| 1 | PineTime - A promising open-source smartwatch and my experience |
| 2 | |
| 3 | ## A PineWhatNow? |
| 4 | |
| 5 | [PineTime](https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/) is a open-source smartwatch built by Pine64 |
| 6 | and the community. It rocks a 1.3 inch IPS capacitive touchscreen and boasts a week long |
| 7 | (yet to verify, but seems likely!) battery life and it communicates over BLE and Bluetooth 5. |
| 8 | It has the typical features of your usual smartwatch such as step counting and heart rate |
| 9 | sensor, ability to control your music and view notifications - all that on very low specs. |
| 10 | It runs on a nRF52832 SoC with a 64MHz ARM Cortex-M4F CPU coupled with 512KB Flash and 64KB |
| 11 | of RAM. It also has additional SPI NOR 4MB Flash which community software has recently taken |
| 12 | advantage of. |
| 13 | |
| 14 | Now that you know fundamentally what a PineTime is, what sets this apart is the openness |
| 15 | of device, you can replace the firmware and bootloader with anything of your choice. You |
| 16 | do not have to use the preinstalled [InfiniTime](https://github.com/JF002/InfiniTime) and |
| 17 | can install a firmware of your own choice such as [WaspOS](https://github.com/daniel-thompson/wasp-os). |
| 18 | Other smartwatches often depend on sending telemetry or constant feed of your data to a |
| 19 | centralised server - it is convenient for sure, but it comes with a large invasion of your |
| 20 | privacy. You are in charge of your own data, you do not need to send your data anywhere in |
| 21 | order to access it, you can simply use open-source companion apps that only keep track of data |
| 22 | offline. |
| 23 | |
| 24 | ## Ok, but how nice is it to actually use? |
| 25 | |
| 26 | My experience with PineTime is rather recent, I got my hands on it on July 22th, 2021. |
| 27 | It shipped with InfiniTime 1.2.0 and MCUBoot 1.0.0 which was the most recent at the time. |
| 28 | Setting it up was very simple, all I needed was [GadgetBridge](https://gadgetbridge.org/) |
| 29 | [(source code)](https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge) on my phone and connect it |
| 30 | over Bluetooth. Time and date synced immediately after making a connection without a hitch. |
| 31 | I was also pleasantly surprised with how easily the menu was navigatable - so UI/UX gets |
| 32 | another point from me. The step counter on PineTime is also surprisingly good for a device |
| 33 | that retails only for $26.99 - I had zero false positives when in any moving vehicle, my last |
| 34 | smartwatch (regrettably, Garmin) got a ton of false positives constantly. The music program |
| 35 | also worked very nicely with my phone which runs clean Android 11, found it really intuitive |
| 36 | to use. There are a few shortcomings, though - for one, touch registering currently works via |
| 37 | constant polling, so single taps may not exactly register or get delayed quite a bit - fortunately, |
| 38 | [this is being addressed](https://github.com/JF002/InfiniTime/issues/471). The next issue I |
| 39 | had only once, woke up one morning to the watch being unpaired from my phone, rebooting the watch |
| 40 | fixed it at cost of losing all the steps I had gotten during my morning routine - and at the time |
| 41 | of the issue occuring, InfiniTime 1.2.0 had issues with keeping settings saved. This has been |
| 42 | addressed by InfiniTime 1.3.0 with introduction of LittleFS. |
| 43 | |
| 44 | Overall, it's been a solid experience - as of the time of writing, I am running InfiniTime 1.3.0 |
| 45 | with PineTimeStyle watchface ([+ color picker PR applied](https://github.com/JF002/InfiniTime/pull/458)) |
| 46 | and I am very much satisfied. [This is how the PineTime looks like](https://based.quest/img/pinetime_review_pic.jpg). |
| 47 | |
| 48 | Thanks for reading |
| 49 | - Cernodile |
| 50 | |
| 51 | ;tags:pine64 smartwatch opensource review |
| 52 | ;description:PineTime is a open-source smartwatch built by Pine64 and the community on the budget. Does it hold up to Cernodile's standards - is he satisifed, is it any good or a fail? Find out in this blog post! |
| 53 | ;og_image:<meta property="og:image" content="https://based.quest/img/pinetime_review_pic.jpg"> |