Upcoming Product: PineTime Smartwatch Coming in 2020 For ~$25

Pine64 continues to expand their product line horizontally, this time to the smartwatch sector with their newly-announced offering, the PineTime smartwatch.

Pine64 released the announcement via Twitter, and in that tweet, they requested the help of FreeRTOS and ARM Mbed developers. Pine64 did make it clear that this is a side-project not to detract from the upcoming PinePhone.

Early details indicate that the housing and band are utilizing existing designs in the generic smartwatch sector, and that the main materials will be zinc alloy and plastic. The watch is expected to ship with a charging dock and wristband, and have Pine64-designated internals including a heart-rate monitor. The battery is expected to last for greater than a week on a full charge, although this will be determined by which OS is installed and how well it is optimized for power utilization.

The SoC will be either a Nordic nRF52832 or nRF52840.

Features of the Nordic nRF52832 are:

• Bluetooth 5 2Mbps
• Bluetooth mesh
• ANT protocol stack
• 2.4GHz protocol stack
• ARM Cortex-M4 @ 64MHz
• NFC-A Tag (for pairing and payment solutions)
• Numerous digital peripherals and interfaces such as PDM and I2S (audio)
• Exceptionally low energy consumption via on-chip adaptive power management system
• AES Encryption
• 512KB Flash
• 64KB RAM
• 12-bit ADC

Additional features provided by the Nordic nRF52840 are:

• Thread and Zigbee support
• Bluetooth 5 2Mbps + long-range
• Full USB2.0 support
• SPI Interface
• 1MB Flash (2x the 52832)
• 256KB RAM (4x the 52832)

The PineTime will include a touchscreen overlaid on an IPS panel visible in direct sunlight.

This is really an exciting time for people who desire a complete Linux hardware ecosystem at a very affordable price, although the PineTime will not technically be running Linux.

With the current proposed schedule it should be possible to acquire all the following devices in 2020 for less than $500 combined:

• Pinebook Pro
• PineTab with keyboard
• PinePhone
• PineTime