News The first new Pebble smartwatches are coming later this year

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The Core Time 2 and the Core 2 Duo should both look very familiar to Pebble fans.

Eric Migicovsky, the original creator of the Pebble smartwatch, is getting ready to ship two new watches. Migicovsky’s new company is called Core Devices, and these will be the first Core smartwatches to hit the market. But they are Pebbles in every important way: they’ll run the newly open-sourced Pebble operating system, they’ll have all the features of the old Pebble devices, and one of them will actually be built using leftover Pebble watch parts. They’re not called Pebbles, but they are Pebbles, and they’re coming soon.

The first watch that Migicovsky and Core plan to ship is called the Core 2 Duo (not to be confused with the old Intel processor), which Migicovsky says will cost $149 and will ship in July. The name explains the whole idea, he says: “It’s like a Pebble 2, but it’s made by Core devices. And then ‘Duo’ is for do-over.” It has the exact same black-and-white E Ink display as the old Pebble 2, and it even comes in the exact same frame. “We were able to find a supplier that still had the frames for Pebble Time 2 and Pebble 2,” he says. “They were never used. So we’ve been able to just draft on that.”

The Core 2 Duo does get a couple of upgrades, mostly by virtue of overall technological progress — Migicovsky says the new watch will last more than 30 days, instead of the Pebble 2’s seven, largely because Bluetooth chips have become so much more efficient. There’s also a speaker in the device now, which Migicovsky uses for chatting with AI assistants. Overall, though, this is an 8-year-old device simply made new again. (This is part of the idea behind the Pebble reboot: Migicovsky is convinced that Pebble mostly had it right a decade ago and simply wants to get back to that.) He estimates there will be around 10,000 Core 2 Duos available and figures a lot of developers and hardcore fans will be happy to have a new watch to play with as soon as possible.

Coming a little later this year is the Core Time 2, an update to the old Pebble Time 2 design. This watch is shipping in December and will cost $225. The big change with the Time 2 is the addition of a touchscreen; Migicovsky says he really likes the tappable “complications” you get on a watchface, with bits of information that open up to full apps, and he wanted to bring the same feature to the Pebble world. “It’d be cool to just tap on your watch, rather than having to dig through a layer of menus with buttons,” he says. He doesn’t intend the touchscreen to enable complicated new apps or become a whole multitouch surface, though. He just wants to be able to tap on the screen.

For the most part, though, the Core Time 2 is a return to old-school Pebble form. It has buttons on the sides, long battery life, lots of customization, and plenty of hacker-friendly features. It also benefits from battery life increases — Migicovsky says this one will last 30 days on a charge, too — and has a speaker, plus some new chips and upgrades for step- and sleep-tracking.

This is all happening faster than Migicovsky says he expected, particularly for the Core 2 Duo. Getting that up and running with the new software and new parts has been pretty smooth. But there are still hurdles. Connecting a PebbleOS watch to an iPhone continues to get more complex and less functional. “I want to be able to reply to notifications, and I can’t,” Migicovsky says. Luckily, Android is easier to both connect to and get information from.

There’s still work to do on manufacturing and software integrations, so Migicovsky is careful to note that things might get delayed. He’s also worried about tariffs and says his only plan is to pass along extra costs to customers. “We’re going to charge more if it costs more,” he says. “We just can’t bear the cost.” But through it all, Migicovsky seems thrilled to be making smartwatches again. “I’m not building a company to sell millions of these,” he says. “The goal is to make something I really want.”