Pebble Time Round review

The Pebble Time Round is not for the fashion conscious. It is also not waterproof or resistant, but if you're looking for a simple smartwatch that does the job, and is really light, this is the one to consider.

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Pebble Time Round is the first round smartwatch from the company, and it certainly does not disappoint. While a few of the software features may be slightly inconsistent (or niche-based, like the voice commands), it is an incredible watch in both form and function.

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It's lighter and better-looking than any Pebble before, but the battery life and app compatibility mean those in the market for the brand may prefer a Pebble Time Steel.

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What holds The Pebble Time Round back is its hefty price tag. Pebble has always marketed itself as the burgeoning smartwatch industry’s most affordable wearable, but at $299.99 CAD, the company’s latest smartwatch is approaching high-end territory. It still undercuts the $379 Moto 360 and $399 Samsung Gear S2, but it may be too much for those looking to dip their feet into the smartwatch genre. Perhaps it’s good, then, that the company still sells its original Pebble, along with the Pebble Time and Time Steel, for significantly less.

Still, despite its hefty price tag and lacklustre display, if given the choice between the above smartwatches and the Pebble Time, I’d pick Pebble’s circular wearable every time. But this is the type of smartwatch that’s only going to appeal to a person with a very specific wearable use case in mind, as well as those who aren’t iPhone users since the Time Round’s functionality is limited with the iPhone.

If you’re only interested in receiving notifications on your wrist, the Pebble Time Round is the best smartwatch around. 

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iPhone users can view and dismiss notifications, and trigger voice commands on supported apps. But notifications are non-actionable, which means no deleting e-mails, liking Facebook posts, or replying to WhatsApp messages by voice. An experimental feature allows AT&T users to answer text messages with voice or canned replies, and it worked well in my experience, though there’s no word on when other carriers might be supported.

By comparison, Android users get all the same actions that appear in their phone’s notification tray. So instead of just getting a glance at notifications, you can decide how to deal with them straight from the wrist.Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky told me the company’s working on a solution for iPhone users, though this has yet to materialize. As it stands, Pebble is not a bad smartwatch with an iPhone, but it’s a much better smartwatch with an Android phone. 

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For its design and the well-performing functions this smartwatch offers, users will look to the Time Round as the watch they want when simplistic elegance is the order of the day, and that is exactly what this device is able to achieve. For most users, being able to see notifications, and in most cases, respond to them is the core of a smartwatch, and Pebble has certainly delivered that.

Where other smartwatches fail is in their feature sets – not because these features aren’t good, but because the design has to suffer to make room for them. The Time Round is the anti-thesis of this trend in smartwatches, and by prioritizing simplicity, it is probably the first device that can be recommended to anybody. If you really do need a heart rate monitor, the ability to make calls from your wrist, or even use the device for mobile connectivity, then this isn’t the device for you. What you do get here is simplicity, elegance, and one of the best looking smartwatches we’ve seen all year.

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The Pebble Time Round has the potential to be the best smartwatch yet. As far as look and feel, no other smartwatch comes close by my estimation. And if you're set on a round smartwatch, it's better than the Android Wear-based Huawei Watch and Moto 360. But it's tough to recommend over the Pebble Time, which has much longer battery life, access to every app in the Pebble store, and a water-resistant design—all for less money.

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The Pebble Time Round is without doubt the most elegant smartwatch Pebble has ever made. It's slim, lightweight and fits smaller wrists well. Unfortunately, that fashionable design comes at a cost: It has far shorter battery life than previous Pebbles and you can no longer go swimming with it. Seeing as how you can get a more feature-rich watch for around the same price, we mainly recommend the Time Round for people who care more about style than substance.

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Pebble has been busy this year for a reason: it’s never had stiffer competition for wrist real estate than now, and it’s just a small fish in what’s becoming a larger and larger ocean. The Time Round may just be another option in Pebble’s expanding lineup, but it takes the company forward, in both design and build quality. Pebble has mounting challenges ahead of it, but if the Time Round is an example of where the company is headed, I’m excited to see where it can go.

If only the company could do something about that bezel.

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The Time Round is more expensive than it looks or feels, which is a shame. But this is the first smartwatch I’ve used in a long time that offers me more peace than anxiety. I don’t worry about figuring it out or making the most of it, or whether I should be doing this thing on my watch or my phone or my laptop. I don’t think about it at all most of the time. I just check the time, and it tells me what I need to know. That’s the job, isn’t it?

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