Months after announcing a plan to bring the Pebble back, Eric Migicovsky’s new company, Core Devices, is showing off specs and images and opening up pre-orders.
Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble, still wears the eponymous smartwatch he created back in 2013. Launched as a Kickstarter campaign, Pebble developed an audience of loyal enthusiasts. The company made smartwatches for a niche of people who traded features like health tracking, color touchscreens, and luxury materials for something more affordable with a black-and-white display and physical buttons that could last for days instead of hours. An open SDK allowed developers to make all sorts of apps not allowed on other smartwatch platforms.
But Pebble eventually collapsed after the company, as Migicovsky said in an interview, “lost the core vision of what made a Pebble a Pebble” and found itself “kind of flipping around in the wind, reacting to what we thought the market was calling for.” Pebble shut down in 2016 and sold its assets to Fitbit, and afterwards Migicovsky said he never found another smartwatch with the exact same suite of features he wanted.
After all these years, he is bringing back the beloved smartwatch under a new company, aptly called Core Devices. Its first two smartwatches became available for pre-order on Tuesday, and Pebble lovers will be glad to know they largely stick to the original design and aesthetic with some key improvements.
“We’re keeping the core things the same,” said Migicovsky. “Like, what makes a Pebble a Pebble? It’s the e-paper screen, long battery life with a clean, simple aesthetic, kinda quirky physical buttons.” On the continued use of buttons, which automakers have been removing to the chagrin of many drivers: “You wanna be able to answer a call or hang up on a call without actually looking down at the screen or pressing play or pause when you’re on the line.” And the watches from Pebble were hackable, “in a way that no other smartwatch is.”
Core 2 Duo (not to be mistaken with the Intel chipset) is said to look and feel just like the Pebble 2, but now with battery life of up to thirty days on a charge, a massive leap from the seven days the earlier watch could get. Migicovsky attributes that to improvements in Bluetooth chip efficiency over the past ten years. “It’s the stress of having to remember all chargers and everything. That’s always a problem,” he said. “So that’s one thing that we’ve improved. You can go on basically the longest vacation you can think of and still not bring your charger on the trip.”
The Core 2 Duo—the “Duo” stands for ‘do-over’—will also have a speaker and microphone as well as sleep and step tracking in a polycarbonate frame. It will cost $149, with an initial production run of approximately 10,000 units available on day one. Shipping begins in July.
The other watch, Core Time 2, is Migicovsky’s “dream watch,” featuring a metal frame and, for the first time, a color reflective LCD touchscreen. He conceded that although buttons are great because you do not need to look at the watch to control it, he likes the complications feature on Apple Watch, and wanted to offer something similar. Wearers will be able to see information from apps directly from the watchface, and tap the complications to go directly into apps. The Core Time 2 will cost $225 and shipping begins in December. Like the Core 2 Duo the company claims it should last about 30 days on a charge. In another departure from the Core 2 Duo, the Core Time 2 also includes a heart rate monitor and should be water resistant.
The software and app marketplace will largely be identical to the Pebble lineup, after Migicovsky convinced Google to open source PebbleOS. Google took over Pebble’s assets with its acquisition of Fitbit. A roughly combined 10,000 apps and watchfaces that were available on the older Pebble watches will be supported.
Pebble fanatics have a lot to like here. The brand is not being exploited to chase new trends—this is not an AI companion like the now-defunct Humane Ai Pin. Though a microphone on the watches will enable chatting with ChatGPT. “We’re not messing with a good thing,” Migicovsky said. Do not fix what is not broken, is what the strategy seems to be.
Core 2 Duo is already far along in the production process. According to Migicovsky, Core Devices has already built dozens of units for testing and development, the process of launching the new company has been aided in part because he began working on development before Google even committed to open-sourcing the OS, and because he found a supplier who still had old Pebble 2 parts. Core Devices is currently in the process of making the first Core Time 2 prototypes.
The market for smartwatches has changed a lot over the years, with the largest players, Apple and Garmin, focusing on health and fitness tracking. Core Devices watches will have basic step and sleep tracking, but Migicovsky believes there remains a niche in the market for people who do not need that.
Migicovsky is not making a big gamble here, having learned from past mistakes. “We’re not taking big risks. We’re not trying to build millions of watches or compete with Apple or Garmin,” he said. “If you’re looking for something that’s perfectly polished or looking for something like a Garmin, go and buy those watches.”
“This is not designed for everyone,” he continued. “It’s designed for a very specific type of person that doesn’t feel like their needs are met by the other guys. I’m not sitting here trying to sell millions of these. This one might sell out, we are only making ten thousand a month. If it works really well and people love it, we’ll make more. But we’re taking it slowly trying to build a sustainable company.”
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