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Comment by anotheryou | Hacker News Reader

PineTime is even cheaper and probably more powerful, but looks less approachable than arduino.

https://pine64.com/product/pinetime-dev-kit/?v=0446c16e2e66

Also, unless I'm mistaken, not e-ink.

I keep thinking that e-Ink is way overrated, and the fact that a large chunk people do not seem to distinguish Pebble (which is an LCD) from actual e-Ink devices only reinforces it.

Not saying that I like "backlight" watches (I don't), but there's a large selection of reflective LCD watches (e.g. most traditional sport/GPS ones, Garmin, Suunto, etc.) which are indistinguishable from the Pebble in terms of display.

e-Ink at this point is just $$ and slow refresh. For most users, at least.

Interesting point here. I've recently been thinking about why e-ink hasn't gotten more market saturation, and you make a good point that LCD watches look the same as e-ink, but have more customizability.

Just for example, do you have any specific watches that you like the most for their LCD look?

And where would you go purchase small LCD screens? I'm not familiar with online marketplaces that do that, although I'm sure I can do some of my own research and find some.

Just wanted to add a nuance to the Pebble comment. Yes, it is a reflective LCD. But, it is also a pixel in memory LCD that has much lower standby power usage. Unless I'm wrong, I'm fairly certain this tech is patented by Sharp and isn't scaled up to larger screen sizes. This makes it sometimes difficult to source these screens (and oftentimes difficult to source large quantities)

> why e-ink hasn't gotten more market saturation

It's proprietary; patented by one company.

Please try to explain yourself. Apple makes proprietary products and gets huge levels of market saturation. So it is unclear what you're saying. There was already a past discussion showing that e-ink being proprietary is not the reason why electrophoretic displays are more popular. In short, cost of development and market volume is the bigger reason why it has not gotten more saturation. There's no patent blocking development of electrophoretic displays and this can be seen by the many startup and larger entrants into the space like fujitsu, liquavista-amazon, qualcom/apple-mirasol who tried to scale up production and then failed.

Are these LCD watch display always?

Some are transreflective, like the Amazfit Bip[1], which though it isn't perfect, is pretty decent overall.

1: https://www.cnet.com/reviews/amazfit-bip-review/

Yes they are. Just the backlight is not always on, putting them in reflective mode (again, exactly like the Pebble does).

Yes, not e-ink. But it has a heart rate monitor.

definitely not. And in the dev kit the halves are not even glued together yet :)

They're intentionally not glued together so devs can dev. Seems reasonable.

Totally :)

Just different to the arduino one.

"The PineTime Dev Kit aimed solely for development purpose only, this is not for end user who is looking for ready to wear Smart Watch. More specifically, only intend for these units to find their way into the hands of developer with extensive embedded OS experience and an interest in Smart Watch development."

Look for a Colmi P8. I got mine for 15USD!

Received it today and hadn't time to play with it yet.

I want to avoid closed source with any trackers :)

The Colmi P8 is the same hardware and looks that the PineTime. There is an arduino firmware for it!

https://github.com/Jac-eko/p8-smartwatch-hacking

Oh cool. Didn't understand that.

Even a js firmware for me front-end guy. Cool!

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