I picked up a PineTime watch a few months ago, and decided when my Fossil smartwatch kicked the bucket, I’d give it a go. I’ve been spending the last month with the PineTime, and here are my thoughts – unfortunately, they’re not great.

The not so good stuff

• The lack of Apple integration other than the Infinitime app, is disappointing, though my understanding is this is just a matter of someone writing the code using the proper libraries. No notifications are really a problem.
• The various ‘wakeup’ motions are incredibly inconsistent. “Shake to wake” means “if you move your wrist at all, it wakes up” – this kills the battery because unless you’re dead, the watch is basically on full time.
  
  (UPDATE: So it appears there’s a very handy setting further down in the ‘Settings’ menu that adjusts the sensitivity of the motion sensor. After changing this setting, the ‘shake to wake’ function is much better, and my battery life has gone up to 4-5 days agin. WIN.)
• “Lift to wake” is nigh on useless. It either triggers too often, or never triggers at all and you end up waving your hand around like a madman.
• I’ve frequently looked down at my watch and noticed it was… running an app? Like Pingpong or the heart monitor? I don’t think there’s a reasonabe unlock mechanism that filters out unwanted motions or actions.
• A dead battery reset the entire watch. When it powered up again, it had the wrong date and time – It’s possible infinitime on the iPhone reset it? Because it’s showing correct now, but it was incorrect on powerup.

There are a few positives.

• It’s nice looking. Sleek, small, not problematic. I like it.
• Battery life IF you don’t use any of the auto-wakeups is phenomenal. I get about a week out of it. Take that Apple Watch.
• It’s cheap.

Conclusions

I don’t think I’ll stick with this, unless I’m missing something blatantly obvious regarding functionality. It barely works as a watch, and even then does it poorly. I dn’t see a compelling reason to keep going with it.

Update

3/22/2024: Well that didn’t take long. While I was able to figure out the calibration problem for ‘shake to wake’, it looks like the inertial sensor has stopped working, so now shake to wake doesn’t do anything, and the calibration function isn’t working. I’ve tried restarting and resyncing, but no dice. I think it’s time to move on.