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Pebble, the early smartwatch pioneer, has added a new model to its relaunched lineup, and it’s the thin, round model Pebble fans have been waiting for. What’s even more intriguing to me is the fact that the Pebble Round 2 doesn’t have a heart rate sensor, signaling that a smartwatch doesn’t have to be a fitness watch, too. The Pebble Round 2 starts shipping in May, and is available for pre-order now at $199.
The new watch is meant to be a modern remake of 2015’s Pebble Time Round. Pebble fans loved the round watch, and every thread about new products on the Pebble subreddit has at least a few comments begging for a new version of it. That wish has been granted. (I did notice that Pebble’s website had a teaser telling people who visited the website to “check back around” to see what’s in today’s announcement. Cute.)
What’s in the Pebble Round 2
The Pebble Round 2 is a round smartwatch in a stainless steel frame. It’s about the same size and shape as the old Pebble Time Round, but has a much larger display area with nearly double the resolution, better visibility at an angle, a dramatically increased battery life, and—unusually for smartwatches these days—no heart rate sensor. The specs include:
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10 to 14 day battery life
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42 millimeter size, 8 millimeters thick (that’s thinner than every Apple Watch)
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Color e-paper screen (the same technology Garmin calls MIP)
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1.3-inch screen with 260×260 resolution
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Dual microphones for voice input
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Accelerometer
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Magnetometer
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Touchscreen
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Takes a 20 mm watch band (black and brushed silver models), or a 14 mm watch band (brushed silver and rose gold models)
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Works with iOS and Android
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Tracks steps and sleep
Eric Migicovsky, founder of both the original Pebble company and its modern incarnation Core Devices, told me the e-paper screen is the same one Garmin used in its old Forerunners. You may recall that I think the Forerunner 255 is one of the best-kept secrets in the smartwatch world, and that MIP screens have some advantages over the AMOLED displays that are more common these days.
I’ll say more about this below, but the lack of a heart rate sensor is an interesting choice. The Pebble Round 2 can still track steps and sleep by sensing motion, so it’s not like health tracking features are totally missing. But it’s not going to measure your heart rate during workouts, nor try to capture heart rate and HRV while you sleep.
How the Pebble Round 2 bucks the smartwatch trend (and why that’s probably a good thing)
This is a really interesting list of specs, to me. Microphones for voice input are a new trend that’s been rolling out to more and more watches (both Garmin and Coros added them to more models this year). The battery life is a nice improvement, since the old Pebble Time Round only had about three days of battery life, and even today’s smartwatches often struggle to get more than a few days. The thin build is impressive—I believe it’s the thinnest on the market right now.
But some aspects feel retro. The display technology is an older one that has seemd like it was on its way out. And the thing that I can barely wrap my head around as a fitness-focused writer is how do you release a smartwatch in 2026 that doesn’t have a heart rate sensor? This is madness! Or…is it?
Over the past few years, maybe the past decade, smartwatches and fitness watches have been converging on each other. It seems like each device wants to be able to say “we have that feature too!” so Oura now tracks activities instead of just sleep, Whoop tracks steps instead of just heart rate and HRV, and Apple—always willing to be seen as a fitness company, but always lagging behind on fitness features—finally, in 2025, gave us a real fitness app. Every watch these days has a heart rate sensor, every brand is ditching MIP style screens for AMOLED ones, and there’s no longer any categorical difference between smartwatches and fitness watches. Everything tries to do everything.
What do you think so far?
This trend isn’t necessarily good for users. For example: Garmin needed to add more features to the Forerunner 265 to justify a new model, but it already had pretty much everything a runner could ask for, at an already-premium price. So Garmin added a speaker and microphone to create the 570, and raised the price by $100. Should a middle-of-the-road running watch really cost $550?
By contrast, the Pebble Round 2 leans into the things it’s good at (thin build, e-paper screen, microphone for input) and leaves off the things that, in theory, Pebble Round 2 users don’t care about. It’s missing both a heart rate sensor and a speaker, but its rectangular sibling the Pebble Time 2 has both. These two models sell for $199 and $225, respectively.
I’m cautiously optimistic that Pebble’s approach might signal a change in the trend. Migicovsky wrote in a postmortem on the original Pebble company’s failure that Pebble could have kept its niche as “the smartwatch for hackers” but tried to be too many things to too many people. (In that same blog post, written in 2017 and updated in 2022, Migicovsky notes that the smartwatch market of 2015 was moving toward fitness, but Pebble wasn’t a fitness company and arguably shouldn’t have tried to be one.)
“People want different things,” Migicovsky told me in a call earlier this week. He’s focusing Pebble’s new products on things he would want to use, not on what he thinks everybody else wants. That could be a risky move, since I’m not convinced that there’s a huge market for a heart-rate-less smartwatch. But I think he might be right that the smartwatch market is ready to stop being everything to everybody.
