I love the Pine lineup of devices.
They are really helping the Linux phone by providing a dev platform, partnering with different OS implementations and mainlining as much as possible.
I do wish they had a Pinebook Pro and Pinephone with a bit more oomph.
And for them to focus heavily on RISC-V in the future once that becomes viable, which sadly seems a few years off.
I agree .. I've been hacking away on the PineWatch as a platform for the last few months, mostly to teach myself baremetal Rust, and it is an extraordinarily satisfying circumstance to be able to tell time on a watch running my own code. The hardware is decent for the price (very cheap), and it is so very, very refreshingly open.
I will pick up a PinePhone as soon as possible, based on this experience, and I'm probably going to be a Pine stalwart for the next few years, at least, as a general platform. These guys are finally delivering devices that we developers can be happy to get involved in.
I say that as a dev with years of iOS experience, where I am currently fatigued with having to keep up with yet more proprietary bollocks from Apple: the future of these devices is open.
The dev kit buy page has a scary warning that the cover doesn't pop on. How much of a problem is that in practice? I really want to get one to play with.
I have two kits - one which I hack on with Rust, and has wires hanging out, and the other which has the pinewatch python project on it, and I have sealed it shut.
When I get my personal little watch application built and ready, I'll get another, install it, and seal it in.
No worries.
Do you need to have the watch open to reprogram it? I don't know why it wouldn't be able to do that wirelessly.
https://github.com/JF002/Pinetime/blob/develop/bootloader/RE...
.. there are so many interesting projects to run on the PineWatch, I just bought a couple extra so that I could evaluate them all at once. Its not an expensive investment - I've certainly spent more on the rPi lab-bench over the years:
https://github.com/daniel-thompson/wasp-os
(MicroPython based environment)
https://github.com/seclorum/pinetime-rust-mynewt
(Rust-based environment)
https://github.com/JF002/Pinetime
(C/C++ based environment)