shipping you those items. But I don't appear to
be getting one in this case. So, how compelling is this sales pitch? Let's go
ahead and put it on. Pretty basic silicone strap. There we go. and
immediate head turner. And I mean that. Seriously though, the day I put this on,
I started getting comments on it. And after I explained further, not everyone
remains interested in it. But for certain people, there is an appeal. It's
basically an original Pebble 2 just with some new chips and some new tricks,
hence the name Pebble 2 Doover. Anyway,
if you want to learn a ton about this device, then that means that you can
pretty much go watch old reviews from almost a decade ago and familiarize
yourself with it. Or I can tell you the basics. Core Devices, which is Eric's
new company, boasts that it has an ultra crisp 1.26 in black and white e-aper
display. It can run over 10,000 watch faces and apps, many of which are still
carryovers from the OG Pebble. Though it is worth noting that some of those apps
might try to connect to services that no longer exist and stuff like that. It's
water resistant targeting IPX8, so you should feel more than comfortable going
swimming or washing your dishes with it. It's got a microphone for dictating
responses to text messages. The new one has been upgraded with a barometer and
compass tracker. And like the old one, it has a step counter as well as a sleep
tracker. And the sleep tracker is far more interesting to me on a device like
this than it is on most smart watches. See, I'm a charge at night kind of guy.
So, how is it supposed to track my sleep? It can't. This can. I've actually
been using it for I think about two weeks and I accidentally left the
charger at work and then I kept forgetting to take it home and it hasn't mattered because it is still on the
first charge. Core Devices claims a month of battery should be possible on
this thing with some updates, but for now, people are getting about 2 to 3
weeks, which is still pretty freaking awesome. Enough yak yak though. Let's
get it paired with my phone and tell you about our sponsor, >> Secret Lab. Their Magnus Pro sitstand
desk simplifies one of the biggest problems all gamers face, cable
management. Thanks to its discrete cable management tray and integrated power
supply column, you'll never be managing a rat king of cords again. Plus has
customizable desk mats and RGB. Yes, there are holiday sales going on till
January 2nd. So, grab your Magnus Pro metal desk bundle and save $249 right
now. >> Are you tired of boring screwdrivers? Boom! four new colors of the brand new
LT transparent screwdriver. Plasma purple, cryo teal, molten orange, and
carbon black. They're see-through, they're awesome, and they're probably
going to sell out. The Prismagic screwdrivers are launching on December
26th at 6 a.m. PST. Sign up at the link below to get notified. Collect them all
or maybe pair them with our brand new case and all over print hoodie.
Connecting pair pair. It's a pretty
simple process. It took a little bit longer the first time because I had to
click add Pebble device in the Pebble app, but yeah, really easy. This gives
you an idea of what a notification looks like on a black and white e-paper
display. You can scroll through your reminders like this, and then you can
close them like that. What is this? What does this drop something? Very funny.
Very funny. Anyway, here's my schedule for the day. The interface is kind of
delightful. And unlike many modern devices, it doesn't come preloaded with
a bunch of crap that you don't want. You've got literally two watch faces.
That's all. And one of them doesn't even work because you have to enable health
in the Pebble mobile app to continue. So, why don't we play around in the
mobile app for a bit? Oh, firmware. Uh oh, man. Yeah, I feel like we should
probably do that. Notification vibe timing setting. Ooh, vibrate at the
beginning or end of notification animation. That's a valuable setting.
Oh, very cool. Oh, apparently the new vibration motor is much better than the
old one. I never actually threw my old one on to compare, but it's a linear
actuator now. See, Apple, this is how you do it. Whatever device I happen to
use, I'm allowed to update my firmware with it. You know, you can't update
AirPods firmware if you don't have an iPhone or a Mac. Literally, Apple's
instructions is to take it to an Apple store and have them do it for you. That's insane. Apparently, Apple has
made it quite difficult to integrate third party wearables, but uh they're
they're working hard at it. I got to say I really missed physical buttons for the
last quite a while. Like dayto-day
honestly it doesn't really matter that much. I can use a touchcreen but if I'm
riding on my motorcycle or my hands are dirty or they're wet being able to
interact with my smartwatch using only buttons.
Right. This is what the process looks like for signing into Rebel. You
basically just select your Google account. Wait 15 seconds. All right,
time for a factory reset. I can't I can't forget it.
This is wild. I reinstalled the app and I still can't
I can't connect to it because it's factory reset, but I can't forget it
because it's not in the interface. Let's see if we can sort of break the cycle
here by using an Android phone. Okay, let's go.
Press plus to add Jesus H Christ. How?
