Pebble Time 2 review: The perfect smartwatch for a select group of people - Engadget

It's hard not to sound like a crank when talking about my ideal smartwatch given the prevailing trends. Apple, Samsung, Google and its partners have achieved the miracle of shrinking a general-purpose computing platform into a device that can sit on a wrist. The fancier models even have LTE radios, freeing them from the yoke of needing a smartphone at all. But, what if all you really want is a watch that operates as a companion to your phone, rather than a poor substitute? It was this line of thinking that defined the early smartwatch era, and I think things got a lot worse when we lost that sense of restraint. So, imagine my delight to see Pebble, back from the dead after nearly a decade in limbo, offering something that now feels radical. Not because of what it does, but because of what it doesn't do. Because this isn't a fitness watch, or a general-purpose computing platform on the wrist, it's a second screen for your phone. You can read notifications, control music playback, check the weather and run basic apps that do a single job at a time. And that's it. This is a watch not for general-purpose users, but for everyone who feels that smartwatches got worse as their missions ex