Pebble gladly tells you who its watch is not for.

Eric Migicovsky at the end of his blogpost introducing two new PebbleOS watches:

You shouldn’t get one if…

You need a perfectly polished smartwatch. This project is a labour of love rather than a startup trying to sell millions of watches. There may be some rough edges (literally). Things will get delayed. Some features will not be ready at launch. Things could break. Things could not last as long as you’d like. The only thing we can guarantee is that it will be awesome and a lot of fun! Every time you look down at your watch, you will smile 🙂

You’re looking for a fitness or sports watch. That’s not what we’re making. From what we hear, Garmin watches are great for runners/cyclists/triathletes!

You’re comparing this to an Apple Watch. There is NO way for a 3rd party smartwatch to compete with Apple Watch. Apple restricts 3rd parties in major ways - read my blog post for more information. For example, 3rd party watches on iOS cannot send replies to notifications.

These watches are not made for everyone. We want to be upfront with you about what to expect.

I appreciate his honesty here, especially when he says you can’t compare this to an Apple Watch. He makes Apple seem like the bad guy in this, but the truth is, can you fault Apple, with its hard stance on privacy, for not supporting the Pebble Watch, when one of its five key features is being hackable?

John Gruber said it best when he described Pebble like the Playdate:

If their goal is to be to smartwatches what Playdate is to handheld gaming, that’s definitely achievable, and if they succeed, will by definition be a lot of fun.

The whole tech world needs more projects that aren’t trying to become billion- (let alone trillion‑) dollar ideas, but are happily shooting for success as million-dollar ideas (or less!).