First Impressions Pinetime
So I was pretty pumped earlier today, I got my Pinetime SmartWatch.
The delivery was during work hours, so I didn’t get to muck around with it for a bit.
I just opened the package which contained the charger and the watch. I plugged in the charger and placed the watch onto it into it’s nice little magnetic cradle and went back to work.
So now it’s got a full charge (this becomes important later)!
Works done, right on! Time to set the time on it. Which requires sync‘ing it to a device (computer or phone). OK this is fine I guess, given that it’s only got one button on it, probably makes it a bit weird to set the time on it.
Anyways, so I search around to find what will allow me to sync my phone to it. Finding GadgetBridge, it’s not actually in the Google play store but instead in the F-Droid repositories. So I snag the F-Droid APK and install it on my phone, and then use that to snag GadgetBridge.
Everything’s fine at this point, I pair my Pinetime to my Pixel2 in hopes to have the time set on it.
Now wanting to check if the time has been sync’ed properly on the watch, I press the 1 button on it in hopes to turn on the screen and … nothing.
OK, mash it a couple other times to see if anything happens… nope. I can see I faint grey outline / backlight shining through, so maybe it crashed or something in the process of syncing. One short google after, and I find out how to reset it (holding “the” button down for 10 seconds should reset the device).
However there seems to be a bug where if you reset the phone while it’s in sleep mode, it’s basically fubared, till the battery runs out (or you open it up by damaging it to manually reset the CPU, since I didn’t get a devkit version just the regular sealed version).
So it takes approximately 2 weeks for the battery to kill itself… So now we wait.
Build quality
Seems great for 30$ you can’t go wrong, the straps are kinda cheap, but I’ll snag a replacement assuming the watch eventually powers up again.
Functionality
I’m not sure I haven’t actually gotten it to do anything yet other than power on initially with the wrong time, and then brick itself.
Hopefully I have some more positive things to say in a couple weeks. I’ll make sure to update here, since it’s a product I’d like to like… Cheap and open source watch, are my wheelhouse but I just wish it worked lol…
Conclusion
TBD