At the university where my wife works, scattered in various locations inside the campus’s buildings, one can find special bins to collect exhausted batteries, spent printer toner and ink cartridges, and electronics waste. I have affectionately named the latter container the ‘tech bin’. There are a couple of such ‘tech bins’ I check on a regular basis because I have found the occasional small treasure in the past.
And I’m not just talking about the odd USB cable or video adapter. I have found several pairs of headphones, a pristine Sony digital voice recorder, a perfectly-working in-like-new-condition Sony portable CD player (the generally highly-regarded D‑NE319), and even a couple of vintage PC laptops — which I managed to reassemble and get back to a working state with some simple troubleshooting. I’ve found a mechanical keyboard I’ve used as my main keyboard from October 2017 to January 2019, when a cluster of keys became unresponsive, only to find another identical model two months later. Not to mention the uncountable CD-ROMs, rewritable DVDs, and floppy disks I find on a regular basis.
Mind you, I’m not taking home everything I encounter (I’m a bit of a hoarder but I know when to stop); the purpose of this introduction is to give you an idea of the kind of stuff people throw away today. There’s literal junk, of course, and lots of genuinely broken devices, accessories, appliances. But if you’re lucky, you can find perfectly working things that, I guess, are discarded simply because they’re not being used anymore.
About forty days ago, I found a smartwatch. It had been thrown away in a small plastic bag along with its charging cable.
YOU WON’T BELIEVE what I rescued from the university’s tech bin today!! :-) pic.twitter.com/2RSENS1Qdk
— Riccardo Mori (@morrick) March 22, 2019
For those who haven’t immediately recognised it, it’s a Pebble Time. It was released in May 2015 and it’s a second-generation product. The original Pebble watch was made possible by a very successful Kickstarter campaign, and began shipping to backers in January 2013. The Pebble Technology company released new and more polished smartwatches in the following years, and ceased operations in 2016. As reminded by the relevant Wikipedia entry,
On December 7, 2016, Pebble officially announced that the company would be shut down and would no longer manufacture or continue support for any devices, nor honor any existing warranties. Pebble’s intellectual property was purchased by Fitbit, a wearable technology company specializing in fitness tracking, who also hired some of the Pebble staff. Further clarification on the transition timeline and efforts to render Pebble OS and its watchfaces/apps more self-sufficient was posted to the Pebble Dev Blog on December 14, 2016. Support for the Pebble app store, online forum, cloud development tool, voice recognition, and voice replies ceased in June 2018, although support for some online services was restored by the unofficial “Rebble” community.
Those who know me or have been reading this website for a while now, know that I’ve never been a big fan of smartwatches. While recognising the usefulness of some of their features, I’ve always felt they are too complex and too gimmicky devices to win a place on my wrist. I don’t need a smartphone surrogate with a tiny, uncomfortable screen. I have my iPhone with me all the time. I don’t need yet another device to charge overnight and babysit. I’m fine with my Swatch (or my dad’s old wristwatch) and my smartphone, thanks.
Still, finding a Pebble in the trash gave me the opportunity to do a bit of testing for free. Providing the watch still worked, of course. And it did. After leaving it connected to one of my Macs, it charged fully after about two hours. It turned on, I paired it with my iPhone 8 via Bluetooth, downloaded the Pebble app (which is still available on the App Store), reactivated some critical services thanks to the folks at Rebble, and put the watch on. I said to myself, Let’s see how long it lasts on a full charge, and let’s see how long it lasts on my wrist before I get tired of the experiment.
Pebble Time with the Simply Bold watchface made by Simply.