Oh, wait. Oh, hold on. Maybe [music] progress. Yes. Success. Pair. Yes. Let's
go. Okay. That's how painless it was the first time on iOS. It was fine. I don't
I don't know what the deal is here. Oh my god. The firmware update didn't work.
[music] Nope. We're doing it. I'm determined. I'm not the kind of guy who
gives up. When I keep failing, I double down. Fail twice. Fail harder. That's
what I always say. I'm like Pebble that way. Google never wanted Pebble. They
wanted Fitbit. And I don't think Fitbit had really done anything with Pebble.
Actually, shout out good guy Google for just being chill and not only open
sourcing the Pebble software, but like just giving back the trademark. [music]
That's incredible. Okay, update complete. All right, connected. Okay, so
I got a couple of reminders there. Okay, I need some notifications. Somebody text
me. Oh my god, this bug still exists. I
remember this from my old Pebble how sometimes you would get the person's
name twice which when you have like a you know 100line display or whatever is
uh maybe suboptimal but you know what all the options that I would really care
about dismiss reply open on phone except
[music] mark red I'm a big fan of mark unread and that's something that I would
love to see the Pebble team work with all of the supported apps to support
because a lot of the time I get a notification that is good for notifying
me, but doesn't actually require any action. I just want it expuned from
existence. Oo, this is cool. So, you're
able to do voice recognition on device or you're able to do it remote first
with local fallback, which [music] is pretty cool. Obviously, a little bit
more accurate having the option for just local. Good stuff. Hey yo, small head.
It's ironic because your head is actually much larger than mine, I think.
Boom. Replied. Cute little animation, right?
That's old school pebble baby. Oh, they have so many fun watch faces, dude.
Totally non-infringing moon. Personally,
I love me just like a simple watch face. Give me that time. Give me that date.
Actually, temperature. No, you lost me there. Oh my god, that's so cute. Mario
jumps. How cool is it that the Rebel team were stewards for all of this, for
all these years, and that Google was willing to just give this thing back?
Like, absolutely incredible. And there
was a little bit of drama between Core Devices and the Rebel team for a bit,
but it seems like they've gotten it resolved, which makes me extremely
happy. I like to see people, you know, get along, you know, and it's that
simple. Boom. Nan Cat watch face. Listen, [music]
that's style. That's style. You wouldn't understand, but that right there, that's
style. Ah, yes. It does not have a timer
by default. I found this out when I was doing some badminton training the other day. Here we go. All right, let's learn
how to use the timer. So, if we go like this, we can set a five minute timer and
activate. Boom. And it runs in the background, too. How handy is that?
Look, I'm trying to I'm trying to channel the 2012, you know, level of
impress that I had. And I legitimately think it's a cool thing in modern era to
have a device that doesn't come with a bunch of rings that fill up or crap that
interrupts you when you're just trying to go about your day. You choose what
you want it to do. And if you don't like this timer app, there's other timers.
You could get multi-timer or you could get stopwatch. You could get the
official timer. All right. It's very readable. You know,
e- paperh. With that said, there are aspects of the design that have not aged
quite as gracefully. The feel is [music] distinctly cheap compared to modern
devices. And if it wasn't so expensive,
that might not bother me. But I happened to be wearing this device during the
Black Friday weekend and I went and I did a little bit of comparison shopping
and I couldn't help noticing that the price is marketkedly higher, not just
than an entry-level Fitbit, but even higher than the Versa 2 and was almost
as high as the promo price for the Sense 2. That is a pretty tough pill to
swallow if you care about the extra features that those devices have. With
that said, given the design intent of the Pebble to hearken back to a [music]
simpler time when smart watches were just watches but a little bit smarter
rather than kitchen sinks that were strapped to your wrist full of sensors
and cellular modems and underwater communications beepers. Maybe it's
better not to focus too much on the price to performance of the hardware,
but rather to frame the price as an investment to a friendlier, more
comfortable open-source ecosystem, one with fewer distractions. If that sounds
kind of like a sales pitch, I guess it's because it is. That's the core devices
sales pitch. And whether that appeals to you or not is going to be entirely up to
you. One thing that I can tell you probably won't appeal to you, though, is
their current approach to support for this device. Right now, they are
offering a 30-day warranty, which I am
not 100% sure is legal in every
jurisdiction. So, that might be something that they're going to have to
look into. It remains to be seen how they're handling that warranty. Like,
it's one thing if you've got a 30-day warranty, but you know, you take kind of
a Costco approach where if people have a problem, you take care of it. But core
devices in its current iteration really hasn't been around that long. And their
founder has kind of bailed on the Pebble community once. So, I wouldn't mind if I
had something a little bit longer in writing. And I wouldn't mind if you subscribed to ShortCircuit.