Mastodawn

RE: https://mastodon.social/@fribbledom/116312884070076276

Lemme guess, will it have half-baked software that the unpaid community will be expected to fix but will eventually go nowhere? Asking for my two PinePhones gathering dust in a drawer somewhere.

I’m done with getting anything from Pine64. They don’t respect their community enough to iterate on the software (or pay some people to) until they have a usable product and they use the goodwill of the community to sell new half-baked devices. The world doesn’t need more tech waste.

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muesli

@aral

On the one hand I get the frustration. Early Pine devices definitely lean heavily on the community. But I think the mismatch is expectations here?

Pine64 isn't really trying to ship polished consumer products like an Apple Watch.

Stuff like the PineTime is more of a dev platform you can actually afford and tinker with. I've had tons of fun hacking my watch and writing my own watch faces. If you go in expecting a finished product, then yeah, you'll probably be disappointed every time.

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Famisuki Mar 29

@aral @fribbledom ironically the hackberry and pi compute module/clones is much more polished in hardware acceleration and support...

Though I dunno about open source watches. I still feel like ESP32 can paves its way better. The problem is just ESP32 doesn't have health sensors. But we can optimistically see where the PineTime Pro will go!

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muesli Mar 29

@far1925

Chips like the ESP32 or nRF52 don't typically come with built-in health sensors. Those are almost always external components regardless of the ecosystem.

You can absolutely hook sensors up to an ESP, but for something like a watch, power consumption becomes a pretty big constraint. That's where platforms like the nRF5x tend to make more sense.