this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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Linux Phones
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Community about running GNU/Linux on phones. Projects like Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, PostmarketOS, Mobian etc. Either on former Android phones or hardware like the PinePhone.
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Cool video and channel. Thanks for posting!
TLDW:
Presenter was generous when describing the end product. It seems to me like they want to like it but came to the same conclusion as most did -- it's definitely not a daily driver. That said, it doesn't have to be to remain a cool product.
Do give them a watch though if you have a chance. This is from a <1k subscriber channel and was well put together.
I'm convinced Pine64 has no idea how to make an actual usable product.
I wasted my money on a PineTime watch. And it's basically only useful for telling time, because as soon as you try to use any smartwatch features, the battery life basically disappears. Firmware updates are horrendously slow. The device has like 5kb of storage and 4kb is used by the base firmware, so when I thought I could program my own features for it because it's open source, it was severely mistaken. Not to mention that if I'm not particularly amazing at programming for this device I either destroy the battery life or brick it.
It is difficult to have a smart watch though. Think about it: you have a small chip with a wifi stack, bluetooth, even a camera slot, it consumes ~5mA when awake even when down clocked, but can at least save power by consuming ~1microA when asleep but it can never use its sleep states because it's primary function is to display and update the time at all times.
All because of a little boy, who won't let me sleep!
You're describing a ton of features that a smart watch does not need. It doesn't need wifi or a camera, for example.
The thing is, there's TONS of off-brand smart watches that can do constant heart rate monitoring, notifications, sleep tracking, and those more basic smart features very well. The problem is that they require proprietary apps and a cloud account you have no control over.
I agree, I was just demonstrating that you could have a tiny chip packed full of features as well as optimized sleep states to really save on power, and it still runs out of power on the same scale as a smartphone, due to the sole reason that it's not actually allowed to go to sleep and still function as a watch.
Most get around this by not displaying the time unless you shake the watch awake (which I find hilarious), or running at extremely low clock-rates in which case the latency in user-interaction suffers.
Agreed. SQFMI's Watchy powered by the fantastic ESP32 seemed promising, but despite having a full bluetooth/wifi stack is very limited in other features.