After 45 Days With the Pebble Time 2, Is The Honeymoon Phase Over?
I posted my full review for the Pebble Time 2 back on June 11th. Since it is now July 20th, I wanted to check back in and give a longer duration review for this device to see how well it has been holding up.
Examining the Hardware and Screen Scratches
The first order of business is to look at the hardware and see how well it has been holding up after a few weeks of continuous wear. Right off the bat, the screen has already accumulated quite a few little scratches. With smartwatches, that just seems to be an inevitability, which is always disappointing, but it happens. The good news is that when looking straight at the display, it is not really a big issue to me.
There have been plenty of reports online, though, of people having their screens shatter. Looking closely at the design, it is easy to see why. The glass actually sits up above the body of the watch, meaning it easily bumps on things, takes the brunt of impacts, and shatters. Pebble has reportedly been replacing watches for affected users, but this feels like a bit of a design flaw.
Otherwise, everything has held up pretty well. The stock watch band was swapped out for a leather band that magnetically snaps down, which makes it much easier to put on and looks excellent with its blue accent.
Outstanding Battery Life
Battery life continues to be absolutely outstanding. Even with a full day of heavy use, the device only drops from 46% to around 39% or 40%, meaning it only loses about 6% or 7% a day.
The battery life easily hits something like 2 weeks at a time on a single charge, which is fantastic. An update rolled out to the Core 2 Duo has apparently pushed its battery life closer to a month, and that optimization should be coming to this device relatively soon as well. The battery life might get even better, which is wild.
Health Tracking and Google Health Syncing
The built-in health tracking is fine, though it is nothing extraordinary. It is accurate enough for basic tracking, but the companion app is not the best place to view the data. Instead, it is much better to sync everything directly with the Google Health app to bring all the metrics into one place.
There is one notable problem with sleep tracking, which can get a bit wonky. For example, the other night I took a long time to fall asleep, woke up around 2:45 AM for a little while, and then fell back asleep. The watch registered this as two completely separate naps instead of a full night of sleep. That data split caused the Coach AI feature in Gemini to get some insights wrong. It is not the most accurate health tracker in the world, but it is accurate enough to track daily steps.
Interface, Button Shortcuts, and Customization
The hardware layout includes a back button, up and down navigation buttons, and a center select button. The display is technically a touchscreen, but it does not actually do anything in the current interface yet. That functionality might come down the line, but for now, you will be using the physical buttons.
The layout can be fully customized, allowing you to map the buttons to whatever system features make the most sense for your workflow.
For my personal setup, I mapped the up button on the home screen to open the media player interface. When shuffling music on YouTube Music, the track information appears instantly on the watch. The middle button pauses the audio, and the navigation buttons can adjust the volume on the phone remotely. The best part is that the watch stays on the media player screen indefinitely. If I am walking around with my phone in my pocket and earbuds in, I do not have to keep digging through menus to find the media controls again. It stays right there until I choose to leave the screen.
For the down button shortcut, I chose to map it to pull up my notifications. This menu displays a historical log of notifications, which highlights a distinct difference in product philosophy. Some devices only show the active notifications currently sitting on your phone, while Pebble focuses on showing a complete notification history.
The issue with a historical log is that once an alert has been cleared or addressed on a phone, it shouldn't really clutter the watch anymore. On the Pebble Time 2, that history becomes read-only, meaning you can't interact with or respond to the messages anymore. My personal preference would be for the system to sync perfectly, meaning that if I delete an email using the middle button on the watch, it clears from the phone and vice versa.
Advanced Shortcuts and Switching Phones
The interface also supports long-press shortcuts, which can also be customized to launch whatever applications you want. On my watch, a long press on the up button initiates a workout log, allowing quick tracking for a run, a walk, or a general workout. I configured a long press on the down button to launch the weather app for a quick glance at the current conditions. Long pressing the middle button opens up the timeline. If you ever want to change these, the quick launch settings allow you to swap them out for the compass or any other application.
Switching the watch to another phone is also incredibly close to being a seamless process. You simply jump into the watch settings, select Bluetooth, choose the currently connected phone, and forget it to put the watch back into pairing mode. After forgetting and deleting the watch from the old phone's Bluetooth menu, the watch can connect to a new device and pick up right where it left off. The only real annoyance is that the watch resets to a default watch face during the switch, requiring a quick manual adjustment to change it back.
Final Verdict and Display Performance
The Pebble Time 2 is an excellent smartwatch that does exactly what it needs to do. The reflective screen performs beautifully, becoming significantly easier to read the brighter the ambient light is.
The backlight is still a bit unhelpful, especially since the lift-to-wake gesture is completely unresponsive. The design expects you to give the watch a physical shake to activate the light, and even that does not work very well. Fortunately, the ambient visibility is good enough that the backlight is rarely needed unless you are in a pitch-black room, and you can always just press a button or tap the screen to light it up.
Aside from minor notification syncing complaints and the exposed glass edge, the Pebble Time 2 is an incredibly satisfying smartwatch with phenomenal battery life, a great screen, and tactile physical buttons.