Well, while this Pebble Time doesn’t have that 10-day battery life it might have had when new in 2015, it still lasts 5 days on a charge, which is still respectable when you look at other smartwatches. But most importantly, about forty days later, it’s still on my wrist. Here are some of the aspects of this humble smartwatch that won me over, in no particular order:
1. It may not have a beautiful, high-resolution, OLED display, but it’s always on. This means I don’t have to make a somewhat theatrical gesture with my forearm to wake the display and check the time when I need to. I glance at it just like I would do with my analogue watches. With the added bonus of the extra information some watchfaces provide, like current weather, temperature, steps or distance walked, etc. If it’s too dark to read the screen, I just shake my wrist briefly, and the backlight activates for a few seconds.
2. I found this Pebble with a nice black magnetic Milanese Loop stainless steel band, which is really comfortable. I know, it’s not a Pebble-specific feature, but the great comfort provided by this band has nonetheless been one of the factors that are making the experience with this watch quite enjoyable.
3. The user interface — I love the visual style of certain animations and transitions. If you haven’t seen it, it’s hard to describe. I think I saw something similar in the 1990s, some sort of ‘beatnik’ retro vibe. It also has the clean simplicity of, say, the Macintosh UI in the System 6‑System 7 era.
But apart from the general æsthetics, the UI works very well. It’s possible that Pebble didn’t implement a touchscreen in order to keep costs down, but I actually find the lack of a touchscreen to be one of the strengths of this watch. You navigate the interface using four buttons, one on the left side of the watch, three on the right side. These buttons have generally fixed functions, and this makes the interface unequivocal, pretty much like the LCD quartz digital wristwatches of the 1980s. You enter the main menu by pressing the central button on the right side. You go up and down — you guessed it — by using the upper- and lower- right buttons. You go back with the lone button on the left side of the watch. There are virtually no discoverability issues here. This system is so intuitive I learnt to use the watch in 10 minutes after wearing it for the first time.
4. It’s not exactly feature-rich, but what it does, it does well — The more I use this Pebble Time, the more I think this could be (well, could have been) the perfect smartwatch for those who are usually smartwatch-averse. The navigation, as mentioned, is button-based and old school, if you like. So if you love those multi-function Casio or Citizen digital watches, you’ll be at home with the Pebble.
The watch has a bare-bones basic feature set you can build upon, if you need more; but if you don’t, it offers what a typical digital watch would offer (time, alarms, backlight, calendar), plus some nice extras like the ability to control music playback on your phone (useful when you’re listening to music from your phone and don’t want or can’t take it out of your pocket to change volume or track), and of course the ability to receive and handle notifications. The Pebble is a humble, simple smartwatch that manages to stay simple and user-friendly even when you load more apps and features on it. This is something I really don’t see in the undoubtedly more advanced products of the competition. Not even in the Apple Watch.
5. There is a whimsical, fun element about this smartwatch I can’t describe, but that I find very appealing. Maybe it has to do with the huge and diverse watchface selection. I thought that looking for a few cool watchfaces was something that would get old very soon, but I keep having fun while looking for yet another face to add to my personal selection. 99% of the available watchfaces are free, but I’ve purchased a couple of paid ones made by Simply which are really well designed. I usually keep a watchface for a couple of days, then switch to another one. Most of them are very customisable, and you do that through the Pebble app on your phone. This may seem clunkier than doing that directly on the watch, but it’s actually more practical.
6. Reliability — Sure, simpler things are less prone to issues, but in forty days of continued use, the Pebble Time never ever acted strangely, froze, or crashed… Never. It has always behaved predictably and reliably. This really helps make a wearable device ‘disappear’ and get out of the way.
7. Notifications — This is the aspect that blew me away the most. That’s because it’s what I had expected would annoy me the most. Before using a smartwatch, I firmly believed notifications were just an added nuisance. I already have them on my iPhone! It’s certainly easier to act on them from the phone. And I still think it’s true. I still think the fewer notifications you enable on your devices, the better. Having said that, in the past month I found myself in situations where having a notification reach me on my wrist in time turned out to be truly useful.
