Pine64's Pinetime

I have been using one with an alternate OS / Privacy focused setup of older hardware (Pixel 7 with Graphene, older Bluetooth headphones and a Pinetime). Switching back and forth between that config and a pretty current Samsung config.

It's interesting how much of the current smartwatch features are really just bloat in my day to day. I really only want to track steps, heartbeat when needed and receive messages.

I can do most of that with either and the battery life + simple design of the Pinetime has me considering a full move to their platform (phone, watch, buds).

I run bangle for most of my advanced config and it's decent. Makes some of the under the hood stuff a bit easier.

I think for the price of a pinewatch most users who are already looking at the hardware will get at least their investment back on checking the platform out and dipping in to the community around it.

To be clear, with the default OS, you don't get true 24/7 heart rate tracking. You can simulate it though by turning the heart rate monitor "app" on and backing out of it without stopping it, and then make sure you have the wake on movement options enabled.

The pinetime is a very basic smart watch. It is not fancy in any stretch of the imagination. It shows the text of notifications only, does very basic heart rate monitoring, and you have to manually go into a different "app" to do multimedia controls. You'll notice I'm saying app in quotes. They're more like built-in function menus, you can't install new apps.

But despite all that, I have never had a watch this refreshingly good to use. I have had 2 WearOS watches and work gave me a demo Apple Watch to show customers. All of them were nice, but all of them had that enshittification ooze leaking out of them.

Pinetime is simple. It works. It simply works. And for that, I love it.

Oh and the week-long battery is nice too.