Hi everyone, resently the company pebble, makers of the original smart watch, announced that they would no longer be making any new products and has been purchased by fitbit. As a happy owner of a pebble watch I was very disappointed with this news, but I hope that Fitbit continues to support the pebble project and keep things up to date. That being said the future does not look good for pebble community, and I was wondering if any other pebble owners have more information on this subject or other concerns?
Fitbit bought them out for the sole purpose of destroying them. The Pebble was one of the best products in the market of smart watches in my opinion. It's sad to see it die.
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From what I've read it seems like Pebble had a crazy amount of debt without much to show for it, so Pebble probably would have gone bankrupt sooner or later anyways. They also laid off a chunk of their staff earlier this year too.
It looks like Fitbit is more interested in Pebble's IP and software, so they're probably planning to gut Pebble and then integrate anything useful into Fitbit and scrap what's left.
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Fitbit is acquiring Pebble only to dismatle it, that's it. All the support for the products (even warranty) is gone forever.
I am bummed about fitbit as well.
I really doubt they will continue to make open source watches.
The best thing to do is wait and see. Buy the current watches that are still open source.
No info or anything useful to say really, but id like to say this:
Im pretty excited to see what the FOSS community will do to keep the Pebble ticking over (hah). Having said that though, Im sad that the (imo) only smartwatch on the market that really had some personality in it is dead.
I loved how it was a little bulky, but had a really cute, retro and enjoyable UI, it was like nothing else out there. I dont think anyone else is capable of filling that niche, its a real shame that the project failed.
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This is why nobody should ever invest in any piece of hardware that doesn't run open source software right out of the box... whether it's a 150 USD smartwatch or a 100000 USD Tesla car, if the software is proprietary only, paying customers are going to get fucked... with Tesxla it was the news that the new software won't be backward compatible to all Teslas delivered up until right now, for Pebble it's that all smartwatches sold up until right now will be software locked and basically can be thrown away.