Pebble/ZDNET

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Pebble unveiled the Pebble Round 2 on Friday.
• It's a thin, open-source smartwatch with a 10-day battery life.
• It improves on the Pebble Time Round, which launched in 2015.

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Ten years after Pebble's launch of its first-generation round smartwatch, the Pebble Time Round, the indie watch brand arrives with the Pebble Round 2 -- and improvements in almost every area. Pebble announced the Round 2 on Friday, with a longer battery life and a larger display.

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The watch has maintained its thinness while addressing common user complaints, like the thick bezel that wraps around the display and the short battery life of the Pebble Time Round.

This isn't the kind of watch you'd use for marathon training. It's a sleek, elegant, and functional device that can track some health details, primarily sleep and steps, but forgoes the breadth of a fitness watch for timekeeping, communication, and AI queries or assistance.

'Constraints make things better'

Where the Pebble Round 2's specs shine is in display and battery life, which Migicovsky has improved twofold. The watch now lasts around 10 days, and it's 8.1mm thin (or thick). That's a little thicker than the famously skinny Pebble Time Round at 7.5mm. Pebble improves the display by minimizing the bezel and maximizing the 1.3-inch e-paper display.

By widening the display, the watch makes reading notifications and messages far easier and more legible, I found in a side-by-side demo with Eric Migicovsky, Pebble's CEO.

The stainless steel watch comes in matte black, brushed silver, and shiny rose gold. The watches come with a silicone watch strap, though leather options are available for additional purchase.

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"Constraints make things better," Migicovsky tells me in the interview. If you're unconstrained, you build a kind of bland, soulless, everything product. With this product, we wanted it to be the most stylish, elegant Pebble ever, and one of the things is to make it feel like it isn't a block of technology on your wrist. It feels more like a timepiece. To do that, it had to be thin."

This thinness also required Pebble to sacrifice some other features, like the heart rate monitor, that would add bulk to the watch. "It's not necessarily going to be the product for everybody, and that's OK," he said. Instead, the watch uses an accelerometer and an internal measurement unit to track sleep and steps.

E-paper display

While building the Pebble Round 2, Migicovsky wanted to create a watch that shows notifications, vibrates on the wrist for calls and messages, looks as analog as possible, and is an effective timepiece -- something he believes most smartwatches are poor at. 

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"It's remarkable how many smartwatches aren't really great timepieces because you have to either flick your wrist to see what time it is, do a little wrist gesture, or if they have an always-on display like an Apple Watch, they're always emitting light," he tells me. 

The Pebble Round 2's e-paper display, on the other hand, allows the watch to reflect light rather than emit a strong ray. This also makes the watch easy to read on a sunny day, Migicovsky says.

Pricing and availability

The watch works with Android and iOS smartphones, though currently only Android devices can use the message-replying feature. The Pebble Round 2 costs $199 and is now available for preorder.