Pebble Was More Than a Smartwatch Pioneer – Exploring Core, the Original AI Gadget
Sunday, February 16, 2025
With Pebble returning to the smartwatch fray, I thought it would be fun to revisit their only non-watch product: Pebble Core. While Core never ended up shipping, looking back it gave us a glimpse of something that’s been happening over the past year or two. AI-centric gadgets like the Humane AI Pin, Rabbit R1, Limitless Pendant, and others have become a major topic of conversation amongst the tech crowd. So has, their usefulness but that’s a separate debate. They’re all trying to be the next big thing, though none of them have quite stuck the landing. Each one has plenty of shortcomings and you’ve no doubt heard about them already. While they generally position themselves as pioneers, all the way back in 2016 Pebble gave us the first piece of AI hardware in the form of Core. They may not have thought about it that way at the time, but if you go back and re-examine their marketing materials it’s clear that they would’ve ended up going down that path had they not been gobbled up by Fitbit.
Pebble Core was largely meant to be a Pebble without a display, targeted at runners and hackers. It was a small little square that clipped to your clothes. It played music through Spotify, used GPS to track your runs, could take voice notes, and had a 3G radio in it for SOS calls. That doesn’t sound particularly crazy, but I left out one key feature: Alexa. It’s no secret that Alexa never reached its full potential and sort of languished over the years. That’s hopefully going to change later this month. Alexa’s shortcomings aside, the idea was that you could just talk to a screen-less device and ask it to do things. It sounds a lot like the Humane AI Pin without the laser. Pebble suggested that hackers could expand the device’s capabilities with examples like ordering an uber, turning lights on/off, tracking your pet, opening your garage door, unlocking your car, and so on. These are the same examples that companies generally use today. It was the “leave your phone at home and still be able to do essential tasks” device that companies are still chasing to this day.
I highly recommend going back and revisiting Pebble’s very last product announcement, both because it’s probably a bit of a glimpse of what could be in-store for Pebble’s return but also because it’s the earliest example I can think of for a modern AI gadget.