From: Joann Mõndresku <joann@cernodile.com>
Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2021 09:00:35 +0000 (+0300)
Subject: PineTime - a promising open smartwatch
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PineTime - a promising open smartwatch
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+PineTime - A promising open-source smartwatch and my experience
+
+## A PineWhatNow?
+
+[PineTime](https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/) is a open-source smartwatch built by Pine64
+and the community. It rocks a 1.3 inch IPS capacitive touchscreen and boasts a week long
+(yet to verify, but seems likely!) battery life and it communicates over BLE and Bluetooth 5.
+It has the typical features of your usual smartwatch such as step counting and heart rate
+sensor, ability to control your music and view notifications - all that on very low specs.
+It runs on a nRF52832 SoC with a 64MHz ARM Cortex-M4F CPU coupled with 512KB Flash and 64KB
+of RAM. It also has additional SPI NOR 4MB Flash which community software has recently taken
+advantage of.
+
+Now that you know fundamentally what a PineTime is, what sets this apart is the openness
+of device, you can replace the firmware and bootloader with anything of your choice. You
+do not have to use the preinstalled [InfiniTime](https://github.com/JF002/InfiniTime) and
+can install a firmware of your own choice such as [WaspOS](https://github.com/daniel-thompson/wasp-os).
+Other smartwatches often depend on sending telemetry or constant feed of your data to a
+centralised server - it is convenient for sure, but it comes with a large invasion of your
+privacy. You are in charge of your own data, you do not need to send your data anywhere in
+order to access it, you can simply use open-source companion apps that only keep track of data
+offline.
+
+## Ok, but how nice is it to actually use?
+
+My experience with PineTime is rather recent, I got my hands on it on July 22th, 2021.
+It shipped with InfiniTime 1.2.0 and MCUBoot 1.0.0 which was the most recent at the time.
+Setting it up was very simple, all I needed was GadgetBridge on my phone and connect it
+over Bluetooth. Time and date synced immediately after making a connection without a hitch.
+I was also pleasantly surprised with how easily the menu was navigatable - so UI/UX gets
+another point from me. The step counter on PineTime is also surprisingly good for a device
+that retails only for $26.99 - I had zero false positives when in any moving vehicle, my last
+smartwatch (regrettably, Garmin) got a ton of false positives constantly. The music program
+also worked very nicely with my phone which runs clean Android 11, found it really intuitive
+to use. There are a few shortcomings, though - for one, touch registering currently works via
+constant polling, so single taps may not exactly register or get delayed quite a bit - fortunately,
+[this is being addressed](https://github.com/JF002/InfiniTime/issues/471). The next issue I
+had only once, woke up one morning to the watch being unpaired from my phone, rebooting the watch
+fixed it at cost of losing all the steps I had gotten during my morning routine - and at the time
+of the issue occuring, InfiniTime 1.2.0 had issues with keeping settings saved. This has been
+addressed by InfiniTime 1.3.0 with introduction of LittleFS.
+
+Overall, it's been a solid experience - as of the time of writing, I am running InfiniTime 1.3.0
+with PineTimeStyle watchface ([+ color picker PR applied](https://github.com/JF002/InfiniTime/pull/458))
+and I am very much satisfied. [This is how the PineTime looks like](https://based.quest/img/pinetime_review_pic.jpg).
+
+Thanks for reading
+- Cernodile
+
+;tags:pine64 smartwatch opensource review
+;description:PineTime is a open-source smartwtch 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!
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