The maker of Pebble thinks way beyond than watches

A few of the neatest gadgets at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026 weren’t anywhere near the Las Vegas Convention Center trade show venue.

Instead, they were sitting on a table at The Venetian Resort’s food court, at least on Monday when Core Devices founder Eric Migicovsky was holding press meetings. He had a couple of quirky Pebble smartwatches to show off, with lo-fi e-paper screens in round and rectangular forms, and he was wearing an early version of the Pebble Index, a smart ring whose main job is capturing voice notes. (He moved to a booth in the bowels of the Venetian expo when CES officially got underway.)

Unlike a lot of exhibitors, Migicovsky isn’t promising anything revolutionary, but he also made clear that Core’s mission has expanded. Beyond just making smartwatches, he now sees the company as a purveyor of fun but indispensable gadgets. The Pebble Index is just the start.

“Core Devices is building the gadgets we want, (because) no one else is,” he says.

Three watches and a smart ring

It’s now been about nine years since Pebble shut down, selling its assets to Fitbit after the Apple Watch sucked out the oxygen for smartwatch startups. Maybe Pebble’s fate was unavoidable, but Migicovsky also regrets overextending into areas he wasn’t passionate about, like fitness tracking. (“I’m not a Whoop guy,” he says.)

Core Devices is a chance to start fresh. After spending three years as a Y Combinator partner, and then selling his messaging startup Beeper to Automattic (reportedly for $125 million), Migicovsky has no desire to go the usual startup route again. When Google agreed to open-source the original Pebble operating system last year, he put up the R&D money for a new batch of watches, then started taking preorders.

With the new Pebble watches, the core appeal is the same as the originals: Geeky watch faces, reliable push button controls, e-paper screens for long battery life, hackability. For Core Devices’ first new watch, the Pebble 2 Duo, the hardware is also similar, as Migicovsky found a supplier with some original Pebble 2 components and repurposed them into 8,000 new watches that shipped late last year.

The next batch of Pebbles is more like what the original company might’ve built if it survived for longer. The $225 Pebble Time 2 looks like a standard rectangular smartwatch, except it lasts for a month between charges, while the $199 Pebble Round 2 ditches heart rate monitoring for a slim design and two weeks of battery life. Both have larger screens and much narrower bezels than any of Pebble’s original watches.

As for the $99 Pebble Index 01 ring, Migicovsky says the idea came from struggling to remember things and wanting to record them in way that became muscle memory. Talking into the ring while holding its clickable button records a voice note, which a companion app transcribes into text. A double-click allows for programmable actions such as smart home controls or AI queries (whose answers, for instance, could appear on a Pebble). A Pebble app with similar functionality is coming, but the point of the ring is that you only need one free thumb to use it.

Meanwhile, Migicovsky is cutting out all the things he hated about making hardware before. He raises money for the watches through preorders instead of investors, sells them through Core’s website instead of dealing with retailers, and doesn’t bother with sales forecasting.

The resulting sales have been modest—25,000 Pebble Time 2 preorders, 7,000 more for the Round, 8,000 for the now-sold-out Pebble 2 Duo—but the company has far exceeded its minimums for what Migicovsky considers viable. That means Core Devices can keep making new gadgets.

“We decided this go-round that we’ll just do the things that are fun,” he says.

Beyond the watch

Among longtime Pebble fans, the Index ring has been contentious, in large part because it’s not designed to last. Its internal battery isn’t rechargeable or replaceable, and after 12 to 15 hours of recording time, it’ll simply stop working. (Migicovsky estimates a two-year lifespan for someone who records 10 to 20 thoughts per day.) Core Devices will offer to recycle the metal, but it’ll throw the electronics away.

Migicovsky says the single-use battery was necessary for an attractive design with water resistance, and he likes the idea of never having to take the ring off, even in the shower. But because the original Pebble watches have endured for so long—a decade later, thousands of people still use theirs—the Index’s disposable nature feels incongruous even if Migicovsky downplays it.

“I would say that most devices are made to be thrown away, and that’s the secret of the industry that nobody ever talks about,” he says.

The Index also just indicates that Core Devices is more than a smartwatch company now. While the original goal was to scratch one specific itch, Migicovsky now says he has “lots more” ideas for new products.

There will be prerequisites: Whatever Core Devices makes can’t already exist, must have low R&D costs, and should be possible to build with a small team. (The company currently employs five people, all on the software side besides Migicovsky himself.) Its products will have to solve everyday problems, even if they’re niche ones.

Still, the company has more things to figure out first. While the Index uses on-device speech-to-text for voice notes, it’s unclear how it’ll cover the cost of using AI to process custom commands, or for its optional Wispr Flow-powered transcriptions. Migicovsky doesn’t love the idea of subscriptions but isn’t sure about alternatives. Employing a team obviously has ongoing costs as well, which means Core Devices will need to expand from its tiny audience, find recurring revenue streams, or keep releasing new things.

But even as it expands, Core Devices is keeping its ambitions in check, which at a venue like CES can be pretty refreshing. “We’re not trying to invent some new computing category,” Migicovsky says. “We’re not trying to take over the world.”

source https://www.fastcompany.com/91472461/pebble-watch-gadget-ces