I backed a Pebble Time Round Gold on the last Kickstarter, which was cancelled when Pebble was acquired. Somehow the devices ended up on Amazon, and I snagged one there. It's a phenomenally stylish device.
My white 20mm one with a brown leather band started more conversations than anything else I’ve ever owned and used, which was surprising but neat :)
Unfortunately mine got stolen and broken, which is a shame. I wonder how hard they are to buy today, and how difficult battery replacements for them are…
Battery replacement is difficult, not impossible, but bordering on impossible is restoring the waterproof seal. Once you've replaced the battery you basically have to keep it away from water. I wasn't careful with mine and lost two to water damage after replacing the battery, despite re-sealing with permanent adhesive.
Good to know! IIRC the Round didn't have as high a water resistance rating to begin with, and I typically wear a leather band, so this might not be a deal-breaker for me.
The PTRs weren't diving watches for sure, but the original waterproofing was easily good enough to withstand submersion, as long as the battery hadn't started swelling yet.
Pebble watches used a Sharp transflective LCD MiP Memory in Pixel display, meaning that the back surface of the LCD was slightly reflective for daylight reading, with front lighting for night.
Memory in pixel means that each pixel remembers its current state, saving on a lot of power budget because the bus/LCD controller is completely shut down, it essentially only uses power to update the display. Versus a traditional LCD or oled where you need to send it data at x refresh rate continously, meaning the high power draw bus and controller are constantly slurping power.
Even though eink has gotten better I still wouldn't use it for something like this, the refresh rate is still a tad too slow, the controllers are always proprietary weirdness with crazy voltage waveform magic to clear the display properly, resulting in that ugly multiple flashing that most eink/epaper displays do.
Quite, but a transflective one (from Sharp, I believe) which gave it a lot of the benefits of daylight readability while being much much easier to program for and work with.
With the benefit of a much improved battery life compared to a lot of other smart-watches. A worthy trade off, IMHO. And it its a lot less washed out than current colour (real) e-ink displays
forgot the name of the watch but it had an lcd display to save battery and a full touchscreen around 2017? i ended up using the lcd display mostly for HB and walk distance. it would be great if we had a completely e-ink based pebble watch with backlighting (lcd display was great but couldn't be viewed in the dark :/)
