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7ba37647 JM |
1 | --- |
2 | title: "PineTime - A promising open-source smartwatch and my experience" | |
3 | date: 2021-07-24T12:00:35+03:00 | |
4 | tags: ['pine64','smartwatch','opensource','review'] | |
5 | 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!" | |
6 | img: "pinetime_review_pic.jpg" | |
7 | type: blog | |
8 | aliases: ["/pinetime-a-promising-open-smartwatch.html"] | |
9 | draft: false | |
10 | --- | |
11 | ||
12 | ## A PineWhatNow? | |
13 | ||
14 | [PineTime](https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/) is a open-source smartwatch built by Pine64 | |
15 | and the community. It rocks a 1.3 inch IPS capacitive touchscreen and boasts a week long | |
16 | (yet to verify, but seems likely!) battery life and it communicates over BLE and Bluetooth 5. | |
17 | It has the typical features of your usual smartwatch such as step counting and heart rate | |
18 | sensor, ability to control your music and view notifications - all that on very low specs. | |
19 | It runs on a nRF52832 SoC with a 64MHz ARM Cortex-M4F CPU coupled with 512KB Flash and 64KB | |
20 | of RAM. It also has additional SPI NOR 4MB Flash which community software has recently taken | |
21 | advantage of. | |
22 | ||
23 | Now that you know fundamentally what a PineTime is, what sets this apart is the openness | |
24 | of device, you can replace the firmware and bootloader with anything of your choice. You | |
25 | do not have to use the preinstalled [InfiniTime](https://github.com/JF002/InfiniTime) and | |
26 | can install a firmware of your own choice such as [WaspOS](https://github.com/daniel-thompson/wasp-os). | |
27 | Other smartwatches often depend on sending telemetry or constant feed of your data to a | |
28 | centralised server - it is convenient for sure, but it comes with a large invasion of your | |
29 | privacy. You are in charge of your own data, you do not need to send your data anywhere in | |
30 | order to access it, you can simply use open-source companion apps that only keep track of data | |
31 | offline. | |
32 | ||
33 | ## Ok, but how nice is it to actually use? | |
34 | ||
35 | My experience with PineTime is rather recent, I got my hands on it on July 22th, 2021. | |
36 | It shipped with InfiniTime 1.2.0 and MCUBoot 1.0.0 which was the most recent at the time. | |
37 | Setting it up was very simple, all I needed was [GadgetBridge](https://gadgetbridge.org/) | |
38 | [(source code)](https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge) on my phone and connect it | |
39 | over Bluetooth. Time and date synced immediately after making a connection without a hitch. | |
40 | I was also pleasantly surprised with how easily the menu was navigatable - so UI/UX gets | |
41 | another point from me. The step counter on PineTime is also surprisingly good for a device | |
42 | that retails only for $26.99 - I had zero false positives when in any moving vehicle, my last | |
43 | smartwatch (regrettably, Garmin) got a ton of false positives constantly. The music program | |
44 | also worked very nicely with my phone which runs clean Android 11, found it really intuitive | |
45 | to use. There are a few shortcomings, though - for one, touch registering currently works via | |
46 | constant polling, so single taps may not exactly register or get delayed quite a bit - fortunately, | |
47 | [this is being addressed](https://github.com/JF002/InfiniTime/issues/471). The next issue I | |
48 | had only once, woke up one morning to the watch being unpaired from my phone, rebooting the watch | |
49 | fixed it at cost of losing all the steps I had gotten during my morning routine - and at the time | |
50 | of the issue occuring, InfiniTime 1.2.0 had issues with keeping settings saved. This has been | |
51 | addressed by InfiniTime 1.3.0 with introduction of LittleFS. | |
52 | ||
53 | Overall, it's been a solid experience - as of the time of writing, I am running InfiniTime 1.3.0 | |
54 | with PineTimeStyle watchface ([+ color picker PR applied](https://github.com/JF002/InfiniTime/pull/458)) | |
55 | and I am very much satisfied. [This is how the PineTime looks like](https://based.quest/img/pinetime_review_pic.jpg). | |
56 | ||
57 | Thanks for reading | |
58 | - Cernodile |