$27 PineTime smartwatch that runs open-source software | Hacker News Reader

$27 PineTime smartwatch that runs open-source software

liliputing.com

53 pointshosteur26 comments

The PineTime is a great smartwatch if your main use cases are checking the time and displaying new notifications from your phone. The build quality is great and the hardware is very similar to the original Fitbit Versa. Battery life varies with use and I get about 5-7 days on a charge.

The most well-maintained OS for the PineTime is InfiniTime:

https://github.com/InfiniTimeOrg/InfiniTime

If all you need is checking the time and reading notification then get yourself an Amazfit BIP with 30 day battery life and pair it with Gadgetbridge.

The original Amazfit BIP as well as the Amazfit BIP Lite had always-on displays and 30+ days of battery life yes.

Current models not so much, they're advertising two weeks at best and no longer have the neat transflective lcd.

You can still find stocks of the old one if you shop around.

Yeah I prefer my Amazfit too, though I have the GTS 2 mini. With its own companion app it's a horrible privacy leak but with gadgetbridge it's amazing.

I have a pinetime too but it's too rough around the edges for me. And I love the GPS tracks on the Amazfit.

>though I have the GTS 2 mini

Can't really recommend these newer more expensive models with OLED screens. The charm of the original was it's low price point and always-on Memory-In-Pixel display which enabled the ultra long battery life. Without those displays and the cheap price, it's nothing special among the dime-a-dozen other OLED smart-watch e-waste.

Not really IMO. The GTS 2 mini lasts me more than a week on battery and that is with regular GPS use too, and always-on display while I'm wearing it (it automatically switches off when I'm not wearing it).

And it cost me only 72 euro, which is only slightly more than the bip which cost around 50 euro here. I think it's a much better deal. Charging once a week is the same deal as once a month for me. And the OLED display is much nicer, especially at night. And I use the GPS logging and barometer a lot for hikes, it makes it a lot more useful than the bip which doesn't have these features.

I've had it for 2 years now so definitely not a throwaway. My Samsung Galaxy Active which I had before on the other hand... I only used that for 4 months because it ran way too hot with GPS on and depleted its battery in 4 hours with GPS (and about 1 day without). It was just unusable and bugs were introduced (and never fixed) with firmware updates that made it worse.

>And it cost me only 72 euro

Maybe you mean the Mini variant or you got it on sale, because checking on geizhals, the standard GTS 2 has costed around 100 Euros for the past year or so.

It is the mini yes like I said in my original post, I forgot to mention that in my last post but I updated it now.

I like small and light watches so the mini was perfect. It's a really powerful watch for its size.

Be careful though because the version sold now is an 'updated' one on which they left out the barometer. I hillwalk a lot so that's a big loss because GPS altitude is pretty horrible even with a great receiver. If you want that you should get the newer GTS 4 mini I think.

I see. Thanks a lot for the info.

Could we get a (2021) in the title? I've been rocking this as my daily driver for years :p

I remember when they added the new themes, and hold-to-increase in the timer and alarm app, which are 100% my biggest use-cases.

WHY can't they make a similarly minimal smartphone? The pinephone is $150, but I would gladly pay for half that price if it was 5 or even 10 times slower. I don't need a 1GHz processor with 3GB of ram and a 1400x700 screen in my pocket.

All I want is look at pictures, chat, email, a basic browser, maybe apps. I don't even need a camera! To be entirely honest, I don't even need 4G or 5G or to make calls or send texts, I just want a cheap pocket wifi computer I can run software on. Capitalism seems to make this impossible.

The answer is obvious: because market forces are always driving performance and power consumption upwards, even if what consumer want is durability..

I will never understand the smartphone market. It's always that damn Law of Wirth: software is getting slower than hardware is getting faster.

Here is why another GNU/Linux phone cost a lot: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground. Tl;dr: it‘s because it has to be a custom design in order to not be Android.

I think it really is the market giving consumers exactly what they want.

Like, I would like it if they didn't need upgrading so fast, but mostly only for environmental concerns. The cost is very little to upgrade every 4 years even for most poor people, especially considering how many things it replaces.

I like that no matter what happens or where I go, I can probably solve most issues with my phone. If I lose my keys and wallet... my phone knows where. If I forget my wallet at home... tap to pay. If something comes up at work... I can do all the research to solve the issue from it.

I do think the world needs a low-power app capable device. But not to replace phones, we just need something that won't lose compatibility with old apps, that's cheap enough to have multiple for dedicated purposes, etc. Something that can control your smarthome, be a remote outdoor thermometer display, or any other random task that would normally be done by some nonstandard thing that risks becoming e waste.

As someone who thought the same thing before buying the PinePhone - trust me, you don’t want something slower. Firefox takes over ten seconds to load. 5x slower than the current phone means you’d spend way more time waiting for things to load than actually using the phone. An extra $75 is worth your time

Exactly this. My PinePhones are functionally unusable as it is, I can't imagine multiple times slower without a fold out keyboard and running the thing as a TTY-only SMS device (and maybe a portable WiFi hotspot).

It's a very nice project, especially that they provide both a fully sealed device and an open devkit - at good prices. The NRF52 microcontroller is the gold standard for battery powered BLE devices. I am considering to use it as a dev/demo unit for Machine Learning inference using emlearn, especially for Human Activity Recognition an Gesture Detection using the accelerometer.

BangleJS is incredible as well.

But, I really wish there was a decent gps smart watch option. I never got the BangleJS to work reliably with gps.

Wow, 64 KB of RAM. That’s incredibly tiny for all that the device needs to do.

64KB is more than enough to show notifications and tell the time. Admittedly the bluetooth stack might use most of it (it does on the esp32 at least).

Of course with that little RAM you also can't keep a full framebuffer so you need more competent developers to drive the display without becoming a flickery mess.

There kind of is a full framebuffer in the display driver chip. You just tell it to draw a square somewhere, and the square will stay there. One of the most limiting factors of the display is actually the spi bus to the display, only running at 8MHz, allowing a maximum full screen update speed of like 8 fps.

Not that that makes smooth video impossible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqL8V3xWmxg

(Shameless self promotion :))

I almost got one, but I decided to get a Wear OS instead and love it.

I still occasionally think about getting one, but not to use as a watch, it just seems like it has lots of potential for other things. I could attach it to something and have it send motion sensor alerts to my phone, or it could be a remote input device.

Dumb question, but how do these pair/sync back to other devices?

Bluetooth and an assortment of apps: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTime#Companion_Apps

I initially looked into one, but the price of shipping to Canada exceeded the cost of the item :/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com