Good news for Pebble fans. Not only are the Pebble watches coming back, they’ll also officially be called Pebble watches.
“Great news — we’ve been able to recover the trademark for Pebble! Honestly, I wasn’t expecting this to work out so easily,” Core Devices CEO Eric Migicovsky writes in an update blog. “Core 2 Duo is now Pebble 2 Duo. Core Time 2 is now Pebble Time 2.”
As a refresher, Pebble was one of the OG smartwatches. Despite a loyal customer base, however, it wasn’t able to compete with bigger names like Fitbit, the Apple Watch, or Samsung.
In 2016, Pebble was acquired by Fitbit for $23 million, marking the end of the first Pebble era. Along the way, Fitbit was acquired by Google. That’s important because the tech giant agreed to open-source Pebble’s software, and Migicovsky announced earlier this year that Pebble was making a comeback. However, because Migicovsky didn’t have the trademark, the new Pebble watches were initially dubbed the Core 2 Duo and the Core Time 2.
The return to the original Pebble naming is both significant and sentimental. For starters, names have power (just ask HBO Max). Not only was everyone going to colloquially call these devices “new Pebbles”, making that official helps bolster the comeback narrative. On top of that, the return to the original naming is also a nod to the power of Pebble’s community.
“With the recovery of the Pebble trademark, that means you too can use the word Pebble for Pebble related software and hardware projects,” Migicovsky writes, acknowledging Pebble’s history of community development. In the years when Pebbles were defunct, many diehards would pop up in the comments of my smartwatch reviews, lamenting how nothing could compare to their Pebble. So deep was their Pebble love, many participated in a grassroots community called Rebble to keep their devices alive. For those folks, this is probably the cherry on top of an already sweet comeback.
