FediMan

I've just bought a PineTime smartwatch to use with my Fairphone 4. This is my first smartwatch, for reasons that will become clear, so I can't compare it with other watches. Nevertheless, here are my early impressions.

Buying PineTime in the UK

PineTime comes in two forms: sealed is the form you wear every day, and unsealed gives you access to the internals, which is useful if you want to write software for it. You can also buy a kit containing both.

There's no UK store: you have to order from China. To keep costs down, I chose standard delivery, and the watch took about four weeks to get here. Bear that in mind if you're buying one as a present. On the bright side, the cost was easily below the £135 threshold at which I'd have had to pay import duty.

Unboxing

The box is sturdy, but not flashy, exactly as you'd hope.

There's a leaflet that seems to be some kind of user manual, but the print is far too small to read, so I don't know what it says. Really, why do companies do this? Just put the user manual on the Web and print the address, nice and large, on the box.

There's a second leaflet, printed in a more reasonable font, advising the user to upgrade the software on the watch. The link given in the leaflet was out of date but, after a few minutes' searching, and in a move to irk mathematicians everywhere, I used Gadgetbridge to upgrade from 1.6 to 1.11.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Linking to a smartphone

The reason I bought a PineTime — and the reason you should consider one, too — is that it works with Gadgetbridge on Android. (For Apple users, there's also InfiniLink.) Most smart watches come with apps that upload your location and health data to the cloud (i.e. someone else's computer), and then you completely lose control over it. Gadgetbridge is open source and cloudless: your data stays on the phone.

Gadgetbridge works with some other watches, too, but PineTime is designed for it. Most other smartwatches use protocols that the Gadgetbridge team has had to reverse-engineer. Maliciously or accidentally, future software updates may break compatibility with Gadgetbridge at any time, forcing you to upload your intimate data to the manufacturer's server or go without; with PineTime, that won't happen.

Gadgetbridge has the following uses:

• It automatically sets the time and date on the watch and keeps them accurate.
• You can use it to download updated firmware to the watch. The operating system, modestly called InfiniTime, is under active development, and each release brings new goodies, so it's worth keeping up-to-date.
• It can show you your last few days' step counts, whereas the watch keeps the data for only one day.
• It sends Android notifications to the watch, which vibrates and displays them on the screen. (You can't interact with them other than by reading and dismissing them on the watch. You can't, for example, reply to a text message or a Signal message.) You can easily disable this feature with a few taps on the watch screen when you need to focus.
• You can use the watch to control music playing on the phone: previous track, play/pause, next track. If you're using Spotify, that means you can use the watch to control music playing on your computer, even though there's no direct link between them.

Unfortunately, it's hard to pair up the watch to the phone and, when the two devices lose contact, they often don't reconnect automatically. When that happens, getting them to talk again takes several minutes of random smartphone prodding and swiping until suddenly, and without explanation, everything starts working again.

Although Gadgetbridge can display sleep graphs, it seems not to work with PineTime. It just tells me I was constantly active and never slept. Sleep As Android claims limited integration with PineTime, but I've not tried it. Sleep Cycle, which I do use, won't integrate with PineTime or any other watch.

Display

There's a choice of four watch faces (six, once a future release of Gadgetbridge gains the ability to download a new kind of resource file to the watch).

The watch display always comes on when you press the button. You can configure it also to come on in response to a single or double tap on the screen and/or when you raise your wrist to look at the watch (which works well, and is useful when your hands are dirty or wet). There are three brightness levels, which are, respectively, well judged for indoors at night, indoors during the day, and outdoors in the sun. There's also a quick-access night-mode setting that disables all notifications and prevents the screen from waking up unless you press the button.

Swiping right on the watch face takes you to four icons: display brightness, watch, notification toggle/night mode, and other settings.

Swiping up on the watch face takes you to a couple of pages of apps: various stopwatch and timer apps; footstep count; heart rate monitor; music controls; a simple scribble app; a couple of games (pong and 2048); an app for watching the accelerometer; a haptic metronome; and a navigation app that I've not worked out yet.

Swiping down on the watch face displays notifications mirrored from your phone, which you can dismiss from the watch (though not the phone) by swiping them right.

Step-counting

If you're walking purposefully, step-counting is very accurate, even if you're carrying a large, heavy object in both arms. If you're doing chores around the house — laying the table, emptying the bins — then it's not. If the watch detects fewer than 20 steps per minute, it doesn't record them at all. (You can change this threshold in Gadgetbridge.) If you're taking a few steps, stopping, taking a few more, and so on, then the watch can easily record twice as many steps as you actually take.

Putting on a tee-shirt and collared shirt adds about 35 steps to the tally. That's the easiest exercise I've ever done. :–)

But none of this matters to me. I bought this watch just as a reminder to keep active as autumn set in. That doesn't require a step-count accurate to four significant figures.

Only one of the four available watch faces is readable and displays step count, so that's the one I use.

Heart rate

PineTime has a heart rate monitor, which uses a bright green LED on the bottom of the watch. Unless you're in the heart rate app, the monitor doesn't run all the time, and Gadgetbridge can't display a graph of your HR throughout the day. However, if the HR monitor is enabled, the watch measures and displays your HR every time the screen comes on. This process takes a few seconds.

Battery life

I have the display set to the lower brightness levels, mostly, and to power off after 15 seconds, but I've also configured it to come on with a wrist-raise, which means it often comes on when I don't need it to. I leave the HR monitor disabled.

With these settings, it looks as if one charge will last about a week. Of course, using the HR monitor and making the screen brighter would shorten battery life. I don't believe the battery is changeable, so, after a certain number of charge/discharge cycles, you'll be in the market for a new watch.

Charging uses a cup that clips magnetically to the base of the watch and has a USB-A connector. Don't lose it. The watch doesn't come with a charger, but yet another USB charger is not high on most people's list of needs.

Strap

I'm averagely hairy for a man in late middle age (ugh, sorry, you didn't need to know that), and the strap often tugs at my wrist hairs. I'll replace it if I keep using the watch.