After the incredibly successful original Pebble smartwatch, the company Pebble updated their offering with the much better designed and far less geeky Pebble Time and the kind-of-upscale model Pebble Time Steel. It's a great product porfolio actually, you can get a smartwatch from Pebble for $99, $149 and $199. Apple charges twice the highest amount for a basic Apple Watch Sport, though, so there's obviously some room for the more expensive offerings in the market.

And now Pebble's in on the game. Well, from November it will be. With the brand spanking new Pebble Time Round. It will cost $249 and come for the first time in a version intended more for the ladies, with a slimmer strap. But that's the most boring thing about it.

The new watch is beautifully designed and actually quite classy. That's the first time we would say that about a Pebble, as even the Time Steel model was a bit weird with its chunky square look and thick bezels.

The Round also has very thick bezels, but somehow the designers have managed to make that a feature, rather than a flaw. Bezel in black or white, in a case of rose gold, silver or black, with more watch faces than we can shake a stick at, the sum of the parts is much more than it would seem from just reading about it. We would definitely wear this to an important meeting and to the opera. Apple watch would like to be seen as classy, but the only message it conveys is "the guy wearing me is a show-off". We're not being sexist here, it's a fact of life that vast majority of the show-offs are guys.

In terms of software and features, the Time Round is just another Time. One piece of bad news is that the battery lasts two, rather than seven or ten days, but with quickcharge built in, it can be topped up for the day in just 15 minutes. From what we've seen the software was adjusted really well to the tiny round multicolour e-paper display. And the support for extending the watch's functionality with "smart straps" is still there. 

You can count on quite a few companies for additional functionality, such as GPS, heart rate monitoring, even an arduino-compatible extension set. That means that those who like to tinker can turn their Pebble into pretty much anything they wish, from a robot controller to a swiss-army-knife-with-a-camera, or maybe even something with foldable wings and a jet engine. Wow, the possibilities are sending shivers down our spines here at Fudzilla.