Pebble hardware could never run Android Wear. It has 256 kilobytes of RAM! Android Wear requires two thousand times more RAM than that.
That's the really impressive achievement of Pebble. They built a smartwatch software platform that was orders of magnitude more efficient than Apple or Google, but still a joy to use. That efficiency gave them the flexibility to make hardware design choices (e.g. 7 day battery or 7.5mm thickness or $99 price) that Google or Apple could never make.
Not only that, despite the extreme technical limitations underpinning the device, they built a dev environment that was a joy to use, and an API that was intuitive and powerful, supported by great documentation. Pebble really was something special.
Pixel, Pebble, Slate would be a good set of names if they resurrected the branding. Bring back Nexus too, the Pixel Nexus. Drop the name google/chrome entirely, name the hardware division Pixel. The Pixel Pebble as their smart watch offering. The Pixel Nest as their smarthome tech.
I actually think google would benefit from differentiating their consumer tech from their search/adwords products.
The Pebble ran on a Cortex M3. These days the new Mi Bands offer somewhat equivalent specs for $40 with 15 day battery life on color displays with heart rate monitors.
I'd be really excited to see something similar in a more traditional watch form factor.
There is some talk of the recently announced PineTime (https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PineTime) running RebbleOS. Should be cheaper than the Mi Bands with a more traditional watch form factor and decent battery life!
If it behaves even remotely like a pebble and runs on Rebble then I'm sold, my current pebble has a dying battery and there isn't much replacement on the market...
Mi bands don't support always-on-screens, third party apps, watchfaces, or integrations with apps outside their tightly controlled ecosystem. From my pebble I could get the weather at a glance, control my smartlights, pick the music to play on spotify, reply to messages, surreptitiously browse reddit, control my camera, and track my sleep with Sleep as Android. You can't use Mi to do any of those things.
That was the magic of Pebble: fitting an honest-to-god smartwatch on the hardware of a fitness tracker.
Mi Band 4 has watch faces and recent update brings always on screen. Has weather and can control music on phone. But yeah Mi Bands are fitness trackers with some additional features, but it does work very well for that use case with extremely good battery life.
That's the really impressive achievement of Pebble. They built a smartwatch software platform that was orders of magnitude more efficient than Apple or Google, but still a joy to use. That efficiency gave them the flexibility to make hardware design choices (e.g. 7 day battery or 7.5mm thickness or $99 price) that Google or Apple could never make.