I bought a secondhand Pebble Classic last year. I think they really hit the sweet spot in the market - the battery life is a key feature for me as I don't want

I bought a secondhand Pebble Classic last year. I think they really hit the sweet spot in the market - the battery life is a key feature for me as I don't want to be forever charging my watch the same way I charge my smartphone. Taking it off for an hour to do dishes or something is long enough to charge it up for a week. The screen is surprisingly crisp and runs at a high enough frame rate for animations. And it's always on, so unlike many watches you don't have to move your wrist at all to wake it up. The vibrating alert is brilliant, and I have a watch face that buzzes whenever bluetooth disconnects, which has stopped me leaving home without my phone many times. I like the square shape of the Classic watch, since it doesn't draw much attention and can be passed off as just another digital watch. Sure, it looks a lot cheaper than it actually is, but if you're concerned about your stuff being stolen, this is a great thing. I like the Pebble most because it does what a smartwatch should do, which is extend the smartphone - it doesn't try to be a phone on its own. The hardware is great. The haptic motor failed after about a year, but the watch wasn't new when I bought it, and when I enquired about repairs, Pebble replaced the whole watch free of charge. I'm very impressed with Pebble as a company and as a product, so I'm really disappointed and concerned about their future reading this article. For Fitbit to basically buy up Pebble for their software and patents smacks of gutting the company and discarding the shell. By discontinuing the watch itself, they're probably going at it backwards. I've had more problems with the software and the watch faces than I've ever had with the hardware - part of this was down to Android, but the Pebble app store used to be hideous even on a top-model phone. As ever, excellent hardware, abysmal software, but it's only the software that people (particularly other companies) care about. I'll be sad if Fitbit do follow through with their plans as detailed here.