[MostlyStable]

Some commenters mentioned that the e-ink screen (and the accompanying battery life) was one reason why the Pebble is so beloved, which reminded me of the Basis Peak, which was primarily a health tracker watch with some (very limited) smart functionality (mostly just some notifications, if I recall), that also had an e-ink screen and a nearly 1 week battery life and had a sort of similar trajectory:

Bought by Intel, then killed two years later after a battery related recall issue.

It was, in my opinion, by far the best fitness tracker watch ever, and remains so to this day. Not so much because of it's actual features (which were relatively standard), but the software paradigm of simple yet effective exercise gamification that helped encourage exercise habit formation. 8 years later and I still miss it.

[ClassyJacket]

Pebble had an LCD screen. It didn't use Eink at all. You can look this up, it was an LCD display manufactured by Sharp.

[_emacsomancer_]

A transflective LCD[0] though (that they call "e-paper"), which, in user-facing terms, is similar to e-ink.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_d...

[orangeyjuicey]

Well now, users would notice if the screen has to constantly flicker like their Kindle instead of looking like a colour Casio screen. Meaningful user-facing distinction there.

[_emacsomancer_]

Ah, that's fair enough. I was thinking of the positive e-ink-like properties, but this is a good point. "e-paper" in fact makes more sense here.

[MostlyStable]

I never had one, but doing some quick googling, it looks like at least some models had an e-ink display. Certainly several commenters seemed to think it did.

[will0]

It was a transflective memory LCD, which Pebble marketed as "E-Paper" (not the same as E-Ink)

[Groxx]

An excellent one at that. It boggles my mind that others didn't follow suit.

I've got a Bangle.js 2 at the moment and while I mostly like it, the screen is nowhere near as nice. Transflective is still very obviously what I want in a watch though, even the best oleds don't even come close in visibility.

[terramex]

> It boggles my mind that others didn't follow suit.

Most fitness smartwatches (Garmin, Coros, Wahoo) used the same display technology for years, called it MIP displays. Nowadays they are switching to OLEDs.

https://garminrumors.com/amoled-vs-mip-in-garmin-devices-a-d...

[Groxx]

Somewhat!

The vast majority I've seen are black and white, with a color layer on top that is disabled when in "low power / sunlight readable" modes. And many of the smartwatch-focused devices (rather than Garmin's super pricey and gigantic "hiking for days without a phone so it solar charges and has gps and..." watches) only use OLED, even if the brand has MIP screens in some other product lines.

I haven't seen anything even close to what pebble's color watches did. Banglejs is by far the closest, with 6 colors and a much more muted screen in general.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

No, it had an "epaper" display that visually looked a lot like eink but was a different technology