Review: Pebble Time Round

A few days after I started wearing the Time Round, Pebble's ultra-thin new smartwatch, I shut off notifications. This was partly practical—I get too many notifications, and the iPhone offers no filtering control over them—but also a thought experiment. Right now most people see a smartwatch as nothing more than a notification machine, a slightly faster way to see what that buzz in my pocket was all about. What if we took that away? What else could it be?

Under that lens, the $249 Time Round comes into clearer focus. So does Pebble in general. It's not trying to make a shrunken computer for browsing Instagram or editing documents. It is, simply, trying to design a high-tech answer to the question we implicitly ask every time we look at our watch: What's going on? Minus the constant dinging and buzzing, I started to figure out what a smartwatch might actually add to my life. (Then I turned notifications back on, because I'm evidently a masochist.)

Really, the new watch has but one unique characteristic: It actually looks like a watch. I know!

Pebble clearly designed the Time Round (ugh, that name) in opposition to the blocky rectangles that sit on the wrists of hyper-connected nerds everywhere. It's round, in case you didn't figure that out yet, which is up to you to care about or not but either way it feels far better on my wrist. It weighs less than an ounce, and is only 7.5mm thick—the Apple Watch is about 50 percent larger in both dimensions, and feels like a lot more when you have it on your wrist all day. I hardly notice the Round on my wrist at all; it's one of the first smartwatches I've comfortably worn 24 hours a day.

Its face is 38.5mm across, which is slightly larger than the smaller Apple Watch. It comes in silver, black, and rose gold, and you can buy 10 different styles of 14mm or 20mm bands. Small watch, plus small bands, plus lots of options, equals a watch most people can comfortably wear. If I were buying one, I'd get the silver case with the nubuck brown leather band, but to each their own.

No matter which you buy or how fancy the leather sounds, there's still nothing sexy or luxurious about the Time Round. Its design is more like a $30 Timex or Swatch than something a guy in white gloves would lift out of a glass case. It's not ugly, though, it's just utilitarian. (The best-looking models are the ones that put time markers on the giant bezel so it looks like the ring is that big on purpose.) It's made of fairly plasticky-feeling stainless steel¹, and I worry about how the four mushy buttons will hold up long-term, but I've had no problem with it so far.

In turning its blocky rectangle into a sleek circle, Pebble made two big sacrifices. The first is that the Time Round is much less waterproof than the other models. It's not waterproof, actually. It's just splashproof, which means you can wear it while you wash your hands but not in the pool or shower. For most people, that won't really matter.

Pebble also sacrificed a lot of battery life to get the Time Round as small and thin as it is. It's not complicated math: smaller thing means less room for battery means less battery life. I've still been getting at least a day and a half out of the watch, and usually more like two and a half. I don't mind that number, and I'll gladly trade a little longevity for looks in this case. If you want more, go buy the other Pebbles.

The Time Round does the same things as the other Pebbles, except for the things it can't do because a few developers haven't updated their apps to work with the Time interface. (Get it together, Jawbone.) You can track your steps with a few apps, set alarms with a few others, and use the built-in microphone to set reminders or take notes. There's nothing remarkable or even surprising here, just simple things. I use the Music app all the time, the Swarm app occasionally for checking in to new restaurants, and a step-tracker in the background. That's about it.

Most of the specs and software are the same across all the watches, which means the interface is still slow, and it's still unnecessarily animated and cartoony. (The unfolding letter is cute, Pebble, but I'd rather just see the email. My arm's hurting from holding my wrist up.) The whole look and feel needs some love, but I'm really growing fond of the timeline metaphor Pebble uses for organizing all your information.

Your watchface is the center of the experience—it's right now. Scroll up with the top button on the right side of the watch, and you move back in time. You'll see sports scores, appointments, incoming texts and calls, and whatever else you want in there. Scroll down, and you see what's coming next. After spending so much time with the Apple Watch or Android Wear, where everything's different and in different places, I love that I can describe a smartwatch's interface in six words: All your information in a timeline. The timeline can clutter easily if you're not choosy with what you allow in, and it does limit the things you can actually do with the watch itself, but I don't think Pebble cares about what you can do. I like that.

The point of the Time Round lies in the name, stupid as it is. It's round. And it's about time. When you look at your watch, you're really looking to see if you need to be somewhere, or if you have something you're supposed to be doing. The Time Round can provide all that in five seconds, and then throw in the Warriors score just for good measure. Then, like with any watch, you stop looking at the stupid thing and go on about your business.

You could almost argue that the get-in-get-out mentality excuses the dim, low-res 1.25-inch screen on the Time Round. Almost. It's great that Pebble found a way to make an always-on display that doesn't crush the battery, but I want more than the jagged text. More than the dim screen you can hardly see without turning the light on. More than the light that turns on every time you get a notification, so the whole world can see, and then goes off way too quickly. I'm in on e-paper, slow refresh rate and everything, but it's hardly glance-and-go when you have to squint at the screen three inches from your face just to see it.

These are the same problems the other Pebble Time models have. And we're still waiting on the developer community to build the feature-adding "Smart Straps," smart-home control, and a million cool apps Pebble keeps promising. Pebble still sucks with an iPhone, because you can't control which notifications you see and you can't do anything with them. Pebble's working on that, but for now, if you use an iPhone, there's no smartwatch worth buying other than the Apple Watch. (That sucks.) If you're on Android, you get much finer control and many more useful features.

Honestly, you could read my review of the Pebble Time from May and not be missing much. Only one big thing has changed: The Time Round is good-looking. Not high-fashion or high-class—you won't see Pharrell and Katy Perry Instagramming themselves wearing one, and no one in Switzerland is sweating through their pocket square worrying about Pebble's design chops. Yet it's good-looking in a white-collar sort of way. It's the stainless-steel oven of smartwatches.

At $249, the Time Round is more expensive than it looks or feels, which is a shame. But this is the first smartwatch I've used in a long time that offers me more peace than anxiety. I don't worry about figuring it out or making the most of it, or whether I should be doing this thing on my watch or my phone or my laptop. I don't think about it at all most of the time. I just check the time, and it tells me what I need to know. That's the job, isn't it?

¹ UPDATE: An earlier version of this piece said the Time Round was made of plastic. It's actually made of stainless steel. It just feels like plastic.

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