Tech

Pebble Time Round reviewed: You can judge this book by its cover

Pebble’s newest smartwatch is mostly different in design—and that’s the point.

Valentina Palladino – Nov 21, 2015 8:35 am | 54

Credit: Valentina Palladino

Keeping up with Pebble has been a challenge this year. First, the company released the Time and Time Steel smartwatches, featuring the new “Timeline” watch interface that breaks up your day into past, present, and future events. Then, it added support for third-party smart straps that allow developers to experiment and give the smartwatches extra features, and it added voice recognition to the devices as well. The final announcement came just a few months ago: Pebble’s new Time Round would be the sleekest, most stylish device the company has ever made. It turns out that’s no understatement.

Of course, this wasn’t hard to do. Previous Pebble watches, aside from maybe the Steel and the Time Steel, were blocky and primitive, and their e-paper displays only made them feel more like toys. The toy-like qualities aren’t totally stripped from the Time Round, but it has a lot going for it: it’s only 7.4mm at its thickest point, it’s incredibly light, and it’s made for smaller wrists using 14mm and 20mm straps. However, chic design doesn’t come free. There are some sacrifices, namely in battery life and app selection, that you’ll have to make if you want the new, disk-like timepiece.

And then it was round

The Pebble Time Round is so small and weightless that I easily forgot I was wearing it. Measuring just 7.5mm thick and weighing about an ounce, the Time Round feels like one of those toy watches I wore as child that I could easily fling across my room. It’s more elegant than a toy, though: my review unit has rose gold hardware accented with white along the bezel and with a white, genuine leather band. You can switch out the bands for any standard 14mm or 20mm strap you’d like, keeping it customizable even after you purchase the watch and band set from Pebble.

Like the existing Pebble smartwatches, the Time Round has a few physical buttons: one on the left side of the body to turn the device on and off, and three on the right side for scrolling up and down and for selecting options on the color e-paper display. No, it’s not a touchscreen, but none of the Pebble smartwatches have had touchscreens in the past. The display is always-on yet dimmed, but it’s supposed to light up when it senses you turn your wrist up to check the time. This motion activation worked most of the time for me, but occasionally my gestures had to be exaggerated to wake the display up.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn

And again, the aesthetic here comes with compromises. Unlike the 30-meter water resistance of the Time and Time Steel, the Time Round is only splash-proof. Also, since the watch sits so flat against the skin, I often pinched my arm hair whenever I tried to press the buttons.

The biggest annoyance of all, though, is battery life: the Time Steel could get about 10 days on a single charge, which is awesome if you hate juicing up your timepiece. However, the Time Round will only get up to two days on one charge—that’s a dramatic decrease, which is reflected in the dramatic decrease in the watch’s thickness. During my week of wearing the Time Round, the watch vibrated and flashed “low battery” on the display at the end of the second day.

All of the Pebble Time Round models work with Android and iOS devices via the Pebble Time app. Pairing it was easy: as long as Bluetooth is activated on your phone, you can make a new account or sign into the app and it will prompt you to touch the Time Round to your smartphone to begin pairing. Next you’ll have to approve access to your notifications and such, and once the Time Round is finished updating, you’ll be able to customize it in the Pebble Time app.

Features: the pros and cons of Pebbles past

Most of the features of the Pebble Time Round are the same as the existing Pebbles. It is primarily a watch with its always-on display, and the side up and down buttons let you scroll through the watch’s interface. The Time Round has the timeline setup of the Time and Time Steel: scroll up to see past events of the day and scroll down to see what’s coming up in the rest of your day. It receives all of your smartphone’s notifications as well, the display lighting up and the body vibrating whenever you get an alert. Unlike Fossil’s Q wearables, you cannot filter these notifications through Pebble’s app, so you’re stuck receiving every single smartphone notification to your wrist unless you disable individual alerts completely.

The timeline is populated with meetings and events from your phone’s calendar, so only the things listed there will show up in your timeline. Pebble throws in a few of its own events, like sunrise and sunset each day, and there are Pebble apps that let you schedule your own things. One app I liked is called Habits: from its settings in the Pebble Time app, you can set certain habits you want to complete during the day and those will appear on your timeline like a regular calendar event. It’s basically a reminder app that’s hoping you will use it to develop good habits. Another perk of it is that you don’t need to download a companion app to your smartphone to use it—just install it on your Pebble, set a few habits like “get up and walk” or “call grandma” then actually complete those tasks when the vibration alert goes off.

The Time Round does have a few preinstalled apps: music, notifications, alarms, and watchfaces. You can control music playback from the watch, skipping songs and changing volume levels. The display shows you the artist and song title as well, which is convenient if your phone is across the room. The notifications app is a drawer of all your most recent smartphone alerts. You can select any of them and read more of the full notification, if it’s a longer one like a text message, but you cannot reply to anything from the watch if you’re using an iOS device. The most you can do is review all the alerts you have and then clear them when you’re finished. Android users, however, can reply to texts using the actionable notifications feature, which has short, stock messages like “On my way!” ready to send from the watch. You can also opt to reply with an emoji or a voice message.

The alarms app lets you set alerts throughout the day, and you could use it as a wake-up alarm if you desire. The watchfaces app shows you all of the watch designs you have saved, and you can switch them directly from the Time Round. Unfortunately, because of its circular style, not all of the existing Pebble watchfaces work on the Time round. However, there are 275 to choose from within the watchface “store” portion of the Pebble Time app, and being able to change them on a whim from the device is convenient.

