May I ask why it was so special for you? As I did not participate in all the hype and now I'm a happy owner of a Garmin watch and it does seem like it is closer in specs to Pebble than most other smartwatches. Other than the openness.
I wear a Garmin and I still miss my Pebble Time that died to swelling battery.
- Always on. Garmin has option to do that as well but it reduce the battery life to like 3 days. In outdoor my Pebble Time is very bright with zero backlight.
- 5 days battery. I went on a trip to Japan without its proprietary charger, by the time I board my flight back it was on power save mode and it died the moment the plane landed. Garmin could do this if you set it to power saving mode, but the Pebble is in standard mode. One could argue that the Garmin do have more stuff like health monitoring that Pebble didn't.
- Cheap and no frills. I want a second screen for my phone, not a health tracker. Originally my Pebble Time shipped with zero fitness features, and it later added a step counter once it's clear that the market direction go that way.
- Garmin is quite thick, Pebble Time is thinner
- The UI is simple - press up for past event, down for future event (calendar). Press the middle button for menu. Hold are configurable. Garmin has 4 main menus which are very confusing (fitness menu, shortcut menu, apps menu, system menu).
- Lots of free apps and watch faces which I actually used (like a music app that show album art). I don't see any apps I would want to use on the Garmin, and they're mostly paid. The "hide in a hole while ceiling crush the map" game on Pebble was really well done. Now my Garmin use the simple time in Verdana watch face because I cba to find a decent one.
- Even with low framerates, Pebble managed to deliver cute little animations. Replying to message show a flying paper plane, screen transitions have suitable animations (not generic ones like Android), and the best one is muting an apps show a Ostrich putting its head under the ground. The animation also hides how slow the hardware actually is, with later OS versions stalling over a second or two after a second long animation.
- I think the phone app UI is not as good as say, Apple Watch, but it focus on apps and the store without the fitness features. Garmin's app is entirely about fitness and they hide smartwatch stuff in a menu plus another separate Connect IQ app.
Overall the PebbleOS feel like a really solid and polished product than any smartwatch today. It do fewer things than most smartwatches, but that's all I care about and everything it does is very polished.
It was cheap, simple, did everything I wanted from a smart watch, and wasn't annoying to use (never had to worry about the battery). It wasn't a matter of a killer feature, more just the lack of the problems I see with all the alternatives since. Every time I've looked at a replacement option, I've noticed something that just made me not bother getting it.
