I feel you on the smart gadgets thing. After the fall of pebble I swore off smart stuff and was into Casio and simpler amazefit neo type stuff for a while. Then I fell into casio PCB conversions and before I knew it I was back at basically smart watches again like the pinetime.

When I saw pebble was back I had to get it. I pulled my old pebble time out and started daily driving it.

The time 2 builds on the existing pebble vibe but just sort of smoothes a lot of edges, improves quality of life and feels like a solid upgrade. It's early days but I kind of love it.

Pros

• The screen is great. Maaaaybe a tiny bit less legible than the time screen, but easy to read in most light and in sunlight it's stunningly crisp. Not amazing color reproduction but eh, it's epaper.
• the buttons are this nice knurled metal and they click satisfyingly. An improvement over my old time's mushy buttons.
• It looks pretty slick imo I love how it looks on the wrist.
• should you want them there is a decent hobbyist level of apps and watchfaces available for all sorts of things. You could also easily make your own if so I inclined.
• there's lots of simple customizations that feel very neighborly for example letting you flip the screen if you like the buttons on the other side for wearing on your right wrist.
• it just has that fun lo-fi feel that is kind of missing these days.

Cons

• I haven't completely discharged the battery yet, but at current rate I don't see the endurance target being realistic. I think theres optimizations like turning off heartrate monitor etc. Maybe we'll get there with updates.
• while cool the backlight is not exceptionally bright. It's not dim, but I could have used a bit more juice personally.
• there are some minor bugs. Backlight will stop sometimes while navigating the menu. Not ideal in the dark. Again maybe this will be fixed.

Tl;Dr

Yeah I recommend it if you're like me and like the pebble philosophy and are willing to accept some deficiencies. If you want a polished finished product I'm not sure it's there yet. It's a nice watch in general though. Even without notifications it offers a lot of unique timekeeping functions.