You see, I usually keep my iPhone 8 in a side pocket of my cargo pants, or in my jacket, and while I have no problems hearing a notification, I almost always miss them when I forget the iPhone on vibrate. The pocket is big, the iPhone is in its case, and the result is that the vibration is too weak for me to notice, especially if I’m walking. I typically spend a few hours working from a library every day: I switch the iPhone on vibrate when I go there, but often forget to reactivate the speaker later when I leave. When that happens, and someone calls me or sends me a message, chances are I won’t notice until later — sometimes when it’s too late (email or message demanding an urgent reply, deadline reminders, etc.). Since wearing this Pebble, I’ve never missed anything. The watch helped me reply to an urgent communication in a timely fashion, and I also have won a couple of eBay auctions because I didn’t miss the notification that typically arrives 15 minutes before the auction ends. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by how readable notifications are on the watch itself.
When you first use the watch, by default it receives notifications from all the apps on your phone with notifications enabled, but you can progressively mute them on the watch (or, more comfortably, from the Pebble app), so that only a few selected apps can reach your wrist. This reduces the nuisance factor of notifications and extends the Pebble’s battery life.
8. Ah yes, battery life — Despite being four years old, despite the fact that its previous owner didn’t seem to treat it with much care, this Pebble Time easily lasts me five days on a full charge. To save battery, I switch it off when I go to bed. If I wanted it to track my sleep activity, I could wear it while I sleep, but I’m not interested in that for now. It’s really really nice not having to worry about battery life during the day. When the battery reaches critically low levels, the Pebble enters a sort of power-saving mode where it keeps displaying the time, and the icon of a power plug. I like that.
I’ve also learnt to like something that irked me at first — how battery life is displayed. You don’t get a precise percentage measurement like on a smartphone. The watch will only display battery drain in 10% decrements, and only by using a Pebble app like Battery+ can you know the exact value. As I said, this annoyed me a bit at first, but then I realised how subtly less stressful this becomes over time. You glance at the watch and see 40%, and you know the actual battery drain is somewhere between 50% and 40%. It’s okay. You still have enough fuel. Don’t worry whether it is 46% or 42%. With a device like this, with its typical battery performance, it really doesn’t matter.
9. Since I discovered (thanks to my brother-in-law) that iOS’s Health app could track some of my everyday activity, I started paying more attention to it. I playfully accepted the ‘gamified’ aspect of reaching a 10,000-step daily goal and started tracking my steps more closely. But of course a smartwatch can track this much better than a phone, simply because you have it on yourself for a longer time during the day. I like having a watchface with the ‘steps’ or ‘distance’ complications, so as to have a general idea of how much I’ve moved on a daily basis, even though the measurements aren’t super-accurate. And as a result, I’ve started to actually walk more. The Pebble app also has a nice interface to explore when you want to check how your day has been.
Am I a smartwatch convert now?
It’s a difficult question, to be honest. Wearing the Pebble Time this past month has really given me a more precise perspective on the subject. I’ve finally experienced firsthand what it means to have a smartwatch on my wrist and how such a device can fit in my day-to-day. I still think smartwatches can be too intrusive, and while I certainly praise the heart monitoring capabilities of the Apple Watch, I realised I was glad that the Pebble Time has no heart rate sensors and doesn’t display such information. People tend to become obsessive and self-conscious when certain data is available to them. We’re not doctors, there are several reasons behind a fluctuation in our heart rate, and while in some cases it may indicate some underlying condition, most of the time it’s just that, a passing fluctuation. I think it would be better to have a smartwatch that did warn you when detecting an abnormal heart rate, but without providing real-time heart rate values.
I’ll keep using this Pebble while it lasts, but I’m still not sure whether I’ll upgrade to a more sophisticated smartwatch when the Pebble stops working. Exactly because it would be… a more sophisticated smartwatch. Ideally, I’d want another watch with the same spirit as the Pebble’s, if you know what I mean. Something simple, fun, with a well-designed, user-friendly interface that does a few things well and doesn’t overwhelm me with features or data. At the time of writing, I’m just not seeing a viable candidate in the current offerings.