Don’t wait around for Pebble founder’s Small Android Phone

“I really do hope someone else makes one so I don’t have to 😂,” writes Migicovsky.

I’m now one of a contingent of Samsung Galaxy Z Flip owners who is seriously considering trading in my Flip for a Galaxy S25. It’s not small, but it’s the closest thing we’ve got and my Flip’s battery doesn’t remotely last until bedtime anymore. I ask Migicovsky whether I can safely upgrade without feeling I might miss out on a possible Small Android Phone by, say, mid-2026. He says I can, without commenting on my proposed timeline.

At one point the phone project was targeting a 2024 release date and had gotten as far as creating an entire brand, Beep, to market it with, according to the portfolio of Small Android Phone Project industrial designer Alex De Stasio. He’d even dreamt up a billboard:

Please don’t get your hopes up that the new watch will have X/Y/Z new feature. It’s going to be a Pebble and almost exactly as you remember it, except now with open source software that can you can modify and improve yourself. More hardware details will be shared in the future.

For the uninitiated, the original Pebbles were low-power devices whose best features were dead simplicity and battery life — no touchscreen, no digital crown, just a few buttons to help you read notifications and run a catalog of charming basic apps. That’s fine with me as long as the buttons are good!

A few other things he’s confirmed about the new Pebble so far:

He told Android Faithful there are two software features he’d like to add. His “big thing” is to someday have a chat client, one that could address a limitation of early Pebbles by letting you see a whole conversation history on your wrist. The other is a basic AI handoff: “Pebble has a microphone, it has a screen… why can’t you talk to ChatGPT?”

Migicovsky should be in Shenzhen this week to meet with suppliers and factories for the new smartwatch.