Some commenters mentioned that the e-ink screen (and the accompanying battery life) was one reason why the Pebble is so beloved, which reminded me of the Basis Peak, which was primarily a health tracker watch with some (very limited) smart functionality (mostly just some notifications, if I recall), that also had an e-ink screen and a nearly 1 week battery life and had a sort of similar trajectory:<p>Bought by Intel, then killed two years later after a battery related recall issue.<p>It was, in my opinion, by far the best fitness tracker watch ever, and remains so to this day. Not so much because of it's actual features (which were relatively standard), but the software paradigm of simple yet effective exercise gamification that helped encourage exercise habit formation. 8 years later and I still miss it.
Well now we have a conundrum - the top 3 posts on the frontpage are all about this!<p>The submitted title of this post was "Google has open-sourced the pebble smartwatch operating system" but it actually points to <a href="https://rebble.io/2025/01/27/the-future-of-rebble.html" rel="nofollow">https://rebble.io/2025/01/27/the-future-of-rebble.html</a>, so I've changed the title and moved the comments from here to <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070</a>, which has the Google announcement.<p>The 3 threads are:<p><i>We're bringing Pebble back</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845091">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845091</a><p><i>Google open-sources the Pebble OS</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070</a><p><i>The future of Rebble</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017</a> (<-- you are here)
I'm a little confused at the moving pieces here. We have RePebble, Rebble, and PebbleOS. PebbleOS is the easy one. OS recently opened by Google.<p>But how are RePebble and Rebble related? Are they the same thing? Is Rebble making hardware as well as RePebble, or are they the same effort? Is RePebble also open source and community owned like Rebble?
I'm curious if anyone has tried one of the newer e-ink smart watches you see on Alibaba, which use ESP-32 or other low-power SOCs. I saw one recently at a meet-up and the guy who was wearing claimed it was completely open-source and he could run whatever he wanted to on it. It did not have heartrate monitoring or anything other than clock on it, as far as I could tell.