Pebble Is Back: The Time 2 Smartwatch Has Sold 25,000 Units Across 93 Countries
Core Devices has sold more than 25,000 Pebble Time 2 smartwatches across 93 countries, according to TechCrunch's review published August 21, 2026. The $225 device uses a 64-color e-paper display — a low-power screen technology that stays visible at all times without the battery drain of a traditional LCD or OLED panel. An RGB LED backlight can be triggered by a flick of the wrist or taps on the screen. Battery life is rated at approximately 21 days per charge depending on usage, with a charger included in the box.
The Time 2 ships in blue, red, silver, or black bezel colors around a stainless steel frame (available in silver or black), paired with a silicone watch band. It retains physical buttons for navigation rather than relying on a touchscreen, and includes a second microphone alongside the multicolor RGB backlight, TechCrunch reported when the specifications were first revealed in August 2025.
The Pebble brand's return is the work of its original founder, Eric Migicovsky, operating under a new company called Core Devices. The original Pebble began as a Kickstarter project and went on to sell 2 million watches and generate $230 million in sales before being acquired by Fitbit, which was subsequently absorbed by Google. Migicovsky has stated that Pebble's financials could not sustain the business, which forced the sale.
After the acquisition, Fitbit kept Pebble's servers and app store alive until mid-2018. At that point, the Pebble user community, organized as rebble.io, took over maintenance of the infrastructure — a volunteer effort that kept the watches functional after the company itself was gone. In 2025, Migicovsky, with help from former Pebble employees and Fitbit staff at Google, convinced Google to open-source the original Pebble operating system, meaning the codebase is now publicly available for anyone to inspect, modify, and build upon.
Core Devices' product roadmap extends beyond the Time 2. The company has already shipped a limited-edition Pebble 2 Duo, and its third device, the Pebble Round 2, was expected to begin shipping in September. The Round 2, first unveiled at CES 2026, features a 1.3-inch circular e-paper display and offers basic health and activity tracking including steps and sleep, with a battery life of 10 to 14 days per charge according to TechCrunch and IEEE Spectrum.
The specifications sit well outside the mainstream smartwatch envelope. A 21-day battery life is roughly ten times what Apple Watch or Wear OS devices deliver, and the 64-color e-paper display trades the color depth and refresh rates of OLED for always-on visibility and power efficiency. Physical button navigation, rather than touch, is a deliberate design constraint. Core Devices initially promised up to 30 days of battery life for its Pebble-inspired smartwatches when the lineup was first announced in March 2025; the Time 2's real-world figure of 21 days falls short of that ceiling but remains far ahead of the category leaders.
The broader context here is the divergence between two smartwatch philosophies. The dominant model treats the watch as a wrist-mounted extension of a smartphone OS, with all the display fidelity, app ecosystem, and daily charging that implies. Pebble's approach, now running on an open-source OS, treats the watch as a low-power notification and activity device with multi-week endurance and a software stack that the community can inspect and modify. The 25,000-unit sales figure across 93 countries suggests a real, if niche, demand for that proposition.
For developers, the open-source PebbleOS repository means the platform is not dependent on a single company's continued operation in the way the original Pebble was. The rebble.io community's successful maintenance of the servers and app store from mid-2018 onward is a concrete precedent: the infrastructure survived the original company's dissolution because users had the means and motivation to keep it running. Core Devices' revival layers a new hardware vendor on top of that community-maintained foundation.
The Time 2's feature set is modest by current smartwatch standards. Basic notifications, the health tracking on the Round 2 limited to steps and sleep, a 64-color screen: none of these compete with the sensor arrays or computational capabilities of mainstream wearables. The pitch is not about matching those devices feature for feature. It is about delivering a subset of functionality with battery life measured in weeks rather than hours, on hardware that a community can sustain.
Whether that pitch scales beyond the 25,000 early adopters who have bought in so far is a separate question. But the combination of an open-source OS, a community-proven server maintenance model, and hardware that prioritizes endurance over feature density gives the Pebble revival a structural durability the original company lacked. Migicovsky's stated reason for the original Pebble's failure was financial unsustainability. The current model, with lower expectations and a community-maintained software stack, is at minimum designed against that specific failure mode.
