Goodbye Pebble

As of December 7th, Pebble is officially no more. Their intellectual property was purchased by FitBit, who won’t be issuing any updates for the Pebble ecosystem.

I love my Pebble Time Round. It isn’t a “smart watch for women,” but in my mind it’s the only smartwatch truly designed with women in mind. And the next round of Pebbles were going to continue that. They were going to be slimmer and smaller than the one’s before, while still increasing screen space. They were a brilliant product that hardly anyone knew about.

But the Pebble also lacked any real processing power, relying on the cloud for most of it. FitBit is keeping those servers up for 2017, which is awesome of them, but after that there’s a big question mark. It is possible the developer community find a way to make the Pebble work to some degree without the cloud. FitBit could even come out with a Pebble-like device. But I’m still more upset than I should be over losing a gadget.

After some reflection, I’ve finally figured out why this was bumming me out. It’s because it’s confirming everything I already knew about the cloud, and it’s inherent transience. If something runs on someone else’s computer, you can’t count on it running there forever. This isn’t the first product to come across this issue, earlier this year Google shut down Revolv for example, but it’s the first that directly impacted me with a device I use daily. It’s time to take a serious look at some of my cloud based services.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some OpenHAB research to do….