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posted by janrinok on Saturday February 01, @03:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the from-the-fun-to-count-with-tiny-rocks dept.

The Pebble was 2012 smartwatch built using an e-paper display. It had great battery life, a UI that could be hacked using C or Javascript, and a very loyal fanbase. Unlike current incumbent smartwatches like the Google Pixel Watch or Apple Watch, Pebble kept its feature set under control and aimed to supplement a smartphone rather than step on its toes. The end result was a compact product with great battery life that was genuinely liked by gadgeteers.

Unfortunately, after a number of strategic missteps, the manufacturer of the Pebble was bought out in 2016, by a competitor, FitBit. The product was discontinued almost immediately, leaving the world of nifty wrist-mounted doodads noticeably poorer.

Ever since there's been a sort of grassroots campaign to support the Pebble, called Rebble, which was started more-or-less immediately after FitBit shuttered the Pebble, and is helmed by one of Pebble's founders. For the longest time they weren't making much headway on delivering software updates, as they essentially had to start over from square one, without the initial startup resources they'd had the first time around. Mostly they just served as a home for applications and widgets.

This all changed on Monday, when the Rebble lead was able to get hold of some folks at Google—who bought out FitBit in 2021—and convinced them to open-source the Pebble OS. (It's not quite complete—like many open-sourcings of closed projects, there are some patent-encumbered bits missing.) There's now the (similarly-named yet distinct) Repebble project, which aims to begin a new production run of Pebble smartwatches.

Is this the beginning of a renaissance for resurrecting beloved Google-owned products? Probably not. But it's one less corpse in the ground, that's for sure.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by day of the dalek on Saturday February 01, @05:55AM (1 child)

    by day of the dalek (45994) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 01, @05:55AM (#1391156) Journal

    The original submission was deleted in error and was added back into the queue. The result is that a few of the links didn't get copied over. The actual original submission [soylentnews.org] contains those links.

    I think this is a worthwhile story not just because of the Pebble. I believe there's value if this can be done for other devices. Here are a couple of examples:

    One example is the Nike Fuelband, which was a fitness tracker that was considerably more limited than a true smartwatch. The devices tracked users' activity throughout the day and allowed them to earn "fuel", which was a number that took into account the amount of activity and its intensity. The devices could also do more basic things like counting steps. It didn't have heart rate tracking, and there was only a very simple readout that could show the amount of fuel a person had earned. The Fuelband was a good device, but Nike discontinued it and bricked the devices by taking the servers offline. There have been efforts to reverse engineer the protocol for communicating with the Fuelband [github.com], but I am not aware of the devices being completely unbricked. The Fuelband did have a loyal following and was a relatively early form of the now ubiquitous fitness trackers. There's at least one DIY imitation of the Fuelband [hackaday.io], though it still has some distinct differences from the original Nike product. I had a Fuelband SE+, and I would be interested in seeing it work again despite Nike taking the servers offline and bricking them.

    Another good example of older hardware that perhaps is more in the mold of the Pebble are the Palm Pilot handhelds. They're quite limited in functionality compared to smartphones, but that also has some advantages. For example, they're not littered with privacy-invading software like most smartphones. Unfortunately, PalmOS isn't going to receive official updates, and I'm not aware of any open source versions. That means there aren't software updates for things like changes to timezones, and Palm devices actually have a bug that will cause problems in a little under seven years from now. That bug is Palm Day [palmdb.net], which is that the time on a Palm Pilot cannot be set beyond 11:59 PM on December 31, 2031. Without patching or updating the OS, there's not a good solution to get around the Palm Day bug. It's unfortunate because the Palm Pilots were good devices, and I still have a Palm Tungsten that works quite well. I'm hoping that at least a few major bugs like this might get patched in the future, but that's difficult due to PalmOS being closed source.

    My interest in this particular article is that it seems to be a success story of reviving old hardware after it had been abandoned by the manufacturer and had stopped receiving updates. I never had a Pebble, but I hope that it might encourage efforts to revive older hardware like the Palm Pilot. Despite smartphones being ubiquitous, it's still worthwhile to have a no-nonsense device like a Palm Pilot for storing contacts and appointments.

    • (Score: 2) by hubie on Sunday February 02, @12:01AM

      by hubie (1068) on Sunday February 02, @12:01AM (#1391224) Journal

      The result is that a few of the links didn't get copied over.

      Thank you for point this out. I've added the links back into the published story.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday February 01, @08:21AM

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Saturday February 01, @08:21AM (#1391159) Journal

    No one here cares about Google-owned products anymore. People (and their children) around me are building their own watches, on various pico platforms ranged from arduino, arms, esp or risc-v.

    Tiniest home made smart watch contraption I have seen here is Raspberry Pi Pico Zero with either a 0.42'' OLED (SSD1306, 72x40) or 1.54'' e-paper (various GDE, 152x152 or 200x200 for example).

    --
    Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Undefined on Saturday February 01, @04:43PM

    by Undefined (50365) on Saturday February 01, @04:43PM (#1391185)

    But it's one less corpse in the ground

    Apropos to this: The Google Graveyard [killedbygoogle.com].

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