Review: Pebble Time

The Pebble Time is not an Apple Watch competitor. Pebble's ambitions are much smaller, much more focused. The $199 Time is the true spiritual successor to that Casio Calculator watch—and it comes from a company you can't help but root for: a Kickstarter success story packed into a crowded Palo Alto office, competing David and Goliath-style with Apple… which is located just a few miles away.

It's a great story, but that doesn't make the Pebble Time a great smartwatch. It's simple, and it's useful, but if Pebble wants to reach a larger audience, it must start caring about the way things look and feel.

The Time is an improvement of the original Pebble in almost every way. It's an absolutely worthy upgrade. (And hey—people liked the first one just fine!) It's sleeker and slimmer, its buttons less protruding, and the whole thing more comfortably rounded. It’s better looking across the board.

To be clear, though, that's not saying much: The Time's plastic shell, huge bezel, and cheap parts make it feel more like a toy than a timepiece. I have a hard time imagining Katy Perry or Pharrell gleefully Instagramming themselves wearing this thing.

Pebble

Pebble seems conscious of this—CEO Eric Migicovsky argues people care more about what a watch does than how it looks. Of course, there’s plenty to say he's exactly wrong. It's true that a small subset of users, call it the Casio Calculator crowd, doesn't care about looks. They'll like the Time because it's sturdy, durable, and easy to use. But when nearly every critique of wearables relates to aesthetics and personalization, you have to wonder how Pebble convinces anyone to even put this plastic brick on. (The more luxe Pebble Time Steel is coming soon, and I suspect it's going to be a much more compelling piece of hardware—but it'll be more expensive, too.)

There are some nods to personalization and aesthetics, but they’re far too subtle. The Time comes in black, white, and red and is compatible with any 22mm watchband on the planet. Pebble's own straps come with clever hooks to make swapping them a breeze, and the company has some cool ideas about adding features through watch bands. But no matter how well you accessorize the Time, it's never going to look as good as your typical Android Wear device, let alone the Apple Watch.

The whole case for the Time is how it works. Battery life is its biggest selling point: The Time lasts five to seven days on a charge. That's dramatically better than the will-it-last-through-dinner life of all its competitors, and makes the watch's awkward, hard-to-connect contact charger a forgivable annoyance.

To achieve that battery life, Pebble chose e-paper displays over modern, arguably more impressive solutions. (Think Kindle versus iPad.) The Time's 1.25-inch color e-paper LCD is much better than the black and white display on the last model, but if you've ever gazed upon an Apple Watch or a Moto 360, this feels like a huge downgrade. It's low-res, it's dim, it's full of ragged text. Even the backlight is affected by Pebble's impulsive battery-hoarding: It turns off too quickly, and doesn't come on when you need it. It can be really hard to tell the time without pressing a button to turn the light on. Since reading on your smartwatch is hardly the point anyway, the screen isn't a dealbreaker, but it contributes to the nagging feeling that you're getting what you paid for: a smartwatch, only less.

Next to the Watch's multitudinous interaction methods—the Digital Crown! The touchscreen! Force Touch! Siri!—the Time is remarkably simple. It's based around a single metaphor: The timeline. It makes the Time amazingly easy to understand, and intuitive to navigate. When you scroll down from the homescreen, you get a look at your future: calendar appointments, flight status, and the like. Scroll up and you get a running diary of your life. The phone calls that came in, the score of last night's game, the sunrise and sunset. At any time, a couple of taps on the button on the left side always leads back to the watch face. There are apps, where you can go find sports scores or check your step count for the day, and there are notifications that you can dismiss or (very occasionally) act on as they come in, but everything revolves around the idea of time.

The metaphor comes with limitations, though. If you get a lot of phone calls, habitually check in on Swarm, or follow more than a couple of teams, the timeline quickly gets cluttered. And for better or worse, very few things fit in the paradigm—there's no searching, no initiating of messages with Pebble.

The interface is just rough. It's cartoonish and slow, with goofy animations I'd rather not watch when I simply want to see my next appointment. (The animations apparently are a hack for dealing with e-paper's slow refresh rate, but that doesn't make it better.) Some screens are too dense with text and information, and others show a huge image where an icon or simple line of text would do. Every app looks different, and if you have more than a few on your watch, it gets really hard to sort through them. The more you try to do on the Time, the harder it gets to use.

Pebble

The screen isn't touch-enabled, either, which took some getting used to after swiping and tapping around the Apple Watch and the many Android Wear devices. You do everything with four buttons, three on the right and one on the left. It's basically a D-pad: you go up, down, left, and right through the Time's interface. Of course, Pebble's not done, and some of these problems soon will be ironed out. "Soon" is something of a catchphrase for the Pebble Time. Soon you'll be able to buy "Smart Straps" and add new features to your watch. Soon you'll be able to use the Time's built-in microphone—which works pretty well, by the way—to do much more than reply to messages. Soon your watch will control your smart home, connected via Bluetooth to all your light bulbs and smart locks. Pebble has grand ambitions about becoming a playground for developers.

But little of that works right now.

And more likely than not, hardly any of it will work with your iPhone. The Time, or any Pebble really, is dramatically more useful if you have an Android device. On iPhone, it's crippled absolutely everywhere. You can't take action on most notifications. You have much less control over what you see and what you don't. You can't control your phone from your watch, really. Even the connection itself doesn't work as well. Most of this is surely Apple's doing, but it's not likely to get any better—Apple wants to sell Watches, not the Pebbles, and its relationship with Pebble is increasingly fraught as a result.

These limitations are so frustrating because there are good ideas in the Pebble Time. Using time as the interaction metaphor is smart and easily grasped, and there’s something to be said for not trying to be all things to all people. It's not trying to replace your phone, or create new behaviors or features—it just wants to give you a clear picture of what's happening in your life, right now. That's seriously compelling; maybe a smartwatch doesn't need to search Google or Shazam a song or check me into my hotel; maybe it just needs to be able to tell me what to do about the fact that it's 3:05 PM right now.

It's a shame Pebble didn't spend more time on the design of the Time. (The Time Steel does look better, though at $299 it's dangerously close to the Apple Watch and Moto 360.) It's a shame the screen isn't better, and that everything about this device screams of pocket protectors. It's a shame the interface is messy and unattractive, that it feels like a toy.

I want the uncluttered and productive idea Pebble is selling. But I don't want the watch.