Pebble is back and I couldn’t be happier. The smartwatch brand that pre-dated the Apple Watch by a number of years has made a dramatic return under the name “Core Devices”, and it’s clear to me that these are, so far, the most important wearables of 2025.
But that’s not because the two devices on offer, the Core 2 Duo and Core Time 2, are sitting at the peak of technological achievement. No, they’re built from old Pebble parts, with e-paper displays, an old fashioned square design, and the ancient PebbleOS. In comparison to most of the best smartwatches, they’re positively prehistoric. You may then assume they’re bad smartwatches to buy, as my colleague Andy Boxall believes — but nothing could be further from the truth. These renamed Core Device smartwatches are the retro throwbacks we all need right now.
The Pebble doesn’t try to replace your phone
Recently, I spent some time wearing a normal “dumb” watch, and it made something very clear to me — the “smart” part of smartwatches really isn’t all that smart.
Manufacturers have been adding a lot to smartwatches in recent years, and to some extent, it’s meant that we’ve collectively forgotten a key fact about smartwatches — that the “smart” part is not more important than the “watch” part.
If you’re anything like me, you spend the first week with your smartwatch using the absolute monkeys out of it. You install a bunch of apps you’ll never use, download Spotify playlists you’ll never listen to, and spend an hour digging through the Settings app, finetuning everything about your watch. Then you … stop using it for anything other than the time and notifications. It’s a cycle I’ve personally repeated time and time again, and it’s a big part of the reason I, and so many others, consistently find myself going back to fitness trackers rather than smartwatches.
Because, ultimately, a smartwatch isn’t a replacement for a smartphone. No matter how many apps you install on it, no matter how good you get with a teeny-weeny keyboard, no matter how often you answer calls with it, you’re always going to eventually reach for your phone.
A smartwatch isn’t a replacement. It’s a go-between. A complement. The ideal form of the smartwatch is a device that lets you keep tabs on what’s going on, without needing to dig out your phone. And that’s exactly what these new Pebble watches offer. While you’ll be able to reply to notifications with the new Core Devices watches, it’s never going to be the focus. Instead, it’s a way to judge if a notification is important enough to get your phone out or not.
In fact, in a lot of ways, the Pebble approach to smartwatches is now more relevant than ever, because a more retro approach to smart tech is becoming more fashionable.
The old is new again
The Pebble do-over is coming at a time when younger generations are exploring the tech of yesteryear. Despite essentially going defunct last decade, wired headphones are making a comeback. While some will point out that wired headphones have better clarity and quality than wireless headphones, it’s less that young people have all suddenly become audiophiles, and more that they’re doing what young people have always done — reject the status quo.
The new Pebble devices are perfectly placed to take advantage of this new trend. After all, what’s more mainstream than the Apple Watch-style of smartwatch? The Core Devices Pebbles exist as far to the antithesis of the Apple Watch Series 10 as it’s possible to be while still being a smartwatch. It embraces the tech of yesteryear, putting it perfectly in line with a growing fondness for the retro tech chic of the 2010s. PebbleOS has an inherently old-fashioned look about it, but it’s still connected enough to modern tech to be useful. It’s the perfect hybrid between the old and the new, and that gives it value.
Back in their day, Pebble devices fell behind other smartwatches pretty rapidly. But now, that retro style and approach is an advantage.
Reject smart, embrace the watch
I’m not here to make the case that these new rebooted Pebbles are going to set the smartwatch market on fire, because that’s extremely unlikely. Even with my rose-tinted love for the Pebble Steel, I can see the new Pebbles, no matter what they’re called, aren’t a real match for most modern smartwatches. Their designs are old school, their e-ink displays are leagues from the OLED displays on most smartwatches, and the complete lack of fitness tracking shuts them out from a sizeable portion of the market.
But no matter how much I know that to be true, I can’t stop myself from wanting one. Why? Because underneath all of that, these new PebbleOS devices are incredible, effortlessly cool. They reject everything that’s come to define the modern smartwatch. “Smart” has always come before “watch” in the current era of wearables, and it’s about time we looked at a device that’s not afraid to embrace being less smart, and more of a watch. The Core 2 Duo and Core Time 2 hark back to the days when a smartwatch wasn’t trying so hard to be a mini-smartphone. Instead, they’re not afraid to be what they always should have been — watches, with a touch of smart magic.
