Pebble Time 2 review: The perfect smartwatch for a select group of people

There's an overriding theme to every element of this watch, which is that you'll need to take a moment to customize things to your liking. You'll need to spend five minutes or so looking for a watch face you like, but there are thousands to choose from. One benefit of having an archive of faces made during Pebble's heyday is that someone probably already built the face you need. But once you've taken the time to get set up, you'll find the Time 2 is a very easy watch to live with. As the display is taller than wide, it's actually good for reading denser blocks of text, and it harnesses its verticality for its menus. Rather than trying to crowbar in app and menu elements into too small a frame, Pebble trusts you still know how to scroll.

Pebble insists that it's not made a fitness watch, but even so, it's got the basic tracking abilities we expect from every timepiece these days. You'll get a step count, sleep monitoring and with its PPG sensor, you'll be able to keep track of your heart rate. In the app, the layout is basic, just three graphs — but I do like the fact your step count is up against a graph showing your count from the week before. Every Thursday, I've been walking 1.5 miles to see friends and then back a few hours later — and I can see the outline of that goal when I wake up Thursday morning. After so many devices that try and crunch that data into conclusions or scores, a trio of graphs makes for a refreshing change.

Pebble's former owner, Fitbit, kept the company's devices alive for its first year before pulling the plug. At that point, the open-source community, under the Rebble name, took over the work of maintaining the ecosystem. Last year, Google made the PebbleOS open-source, and the app and OS in these new devices are completely open-source. That may conjure visions of well-made apps that seem to ignore every common sense human interface principle. But while the app isn't very polished, and is missing feature parity with the watch, it's not rough. And one side benefit of open-source is that there's actually some personality embedded in both the watch and the software. Activate the watch's DND mode — called Quiet Time — and you get a cute graphic of a tiptoeing mouse.

When you open the app, it speaks volumes that the first pane is for the app "store" rather than to manage the watch itself. Pebble is well aware its watches are platforms onto which you can add tools built by its community. I'd argue that goes too far: It would be nice if there was a built in Stopwatch and Timer app, rather than needing to hunt for a third party option. It's not as if it's difficult to pull down one or two free alternatives from the store, and installation is a breeze. But I'd like to see Pebble's admittedly-small team do a bit of leading from the front here, as the alternative is to scrub through the thousands of apps available like a kid in a candy store.

As part of this, anyone can rock up to CloudPebble, its cloud-based development environment with the promise of being able to build a watch face or app in under five minutes. I gave it a go, and while I expected to blunder my way through an attempt, it's too much JavaScript for me. Migicovsky says that a WYSIWYG interface is coming, but that non-coders, for now, will need to harness a Claude skill to cover the gap in their toolbox. Or, you can go the long way around and teach yourself JavaScript, which might be an equally fun hobby to take up.

There are plenty of things that I think Pebble could do to improve matters, especially within the companion app. Some settings that would be easy to tweak on the app are left entirely on the watch itself. For instance, you can only set Quiet Time on the watch, and have to set it twice: once for weekdays and once for weekends. And while the watch lacks GPS, I'd love to see it better integrate with your phone's turn-by-turn directions, as the third-party apps for navigation aren't great.