The Pebble Time could easily be seen as a cheaper, more watch-like stand-in for an Apple Watch or Android wearable (yes, Time works with both kinds of smartphone), but its smart and useful design, whimsical style and tonnes of free software from a legion of enthusiastic independent software developers means it has plenty to help it stand on its own as well. Plus it still nails those fundamentals.

Hardware

The Pebble Time is much less like a miniature smartphone than other smartwatches, and this is certainly not a bad thing.

For starters, the Time does not have a touchscreen. It has a pair of buttons that let you select options and back out of menus, and another pair that let you scroll up and down. It's weird if you're used to swiping, but it does keep your glass clean and is nice and precise.

The device also doesn't have a bright, flashy screen capable of displaying high-resolution images. It has an e-paper display (like a Kindle e-reader) that can display 64 colours. It looks great, and the main functional benefit of e-paper (apart from allowing the battery to last several days on a single charge) is that the screen is always on.

Basically if you're in an environment well-lit enough to read from a piece of paper, you'll be able to read the watch's display easily. If you happen to be in the dark, a shake of your wrist or press of a button will light up the screen for a few seconds.

With a big metal frame and thick black bezel, the Pebble Time has a cool retro-future look about it. Some people won't like the plastic body, which is a little toy-like, and those people should wait for the Steel edition coming later this year (that body by the way is curved, light and textured, making this by far the comfiest smartwatch I've worn).

The Time will accept any standard 22mm watch band, so if you're not happy with the silicon strap that comes attached you can whip it off and slap on whatever you got from a jewellery store or eBay. I actually found the included strap super comfy, although it does make the whole thing look a bit like a fitness tracker.

Speaking of fitness, the Time does include a basic pedometer, so it's compatible with the Jawbone or Fitbit phone apps you may already be using for step counting and sleep tracking. There's no heart monitor or anything advanced like that, but a special port on the watch means "smart straps" that add extra functionality could exist in the future. The device is water resistant to 30 metres, so it's fine to take for a swim too.

How it works

Functionally the latest Pebble sticks very much to the original's playbook, rejecting the shiny coolness of big tech while prioritising the most important functions of a smartwatch: important information at a glance; readability; handling the more passive functions of your smartphone by proxy.

The watchface serves as the home screen for the Pebble Time, and the information displayed there depends entirely on the face you choose. There are thousands available for free from the Pebble Time smartphone app, and it's just a matter of browsing through and selecting one to add it instantly to your watch. Many are charmingly amateurish, but there are plenty of professional-grade entries. Some take a utilitarian approach, filling the display with information on weather, battery life, missed messages and activity tracking, whereas others are more artistic. In short there's a watchface here for you if you're prepared to dig in and find it, and if you're anything like me you'll be rocking a different one every day.

One of the primary functions of a smartwatch is to serve your phone notifications to your wrist, and it works exactly as you'd expect with Pebble Time. Every time your phone gets an email, for example, the Pebble will buzz and display the sender and subject line. The options for dealing with the notification (dismiss, reply with an emoji, snooze etc) depends on which app is sending your phone the notification. It all works a little more smoothly on Android, as Pebble can make use of the Android Wear infrastructure, but you'll still get all your notifications from an iPhone too.

Entering text is never fun on a watch and Pebble Time has decided to not even try. In general, if you can't deal with a notification with the press of a button you'll need to grab your phone. For replying to text messages there's an option you pick from canned responses you've set up earlier, although trust me when I say significant others do not like that. There's also a microphone to dictate text replies, and it works fine as long as you're in a quiet area.

The "time" in the name of the device refers to the fact that scrolling up or down from the main screen will give you a look at your personal timeline. Looking into your future will show information pulled from your phone's calendar (appointments, birthdays, public holidays), as well as weather forecasts and any relevant info from Pebble apps. You can also scroll back to look at activity from earlier in the day, which could be pedometer information from a fitness app or scores from a big sports game, depending on the apps you have installed.

Apps

There's thousand of apps in the Pebble appstore, but it's a bit of a slog to search through them and find what you want. This is especially true because there are very few big names on the store, and generally I found myself googling for apps and then searching the names on the store to get them.

In general I've been surprised and impressed with the quality and diversity on offer. There are heaps of remotes for your other internet-connected devices, like one that lets you control iTunes on your Mac while you wander around the house; tonnes of glanceable news and weather apps; surprisingly useful utilities like Timer+, which come in handy whether you're baking a pie or swimming laps; there are even some decent games, like the virtual pet/activity tracker FitCat.

A couple of apps are included by default, including a basic music controller, but more in-depth versions of these are only a search away.

This is the first colour Pebble and as such there are a lot of apps and watchfaces on the store that are still black and white, which can be a turn off. Another niggle is that a lot of the apps that require close integration with your phone — for example Music Boss for media control and Pebble Dialer​ for making calls — have mandatory companion apps that are available on Android but not iPhone. This is an Apple problem as opposed to a Pebble one, but it still sucks.

Should I get one?

More than any other smartwatch the Pebble Time feels like a watch that does heaps of useful stuff, rather than an extension of your phone onto your wrist. A lot of the most useful apps are self-contained and not part of your phone at all, meaning it's still pretty functional even if you're nowhere near your phone.

The always-on screen and big battery life (I've been getting four to five days) just make sense for a watch, and the ability to use any watchface and band you want means it can reflect your own personality rather than Apple's or Motorola's, even if the cutesy interface means it will always be a little bit unsophisticated.

Pebble Time is currently available only from the Pebble Website, at a price of $US199. Shipping to Australia is free.