Quick introduction: Pebble Time Round is a color e-paper smartwatch promised to have up to 2 days of battery life, capable to connect to iOS and Android devices. It can run apps, custom watch face and quickly display new timeline interface that highlights what’s important in our day. This is the latest model from Pebble, which was announced shortly after the very successful Kickstarter project of Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel.
I was a backer of Pebble Time Steel, therefore I am eligible to take an offer from Pebble: try Pebble Time Round (with $50 discount) vs Pebble Time Steel for 30 days, then I can choose which one to return (and get full refund at the price of Pebble Time Round) or I can keep them both. Earlier this month I posted my first impression on Pebble Time Round. After using Pebble Time Round for about 3 weeks, I decided to keep it (will return Pebble Time Steel instead).
Hardware
Pebble Time Round has beautiful design that almost look like an ordinary watch. It is very thin for any smart watch’s standard and incredibly lightweight (only 32 gr with included leather band). Its round design enables us to choose a lot of analog watch faces with round design, giving us an (almost) perfect nostalgic feeling of using a classic watch. I can not stress out enough how much I love wearing thin watch.
There are 4 buttons in Pebble Time Round, one on the left side (back button) and three on the right side (up, select and down buttons). The buttons look nice and somewhat more accessible thanks to its round design. There is a built-in mic on the bottom right side. The charging port is located at the back, equipped with magnet to allow easy snap. The color display looks nice, a bit too dim for my liking. A little hand movement or button press is needed to turn on the back-light. It is still a very attractive display and I can see the watch face nicely under direct sunlight.
The leather band included as default does not look good. In fact, it looks even worse than the standard leather band from Pebble Time Steel. It does not feel comfortable and the only redeeming quality is that this band is really lightweight. After 3 weeks usage, I am already worried about its durability because it looks like it can break at anytime. If Pebble could at least provide Pebble Time Steel with a decent default band, I’m sure they can do the same with Pebble Time Round, so it’s a disappointment to get this inferior band instead. To be fair, I was never a fan of leather band, so I will wait patiently for my metal link.
Also worth to mention that Pebble Time Steel has lots of third party bands available, some has self-release pin, enabling us to change the strap without any tool. So far I have not found any third party metal band with self-release pin for Pebble Time Round.
The back-side of Pebble Time Round feels better on my skin compared to Pebble Time Steel. Not sure why. Maybe different material. Or maybe just different size and form factor.
For battery life, Pebble “only” promises up to 2 days. But I have been using this watch for 3 weeks and this watch easily survives 3 to 4 days. I receive a lot of notifications every day. All settings are still using default settings, meaning I didn’t change any settings of display intensity, timeout, ambient sensor or motion enabled back-light. I did not even set any quiet time (which generally will help to save battery life). In my observation, the more frequent I played around with changing watch faces, the extra battery drain is more than displaying frequent notifications.
Pebble original, Pebble Steel, Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel all use two Bluetooth connections to connect to my iPhone, one is the “normal” Bluetooth and the other one is the LE (Low Energy). Pebble Time Round does the connection differently. It only needs one connection: the LE Bluetooth. Using only LE connection, it means that Pebble Time Round will drain less battery from my iPhone and (theoretically) has less interference to my other Bluetooth devices. However, it also means that Pebble Time Round will be disconnected from my iPhone a lot easier. When I put my Time Round in a drawer at night, it quickly lost connection (my Pebble Time Steel has no problem to remain connected inside the same drawer). For me, this is actually a good news because I don’t really need to see my watch when I am asleep and if losing the connection would actually help to save Pebble Time Round’s battery (which might explain why I can get 4 days while its creators only promise 2 days), then I am more than happy.
Software
Pebble smart watches need an app to be installed in our iPhones or Android phones. Pebble Time, Pebble Time Steel and Pebble Time Round use the same app called “Pebble Time” different from “Pebble” app used by first-gen and second-gen Pebble. Connecting the watch to our phone is very easy. Just follow the on-screen instructions and the connection will be established within few seconds. The long waiting part, was when it downloaded the latest software update and upgraded the watch’s operating system (I use watch firmware version 3.8.2 for this review). That took a while to complete.
Pebble Time Round has round display, therefore all the previous apps and watch faces are NOT directly backward compatible with Pebble Time Round. Well, I tried some apps from my Pebble Time Steel, they CAN actually run in Pebble Time Round, but some of the display is being cut because it was not designed for round screen. The number of available watch faces is significantly less than the entire collection for other square models, but I can easily find some really good ones for Pebble Time Round. After all, we end up using only one watch face, with potential to change to few others in a while.
The round screen design gives a very nice feeling to watch faces who are smartly designed to take advantage of it. Analog watch faces give more classic and nostalgic feel, and I quite love it. So far I already have few favorite round-designed watch faces that would look strange in a square display. Some of the very useful apps from Pebble Time Steel are sadly not compatible with Pebble Time Round. I doubt that the app creator will work on Round compatibility any time soon, but I can only remain hopeful.
All watches in Pebble Time lineup have become a lot more useful since Pebble launched Pebble Health last week. Pebble Health basically counts our steps and it syncs with Apple HeathKit or Google Fit. Yes they were third party apps that can give this functionality to Pebble. However, having the feature baked in as part of the firmware significantly increases its usability. We can use any other watch faces that we like (some third party health apps must stay as the active interface.
Conclusion
I love Pebble Time Round. Enough to convince myself to return Pebble Time Steel with Kickstarter engraving. Smaller battery that I anticipated as the biggest issue turns out to be a lot better than what is promised. With 3-4 days of battery life, I basically need to charge it twice a week instead of once a week with Time Steel. And I’m completely okay with that. Other than battery issue, I could not see anything else that Round does worse compared to Steel.
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