Pebble Debuts Its First Round Smartwatch With The Pebble Time Round

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Pebble, the company that arguably sparked the whole smartwatch trend with a $10M Kickstarter back in 2012, is shifting things up today. After years of sticking with square-faced displays, the company is today introducing its first round-faced smartwatch.

It’s called, aptly, the Pebble Time Round.

Pebble Time Round will come in a few different styles: a leather strap in a variety of color for $249, or with a metal band in gold or black for $299. The style of the bezel varies a bit depending on your strap of choice.

I tried on a Pebble Time Round for a few minutes just yesterday. If you’re already familiar with Pebble and its timeline interface, you’ll feel right at home here — it’s very much a Pebble, just a whole lot slimmer and rounder than those that have come before it.

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Pebble is thus far known for its solid battery life; in a world where most smartwatches last a day or so at best, Pebble’s lightweight OS and e-ink display traditionally let it crank on for closer to a week.

Curiously, though, the Pebble Time Round has shaved off a fair bit of that signature battery life in favor of a lighter, slimmer design — instead of five or six days of battery life, Pebble Time Round promises two days. A quick charge feature lets you add 24 hours of juice with just 15 minutes on the charger — but you won’t be taking this one for week long camping trips.

Pebble Time Round goes up for pre-order on Pebble.com today, with shipments expected sometime “in November”. At least according to an Amazon product page that popped up for the device this morning, they’re aiming for November 10th, specifically.

I’ll be talking to Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky on stage later today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF.