PineTime Is a $25 Smartwatch / Companion for PinePhone Linux Phone | Hacker News Reader

PineTime Is a $25 Smartwatch / Companion for PinePhone Linux Phone

cnx-software.com

275 pointsZenst124 comments

A bit OT, but related: there are no cheap, simple, FOSS mp3 players. It used to be that you could get a Sansa which was flashable with Rockbox¹, had a decent battery life, cost around US$30 and would take SD cards. Those options have now disappeared and been replaced with devices that do not have enough memory to be flashed with Rockbox. The default OS on these is terrible compared to Rockbox.

Would love it if someone would make a simple player which was controllable by the user.

1. https://www.rockbox.org/

I have the exact same problem: two (Rockboxed) Sansa Clip Zips I've taken everywhere for years, from snowy mountains to the beach; one is already dead and one about to take its final breath. They're not available anymore for purchase and the few used ones remaining in still good condition are sold ridiculously overpriced. To me there's only one solution: Either develop a a player from scratch or port a subset of Rockbox (no games, FX, etc.) on a small SBC plus added display, DAC, SD and LiPo circuitry. The SBC could well be the ESP32 which would add wireless functionality; *Pi and other Linux boards would be tremendously overkill for the task. Shouldn't be that hard for skilled developers, and it would surely sell among those of us who don't want to use a cellphone.

I have loved all my Sansa MP3 players, but I find my current Sandisk Clip Jam a bit annoying for some things (very long files names; playlisting; working out what fields it sorts on and why). It won't take rockbox.

If you want a cheap device to run rockbox...

> Either develop a a player from scratch or port a subset of Rockbox (no games, FX, etc.) on a small SBC plus added display, DAC, SD and LiPo circuitry. The SBC could well be the ESP32 which would add wireless functionality; *Pi and other Linux boards would be tremendously overkill for the task. Shouldn't be that hard for skilled developers, and it would surely sell among those of us who don't want to use a cellphone.

...this feels like it's going to end up as being an expensive device. There are a bunch of other MP3 players available from companies like FIIO, Cowon, Shanling or others. Would you be able to build something that competes with these? https://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/shop/Digital_Audio_Play...

EDIT: Thinking about it, if you had braille on the buttons and a clear simple layout you could push it to both markets: people who want a hackable MP3 player, and people who want an accessible mp3 player for things like audio books. (Which is something my Clip Jam is not great for).

Just looking at your link the price of those is astoundingly high. It seems like they've taken a modest tool and sought to turn it into some sort of Veblen-good by replacing plastic cases and mechanical buttons with high res touchscreens and aluminum cases.

The rockbox-compatible sansas (and earlier cowons) were: 1. cheap (circa 30 bucks) 2. very small (I just measured my Clip Zip as: 5cm x 3cm x 1cm ) 3. very light 4. has an SD slot (I don't know its max supported size but 32GB works fine for my audiobooks) 5. is easily flashable with rockbox

There's a lot of funky semi-open handheld retro gaming devices that might repurpose if you're into buttons -

https://obscurehandhelds.com/

The very cheap Odroid GO, once fitted with stereo DAC and headphone jack, would make a nice platform to build an audio player. Surely not the smallest around, but good enough to generate interest to make a smaller version. https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go/

Why don't you want to use a cellphone? Privacy/surveillance and/or stimulation addiction? I miss my old mp3 players and RockBoxed iPod classic, and I've been meaning to get rid of my cell phone as well. Really I'd prefer a pocket computer to a cell phone, surprised there isn't anything like that for sale.

When I'm on a longer hike I don't know how long my phone battery will need to hold out (don't get me started on solar and extra battery packs) so it stays off with periodic check ins to stay in contact.

Dedicated music players tend to have a much longer battery life, are lighter, cheaper to replace (weather, drops, being left on wet ground...). It allows me to listen to things without sacrificing my safety net.

"Why don't you want to use a cellphone? Privacy/surveillance and/or stimulation addiction?"

Pretty much all of this, plus not risking a device that I have to rely on for communications. Each of my Sansa players fell like a dozen times without getting a single scratch because they were very light and the screen was small and sturdy; had I used a cellphone I would probably have destroyed at least its screen multiple times or ruined it from prolonged exposition to salty air at the sea. Also I don't use smartphones due to the above points, and I still have to see a traditional phone with a decent player (and a decent camera, but that's another story).

The PinePhone might change this, however. Silently waiting for it to hit the market.

That's pretty much it on all points for me: light and small with a sturdy plastic case meant that dropping it was not disastrous.

Am definitely interested in the PinePhone, but suspect that its dimensions will mean that I shall be restricted in not using it while running/cycling and (more importantly for me) as a cheap audiobook player that I fall asleep to in bed and occasionally drop out of the bed onto the floor or sleep on top of.

A hint for the folks at pine64: please take into consideration the PinePod :)

Check on my response :-)

The physical interface on a standalone player is also better than a cellphone. I always take a standalone player when I travel - it's easy to be able to control it just by feel (and I don't have to worry about running down the battery in my cellphone).

my reason : phones (mostly) make lousy MP3 players.

high battery use, bad DACs, and clumsy interfaces.

There are exceptions, but not many.

Single purpose devices that are designed to do a specific thing just work better -- go figure.

Maybe some raspberry pi or arduino setup could do the trick?

> They're not available anymore for purchase and the few used ones remaining in still good condition are sold ridiculously overpriced.

Thanks! I have one in original packaging somewhere. Bought it to give away but never did for various reasons.

I am TL Lim, PINE64 community founder. The PineTime watch using NORDIC nRF52832, thos chip has i2s output and do you thinks this SoC good enough for an open source MP3 plater just like Sansa Clip?If the answer is positive, I can pass some PineTime devkit to RockBox developer to try out, then just redesign the schematic with audio DAC plus phone amp and a suitable touch screen case. Please note that this is just an exploration, we are currently fully loaded with various projects. P/S: don't mind the PinePod name :-)

What's wrong with the Xduoo X3?

It works with Rockbox[0], has a monochrome OLED screen, can take 2 MicroSD cards, and has two 3.5mm sockets: one for line out, and one for headphones.

The only thing I don't like about it is the headphone socket, which is prone to fail. It feels tight on insertion/removal, and the extra force can eventually cause it to lose connection with the mainboard.

They cost about $100 new, or half that used.

i have one called the "agptek rocker", it has basic rockbox support but a pretty leaky cheap lcd. i like that it has bluetooth, but i don't believe it's supported yet in rockbox. it's available under various other names but i believe it can be had from about 50usd.

it's quite interesting with more modern rockbox supported pmps, rockbox is run as an SDL program stuck into the modified linux firmware. this device is moderately powerful with a 1GHz MIPS ingenic x1000 CPU. fun to tinker with.

fiio has some nice devices (some with RB support, e.g. the M3K), too. but i wish they had bluetooth. i guess it's not cool with audiophiles so intentionally excluded.

That looks like a pretty good option. The downside is the price and it looks at least twice the size and weigh of thr SanDisk players.

Yeah it feels at least twice as heavy as the Sansa. Maybe even heavier.

Is there such a thing as this with Spotify support?

There’s the Mighty[0]? It’s pure Spotify though and not MP3s as well.

[0] https://bemighty.com/

Nice! I've been looking for exactly this product (or to build something like it) for ages. Shame about the lack of mp3 support and the bad reviews regarding the software. For £80 I'd expect something less buggy so I'm not sure I'll try it.

It is HUUUUGGGEEE :)

Agreed! My Sansa Clip+ is still going strong (magically, the battery still works after all this time) and thanks to Rockbox it can do hundreds of things it couldn't do originally.

That's my hopes for PineTime, I would love for it to be a standalone "fitness tracker" and MP3 player rolled into one. It's a very nice price point for a watch to hack with.

All it would need is an ESP32, IMU, heart rate sensor, micro SD card reader, audio jack, LiPo and touch display. Make it work with the Arduino IDE and things get very exciting for hack-ability.

Honestly, the watch makes me more excited than the phone.

When it's released, the PinePhone should provide a good platform for mp3 and other media. If all you want it for is music, disable all the wireless (both for security and max battery life) and you've basically got an open source iPod touch with a microSD slot for $150. Seems like a natural 'stripped down' distro/image use case for the device.

These days you can get a cheap AOSP phone and run a lot more so I'm not that surprised this stuff is dying off.

None of those are small. And they are not that cheap either. I think this is an obvious market opportunity -- small, cheap, open devices doing one thing well. No need for massive screens, touch screens , just a couple of buttons, a battery, DAC, USB and headphone jack, SD slot. I am agnostic on bluetooth support, not a deal breaker for me without it, but if it did not add too much to the price, then sure.

I think that market opportunity is well covered, except for the "open" part. Gadget sites are overflowing with cheap and small music playing devices with those parts.

I disagree.

The F/OSS part is the most important. Rockbox allowed an incredible degree of customization. For something like a music/audiobook player personal tastes in interaction with the a small device mean that configurability is key. That, I suspect is why there are only larger devices with loads more buttons and touchscreens available.

The ability to set timeouts and restart from last position on power-on, led light-level, sort-order etc made devices supported by them something that I could use. I have tried various Alibaba sourced devices that were in the US$20-50 range and none of them had the right form-factor and customizability.

This what I did to replace my iRiver running Rockbox. One problem to watch out for with cheap phones is that the audio can be noisy, even if only when charging, which will be particularly annoying when listening to audio books or talks.

I found an Android app called MortPlayer which is very close to Rockbox in terms of functions and configurability. It hasn't been updated in a years, but still works well.

I think at this point, probably getting a rockboxable ipod is a better valuable proposition than trying to find a viable sansa device (I still have a working sansa clip that I use, and hopefully it'll last for a while).

Oh those were FANTASTIC! I used to buy them, put Rockbox on them and give them as Christmas and Birthday gifts - really good audio quality, battery life and the perfect size for the price.

Ipodlinux? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPodLinux

Sansa wasn't FOSS, it was just supported by the community and was killed by the complete lack of vendor interest. Now there's AGPT Rocker/Benji T6, which can be flashed with Rockbox. For how long it's a viable option, we don't know. I don't know of anything really open by design in the field. It's really disheartening.

True about Sansa not being FOSS, but it was at least flashable with FOSS due to the effort of the Rockbox community. I looked at the AGPT Rocker, but again, it's way too large (IMO) for its simple function. And needlessly expensive.

Here's hoping someone tries to fill the market hole.

If the device can't connect to the internet and therefore doesn't have tracking/etc, does it need to be FOSS?

The ability to make contributions to improving hardware and software is important. Perhaps I want my MP3 player to support a new audio codec, or to display a large clock, or to track my steps when I go for a walk - you get the point. When it's open source, I'm able to make these changes, or use the work of others.

Why isn't e-ink perfect here? A watch is perfectly usable in monochrome and is used in bright daylight which would favor high contrast and viewing angles. Plus battery life is good. Turns out there has been a few on the market but nobody really wanted them. Strange.

E-ink has fairly low refresh rates, and even though it uses no power at rest, it takes a lot of energy to refresh. 'Battery life is good' has become a catechism, but it really depends on the use case.

I don't have hard numbers, but if you need to update as frequently as every second, I don't think you'd gain much over a low-brightness color display with a polarized window for sunlight viewing.

And battery life seems like the only major draw of e-ink, as long as they are limited to one or two colors and a full-screen refresh rate that your eyes can easily register.

People have tried to develop tricks to update faster and minimize how much of the display gets refreshed, but I'm not aware of many successes since a lot of it seems to require reverse engineering; the companies which produce the displays jealously guard any information about the refresh parameters and functionality as highly confidential IP, and the process appears to be heavily dependent on temperature.

I built an e-ink clock recently. E-ink has two downsides; the datasheet says that the display will be damaged if it's refreshed more than every 3 minutes (I ignore that and refresh it every minute, so we'll see if it lasts) and the black/white/black refresh cycle is very visually distracting. Having that thing in the field of view just doesn't work.

Both of these issues can be gotten around with a different refresh algorithm, but of course the datasheet doesn't include any of them. The vendors regard their refresh logic as proprietary and so you have to spend months trying to figure out what will work, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw

I've been thinking about doing a similar project for fun. How long have you had the clock? I'd be really curious how hard that 1 minute refresh rate is on the screen. I have a Kindle and I definitely read more than a page a minute (especially on that small screen) and haven't noticed any problems. But a clock is more consistent and constant.

As for a watch, I could see getting notifications once a minute being fine.

A couple months. No side effects at all so far.

When developing this, it obviously refreshed much more than once a minute. Nothing ever led me to believe anything bad was happening. No burn in, no artifacts, no weird behavior at all.

I think the datasheet is being super ultra mega conservative, designed to cover the worst possible unit that they would let past QC being put in a product that would cost billions of dollars to recall. If you got an average unit and you're making one of these things.... you can probably refresh it in a loop for decades and never have a problem. I wouldn't bet billions on it, but I will bet $20 on it.

Do you really need to update every second? Plenty of clocks have only an hour and minute hand.

As one data point, I frequently look at the second indicator on my phone or laptop (I configured both to show one at all times), but even nerdy colleagues tell me that's just me, so that's probably just me.

I think I'd be fine with having to tap my wristwatch to update the display. It would be cool if it could just show seconds without tapping, but if having to tap means the difference between a few days of battery life and months of battery life (I'm on a computer most of the day so it would wake only a few times a day), then sure.

Once you're fine with tapping to update the display, you might as well just use a non-E-ink display, keep it turned off most of the time, and turn it on to use it, since that's one tap.

I guess that's true, I didn't think of that while writing.

No, It's not just you.

I guess you would have to, if you want to have a playback indicator. You wouldn't have to refresh the whole screen to gradually fill up the bar, as the ghosting effect would be negligible.

Note that this is a smartwatch, not a digital watch. Using eInk would prevent the use of apps on the watch if the refresh rate is once every few seconds.

An eInk display can refresh much faster than that, it's just that you can't keep refreshing so fast if you want to spend less energy than an LCD would. But you could adjust dynamically depending on the current use.

> And battery life seems like the only major draw of e-ink

I also find e-ink easier on the eyes than any backlit display. At least for reading. For a watch it probably doesn't matter too much.

Amazfit Bip is a great watch and it has color e-ink display, works up to 45 days on a charge.

And the more sunlight the more readable it is.

I was under the impression that Amazfit used a transflective LCD

You are correct.

(Pebble also used transflective LCD and also called it "e-paper".)

I use Garmin Instinct with monochrome display. It has so many features, even a simple navigation system, and it’s battery goes 2 weeks. I love it.

I can’t understand why people want to have color, fancy screens on a watch. Do we need colors to see the time? A calendar notification? Heart rate ?

A watch should serve information without distracting, and most importantly, I should be able to go out without thinking about battery life of my watch. It should be reliable enough to carry it in the arm.

I love my Pebble Time, the availability of a basic color palette makes it easier to build a user-friendly UI.

I agree with the fancy screen, IMO this is not necessary but that's what users want apparently.

To you it makes zero sense, to a ton of other people it does. I love the value having statuses conveyed to me in color, it allows me to quickly process information.

Right, changed my comment

Every time the topic of battery life on smart watches pops up, there's a debate: does a battery life of more than a day actually help?

Some argue that the daily habit of charging makes it easier to remember to do it, vs a less frequent schedule.

And people do use the Apple Watch for sleep tracking, charging it during showers and other preparations in the morning or at night, so the battery life is good enough for effectively 24 hours of use.

The problem is that you need a lot of headroom. If you are fully depleating the battery almost every day that will typically result in a 50% capacity drop over 2 years.

And suddenly even if your device had some headroom when new it still won't last a day.

I’m on hour 21 and I still have 30% remaining on my Series 4. Even if a 50% drop is true, and that hasn’t been my experience with any previous Watch, there’s a lot of headroom.

I’m on year 3 I think of having an Apple Watch. It’s a series 1 or 2. It’s at 30% right now after 13 hours. With almost no usage of the watch. And 8 hours of sleeping (with Watch on) and/or DND on. If I actively used it, I’m guessing it would be almost dead right now.

Good, but the question was whether any headroom mattered.

I bet you have clothes with pockets.

E-ink is not necessary for a long battery life - the Amazfit Bip, has a long one (up to 45 days).

An Amazfit Bip equivalent, with an open system would be a great product at least for a niche (Amazfit's interface and functionality is arguably poor).

edit: has this post been downvoted with information at hand? The statement above is technically correct: the Bip has an LCD (see specs), and it lasts very long; therefore, E-ink is not the only option for a display of a long-lasting device.

I googled it, and "Always-on reflective 1.28 inch color touch display" makes it sound like it's using Mirasol or some other color e-paper display.

Google better :-P

From https://amazfitcentral.com/amazfit-bip-specifications:

> The watch has a color LCD display which shows info with a resolution of 176 x 176 pixels. It is a reflective panel which will allow you to save battery while it is in stand by, as it will still be able to show you what time is it.

Yeah, there is no need for low refresh rate eink. Lcd doesn't consume much power and is readable. I've had several lcd watches and their batteries lasted for years.

^ Notably, that's very different tech from actual e-ink.

sigh that is what I loved about Pebble

So true. I'm sad to see so much resistance towards Pebble and e-ink in this thread.

I'm still using my Pebble Time, I love it. I adore only having to charge it once a week and still being able to see the time on it.

Just the fact that anyone can look at my wrist and see the time without shaking it or anything is worth much more than refresh rate and apps for me.

All I need a smartwatch for is to see messages and notifications from my phone.

Pebble is not eink though, it's transflective, marketed as "e-paper" but it's not at all like the screens of book readers

TIL. I've been going around calling it e-ink. Either way, it's better than a LED screen for battery time.

The Pebble screen is hard to read in regular room light -- which, sadly, is the kind of light that most of us are in most of the time.

When Pebble went under I switched to a Samsung watch with an AMOLED screen and the difference in view-ability is stunning.

Did you have a Pebble Time or a Pebble Classic / Pebble 2?

I agree with you with regard to the Pebble Time, but the Pebble 2's screen is fantastic. I can see the time even in an abnormally dim room, without the built-in light. (The trade-off, of course, is that the Pebble 2's screen is black and white, but I think that's fine on a watch).

I've had a Pebble Steel (original), Pebble Time Round, and Pebble 2. The screens on all of them were very readable, IMHO.

I had a classic and a Time.

And you found the Classic hard to read in dim rooms?

I’m just surprised. I’ve admittedly never owned a Classic (only a Time and P2), but I thought the Classic was supposed to be almost as good as a Pebble 2. And I find my P2 as easy to read as a normal watch.

The classic's display was pretty far from the surface of the watch and that hampered the display. Though it was easier to read than the Time.

I expect both the Steel and the P2 are much easier to read than the classic.

I worked on android wear when we were just deciding on hardware. We had an option for a color, low power, slow-refresh display. Andy vetoed it very quickly because "next to an OLED it looks like shit". Basically the logic was that consumers will read one review and get the pretty OLED watche instead.

It doesn't emit light, so you still have to pair it with a backlight. There are some pretty bad ghosting issues, so things that refresh frequently have readability issues. This also makes it bad for all the "smart" watch things - for a regular watch, e-ink would be acceptable, but could be replaced with a traditional watch face which draws even less power.

Aren't e-ink displays opaque, making backlights impractical? Ebooks readers like the kindle paperwhite have front lights LEDs below the screen and a light guide layer to disperse it.

Qualcomm IMOD was pretty cool. Looks like Apple gobbled it up. https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/15/apple-has-taken-o...

I am still using my pebble every day.

Nice! Multi-day battery life and an NRF52 sounds like a great starting point.

I really miss Pebble, which this sort of evokes. Their 'Time' series of watches were incredible, with awesome battery life and a great C SDK.

How has Pine's recent hardware and software support panned out? I remember people saying that the original PineBooks bordered on unusable, but I'm sure they've made a lot of progress since then and I keep meaning to try one of these libre hardware platforms.

The nRF52 is quite good in terms of the vendor's software support, I can't wait to try and turn the watch into a U2F key.

https://aliexpress.com/item/32933638584.html

(from https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d3y87q/is_pine64_sca...)

Why doesn't this come with a reasonable open sdk ? Why none of the Chinese smartwatch companies offer that ?

Seem like a big opportunity.

What's different in the Chinese business culture - that nobody tries this opportunity ?

At the risk of sounding Nationalist or Jingoist... it seems that innovation isn't something that comes easily to many Chinese companies. Innovation is done by American/Western companies, and many Chinese companies piggyback off of Western innovations. Since many Western companies produce their products in China, it's easy for that factory to just keep the production lines running. When Apple asks for 1,000 products to be made, the Chinese factories can make the 1,000 products for Apple and then 5,000 products for sale on Alibaba at basically no additional cost.

When you're selling hardware at-cost and copying OSS software to run on it, it's not really profitable to add additional software maintenance costs like producing an SDK or offering English-language software support. I'm 100% sure there are Chinese companies who offer software and English-language support, but I am also 100% sure those Chinese companies charge similar prices to Western companies, negating the benefits of Alibaba products.

You certainly do have Chinese companies who attempt this: Huawei and Xiaomi come to mind. But their products sell at prices very comparable to Western companies. For the true "Chinese prices" companies who only sell on Alibaba etc... if they're offering Western support and Western innovation, there's no way they're selling at Chinese prices.

There's tons of innovation occurring in the Chinese hardware market. For consumer devices, I'd say there's much more innovation happening in Shenzhen than in San Fran.

The issue is that they have their own ecosystem for software that doesn't really play nice with western IP, so you sort of get stone walled if you come in talking English. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

From skimming your article... is it really innovation if the research and development is stolen from Western countries?

