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1f695a51 JM |
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 on my phone and connect it | |
29 | over Bluetooth. Time and date synced immediately after making a connection without a hitch. | |
30 | I was also pleasantly surprised with how easily the menu was navigatable - so UI/UX gets | |
31 | another point from me. The step counter on PineTime is also surprisingly good for a device | |
32 | that retails only for $26.99 - I had zero false positives when in any moving vehicle, my last | |
33 | smartwatch (regrettably, Garmin) got a ton of false positives constantly. The music program | |
34 | also worked very nicely with my phone which runs clean Android 11, found it really intuitive | |
35 | to use. There are a few shortcomings, though - for one, touch registering currently works via | |
36 | constant polling, so single taps may not exactly register or get delayed quite a bit - fortunately, | |
37 | [this is being addressed](https://github.com/JF002/InfiniTime/issues/471). The next issue I | |
38 | had only once, woke up one morning to the watch being unpaired from my phone, rebooting the watch | |
39 | fixed it at cost of losing all the steps I had gotten during my morning routine - and at the time | |
40 | of the issue occuring, InfiniTime 1.2.0 had issues with keeping settings saved. This has been | |
41 | addressed by InfiniTime 1.3.0 with introduction of LittleFS. | |
42 | ||
43 | Overall, it's been a solid experience - as of the time of writing, I am running InfiniTime 1.3.0 | |
44 | with PineTimeStyle watchface ([+ color picker PR applied](https://github.com/JF002/InfiniTime/pull/458)) | |
45 | and I am very much satisfied. [This is how the PineTime looks like](https://based.quest/img/pinetime_review_pic.jpg). | |
46 | ||
47 | Thanks for reading | |
48 | - Cernodile | |
49 | ||
50 | ;tags:pine64 smartwatch opensource review | |
51 | ;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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