Apps suffered the same fate as watchfaces: currently only 90 of the apps in Pebble’s store work on the Time Round. I was disappointed to see that Yelp doesn’t have a circular version of its Pebble app yet; I really enjoyed using it on the Time Steel to find places to grab coffee or a quick lunch in an unfamiliar neighborhood. As with any new display design in which the shape is changed at all, developers need to catch up with the Time Round and modify apps to work on the circular screen.

Still, there are some useful apps available for the Time Round. It took some digging, but I found Solanum, a Pomodoro-esque app that tracks work and break times from your wrist. You can set how long you want to work for and how long of a break you want after that and the timer counts you down from there. I’ve used a few of these apps, mostly on my Mac, and they would always get lost in the sea of tabs I had open at once. Solanum is a great option that removes the timer from my cluttered desktop, although I had to be careful not to exit out of the app while the timer was running, otherwise it would start over.

There are a bunch of apps that make use of the nuance voice recognition feature as well, which was introduced to Pebble smartwatches a few months ago. There are a few Pebble to Pebble messaging apps like Watchie-Talkie and a bunch of note-taking and reminder apps that you can speak to. One app I liked was Voice2Timeline, which lets you tell the Time Round things to add to your timeline. This lets you add off-the-cuff appointments or events that might not already be on your smartphone’s calendar to the timeline on the Time Round. When I needed to remind myself to take a package out for drop-off, I told the app “take out package at 8am” and it added the reminder to my timeline. Granted, sometimes it was finicky, not following through with pinning the note to my timeline, but most of the time it was accurate and really useful.

Pebble Time app: a whole lotta settings

The Pebble Time app is the mobile companion for the newest Pebble smartwatches. At setup, you choose which watch you have and it will pair via Bluetooth. One thing that’s always bugged me about the app is that it doesn’t have much of a homepage. When opened, you’re shown the “My Pebble” page which is basically two drawers: one that holds all your installed watchfaces and one for all your apps. In both of these drawers, you can tap on a specific watchface or app to modify its settings, or in the case of apps, rearrange the order in which they appear on your Time Round.

Some faces and apps have more settings than others. I downloaded a cool-looking watchface called Prismclock, which floods the face with tiny, multicolored geometric shapes. In its settings, I could customize if I wanted the watch to vibrate when Bluetooth was disconnected or at the top of each hour, and I could set the colors of the prisms from five different color combination choices. In my apps, Solanum didn’t have any settings I could modify, but Habits did of course as this is where I could set a number of habits I wanted to be reminded of throughout the day.

The menu icon at the top left corner of the app opens a drawer with links to “Get Watchfaces” and “Get Apps,” which are Pebble’s pseudo-stores for each. They both have the same layout, which looks very much like a primitive version of Apple’s App Store. There’s a scrolling featured section at the top with roundups of watchfaces and apps by category below. You can also search for a specific face or app by name, which I found is more useful for apps than unknown Pebble watchfaces.

Tapping on any of them brings you to a full information screen for the face or app, and you can tap the Add button to download it to your Pebble. It only takes a few seconds for the Time Round to sync up and show the most recently added face or app, but with apps you may want to check their folder in My Pebble to see if you want to customize any of its settings.

Just another Pebble to choose from

Some may not understand why Pebble would waste time making a smartwatch that is smaller, has less battery life, and can support fewer apps and watchfaces than its predecessors, but it’s a valid move for a company. Pebble’s smartwatches have been very consistent over time in both design language and usability. Now, with other companies diversifying in style, Pebble is just working to catch up with them.

There’s no doubt the Time Round was made to entice customers who were maybe interested in smartwatches but were put off by the basic and blocky style of the original Pebble devices. Although its design is different, it maintains a similar look that keeps it in line with the existing devices, and it rounds out Pebble’s catalog of smartwatches nicely. Also, the user experience is essentially the same as you would get on a Pebble Time or Time Steel—something that Pebble has always been good at doing across all its new devices.

That doesn’t change the fact that Pebble did sacrifice to make the Time Round a perfectly positioned piece of eye candy. It’s two-day battery life is really disappointing—while that’s not very different than other Android Wear smartwatches or even the Apple Watch, it’s a drastic difference from the Time Steel’s 10-day life. You’ll have to be much more careful with this delicate timepiece as well, since it’s not water resistant.

And then there’s the price: $250 will get you the most basic, 14mm version, which is beautiful to say the least, but if you want a fancier model like the black-on-black-link-strap option, it’ll set you back $300. We’re only starting to see beautiful smartwatches come down in price, with Fossil’s Q Grant capping at $195, but that’s still a lot of money to shell out. If you’ve been on the fence about getting a Pebble smartwatch and you already liked the look and feel of the similarly-priced Time Steel, that’s the Pebble you should get since it will provide the same experience as well as longer battery life and better water resistance. But for those more style-conscious, you now have your own smartwatch in the Pebble family with the capable Time Round.

The Good

Sophisticated, ultra-thin design makes the Time Round the prettiest smartwatch Pebble has made yet.
Compatible with both Android and iOS devices.
Timeline interface makes it easy to see what’s going on at any portion of your day.

The Bad

Short battery life compared to existing Pebble devices.
You can’t filter smartphone notifications to the watch—it will vibrate and light up with every alert that the phone receives.
$250 is a lot to ask for this smartwatch.

The Ugly

Some existing Pebble watchfaces and apps don’t work on the Time Round yet because of its circular display.

Listing image: Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino Associate Reviewer Emeritus

Valentina reviews consumer electronics for Ars Technica, testing all kinds of gadgets with a focus on mobile devices and wearables. She has a soft spot for Chromebooks.

54 Comments