Updated Design for Pebble Time 2 Watch

Eric Migicovsky:

First off, for those who didn’t catch the news from a few weeks ago — we’ve been able to recover the Pebble trademark! Our new watches will change from being called Core 2 Duo → Pebble 2 Duo, and Core Time 2 → Pebble Time 2.

The big news today is that we’re revealing the final design for Pebble Time 2. The design that we showed off back in March were preliminary designs. We’ve been able to tweak and improve the industrial design quite a bit since then. I think it’s turned out fantastically well! I even have a working albeit early engineering sample on my wrist.

These look good. Fundamentally Pebble-y but with smaller-than-ever (for Pebble) screen bezels.

I stand by what I wrote back in March, though. They should make just one new watch, not two. In March I suggested making that one single new model the black-and-white display one, to lean into Pebble’s differentiation from Apple Watch and other leading smartwatches. Seeing these new designs for the color display Time 2 — and Migicovsky’s obvious personal enthusiasm for this model — makes me think this should be the one true new Pebble.

Even their naming scheme is confusing. The $150 plastic, 1.2-inch black-and-white-display model is the Pebble 2 Duo. The $225 steel, 1.5-inch color-display model is the Pebble Time 2. Why is the “2” in different places? Nothing about the names “Duo” or “Time” suggests which one is higher-end than the other. If anything, “Time” sounds more simplistic to my ears, like maybe it only tells the time — but that’s the nicer one.

Maybe they know something I don’t, and pre-orders are strong for the uglier, plastic, black-and-white-display 2 Duo. But even if that’s true, that’s selling into the existing Pebble fanbase. If they have any hope of expanding to new users, they ought to put all their wood behind one arrow, and that ought to be the clearly superior, better-looking, bigger-display Time 2. The Time 2 costs just $75 more, but seems way more than $75 better.

★ Wednesday, 13 August 2025