>very small teams of engineers can obtain complete design packages for working phones

They can obtain complete design packages for working phones because those design packages were stolen according to Western laws and customs.

>we also feel that shying away from reverse engineering simply because it’s controversial is a slippery slope

It might be controversial in China, but it's illegal in many Western countries.

>Unfortunately, queries into getting a Western-licensed EDK for the chips used in the Chinese phones were met with a cold shoulder

So instead they decided that stealing the work of Western companies would not and could not be punished in China, so they just stole it.

"Doesn't play nice with Western IP" sounds an awful lot like theft with a fancier name.

For context, the blog post is written by an American born MIT graduate who tries to embody the classic MIT hacker ethos. His is a remarkably western perspective in it's axioms.

That led me right down the rabbit hole. Who makes all this stuff? I’m a little amazed, and a little perturbed...

https://m.aliexpress.com/store/v3/home.html?shopId=1523303&s...

Is there a way to build/upload custom FW to this?

No idea! They say it's the same body, but different internals https://twitter.com/thepine64/status/1172842631107358722

Edit: according to Pine64, they will use NRF52832 https://twitter.com/thepine64/status/1173208712669999105 which is the exact SoC the linked watch use.

I think I had one of these kicking around and gave it to my mother in law.

I'm developing a smart watch product. I'm working with a Chinese company that does the firmware dev.

If there's someone out experienced with SWD etc and might be interested in collaborating on this device please drop me a line. As far as I'm concerned the more open the hardware the better.

Put a Rust SDK for the watch on Github, tell people about it here and on Reddit and send interested people dev kits. Then start preparing the next model because this will be a massive success.

> If there's someone out experienced with SWD

There seems to be no way to contact you other than something called "twitter" as per your profile here?

Pine64 has email, irc, discord, telegram and matrix

I only know it's #pinetime:matrix.org

Would have been helpful to know that you only use twitter so I wouldn't have wasted time trying to find contact information.

What do you have in mind?

I'm making a health game that runs on a tv. I can currently gather data via bluetooth but it would be nice to have better control over the bracelet ui.

This looks pretty similar to the Amazfit BIP, which gives about 45 days (DAYS not hours) of battery life with an always on e-ink screen.

What the Amazfit is really missing is an open SDK or way of running apps on it, then it would be pretty much perfect.

At that price point, this has a pretty good chance of growing a good community around it, which would be really nice.

If this thing is a hackable watch, I’d be more than happy to even pay $1000 for it. I miss my Pebbles, and being open makes me exited to not be chained to Apple or Google

The watch housing is almost exactly like a Fitbit Versa. Kinda curious if the housing is made by the same manufacturer.

Is there a difference if another manufacturer got hold of the exact same tooling?

Is there a similarly priced smartwatch that works with Android?

https://aliexpress.com/item/32933638584.html

(shamelessly stolen from the other comment)

interesting, thank you!

You can still buy various Pebble smartwatches, for less than $100. I still use my Pebble Time Round every day and it fits my needs better than any other smartwatch released before or since.

Has anyone come across good smartwatch hacks to add a hackable microphone to your wrist?

better yet would be a mic array. I don't think this Nordic chip can have multiple i2s inputs

Anyone here use a pinebook? I've been thinking about getting one of the 11" 1080p models @ $99, but really want to see one in person first. It seems very likely to just be e-waste on arrival.

I was hoping it ran the Pine email client.

Ah yeah, 2019 the year of the Linux Phone.

Every year is the year of the Linux Phone because Android exists :)

This is a for-sure buy for me. I have everything from OpenMoko to Creative Zii, to Pandora and back again in my 'utility drawer', and if .. someone .. who is not the Oscilloscope Watch guy .. will make a nice smart watch, without all the bloat and fancy spy'ing, and with 100% open source, then I am IN.

It just seems like a no-brainer. A Linux Watch. Please won't someone just make it. (Bonus points if it has probe inputs...)

Me too. I just want a hackable smartwatch. I want to customize it so that when I press one of its hardware buttons, it'll start recording a memo, and later syncs it to my laptop when in the same network.

I need the recording to start in sub-second time, so there is no barrier to start, which makes my use-case unsuitable for Android-level "hackable."

This thing has 512/256 KiB Flash + 64/32 KiB SRAM. It most probably doesn't even has a mic.

Just a note: it's not a Linux watch.

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