So you write the title. This is a pine time review let’s get to it. Music, full disclosure – this will not be an unbiased review. This was sent to me from pine64 and i’ve been doing a lot of videos for their channel, including the video announcing a finite 1.0. So keep that in mind, although they don’t have any say on what i put in this video say whatever i want let’s. First talk about the build quality. The watch itself is made of a mix of aluminum and plastic, with the sides being made of aluminum in the back being made of plastic, but the plastic is cool to the touch and overall feels very good. The watch band of the pine time does the job but isn’t my favorite in terms of texture and how it feels. Luckily, it does support standard 20, millimeter watch bands, so swap it out for something that you like better. If you are not a huge fan of the watch band back to the watch itself, the watch has a glass ips 240 by 240 screen, not the highest resolution in the world, as you can definitely see each pixel. Even if you don’t look that hard. However, it isn’t bad considering the price point of this watch at only 25 dollars. The brightness is a little bit hard to see in the sun, but you can still see it just not very well, and you can see it perfectly indoors with brightness.
It would be nice to see an oled screen just because every time you turn the watch on, you can see the back light on when most of the display is supposed to be black, but that doesn’t affect the functionality of the watch at all. So i think that’s, okay, the default software on it is amazing. It’S called a fini time and it’s one of three os’s that are fully usable right now. A common misconception is that this watch runs linux. However, this does not run linux. Mini time is based on another open source, os called free rtos, which is an os that is made to be very optimized for low spec devices like this watch i’m, not going to cover, if any time too extensively, because i plan on doing a future video covering All the major os’s, however, i will cover the basics. If anytime does have all the basics, you would want, such as telling the time, obviously a heart rate, monitor and step tracker which i’ll get to those later notification, syncing with gadget bridge even race to wake, which is a feature that i love. This is very impressive to me because all of this is running 100 free and open source firmware and software, and that to me is awesome, considering that it has every daily driver feature i’d ever want. As mentioned earlier, the gadget bridge app on f droid allows you to sync your android phone with your pine time.
This allows, if any time to sync up the time with your phone and get notifications as well as incoming calls, and it also allows you to control your music on your watch. Similar functionality can also be used on linux. Phones like the pine phone thanks to amazfish, although amazfish’s ui is a little bit confusing, at least for me. There isn’t a companion app for iphones. Yet, however, if you’re on an iphone, you can still use nrf connect to flash the watch’s firmware and set the time on your pc using the open source web ble watch project. Really the only missing features on if any time is alarms, which will probably be added. Very shortly dynamic apps, which would be cool to avoid reflashing for a new app. Both of these things are in other firmware, such as wasp os, but those firmwares aren’t nearly as polished as a finney time is again. I will cover all the firmwares in another video. Pretty soon, but this is just a review of the watch and not the firmwares one thing if anytime does have, is a heart rate monitor this is off by default, but can be turned on in the heart rate app the nice addition i wouldn’t use this for Anything medically important, but i used it for my online pe class and you could use it for fitness tracking. But if you want something more accurate, i’m sorry, but you will probably have to invest your money into a more expensive smart watch that doesn’t have open firmware.
Like an apple watch, the watch also comes with a step counter, which seems to be pretty accurate. I don’t have any smart watches other than the pine time, so i wasn’t able to test it myself, but according to nico cartron who went on a 21 kilometer run with an apple watch on and a pine time step counter is pretty dang accurate. When you compare the two now one issue you might have of the pine time, especially if you really like distro hopping like me, is the over the air flashing. Now, if you have a pine time, dev kit, this is not an issue at all. However, if you have a sealed pine time, which you will most likely have, if you actually want to daily drive it, then you have to be careful. Not every os uses the same bootloader and if the bootloader gets messed up, then congratulations your pine time unless you unseal it is now a paperweight or a pineway. If you will, that was a bad joke. I think, as long as you stay on stable versions of a finney times bootloader and you don’t go off of if anytime, then you should be fine, but if you’d like to go and try other os’s like wasp os, do it at your own risk while flashing The bootloader i do not have a dev kit. However, i would like to try out all the os’s and everything like a true linux user.
You know distro hopping and everything i would recommend getting a dev kit right now: there’s a 50 bundle where you get both a sealed watch and a death kit for 50 bucks, and i would highly recommend that because then you could use the dev kit for testing And picking an os you like and then flashing your favorite os onto a sealed pine time and sticking with it only reflashing it when there’s an update, you do not care about distro hopping and you just want to watch that works. This is a non issue, because the bootloader for, if anytime at least, should be stable enough to do an over the air update, or you know, a new version of anytime without the watch breaking itself. So really as long as you aren’t, swapping between affinity, time and wasp, os every day should be fine. So would i recommend this watch? Yes, definitely, even if you aren’t that technical, this is a great watch that you can use to sync up with an android phone. If you are technical, then you can sync it up with a linux phone too, and you can still tinker with it by switching up the firmware and everything if you’re on an iphone. I would wait if you intend to daily drive this, but if you’re on an android or linux phone like the pine phone or i don’t – know google pixel just another regular android phone, i would highly recommend this watch, especially for the 25 dollar price point anyways.
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