I'm getting a bangle!

I run regularly, and I track my GPS when I run. Back in January I joined a club, and the sessions there generally have built-in timed rests. I can record those on my phone, but it's a little inconvenient because I have to hold the phone in my hand all the time, and unlock the screen whenever I need to tweak the stopwatch. Everybody told me I should get a smart watch.

I didn't actually want to do that, for a couple of reasons.

For a while I just put the problem off. I got a second-hand digital watch, to use as a stopwatch. But the buttons are kind of fiddly and I couldn't always see the display clearly, so I eventually stopped using it and just carry my phone in my hand. That's not ideal either, because it's a bit distracting. Ideally, I wouldn't even carry my phone -- I'd just go out with the watch and record using that.

For my birthday, my dad had the idea of getting me a smart watch. That forced me to think about it, because I didn't have any good ideas for other gifts. He suggested the pixel watch, which is a locked-down WearOS device. That would certainly work, I could just install the Strava app on it like I do on my phone and call it a day. But I just knew I would keep feeling anxious that you never know when Google might decide to block you from WearOS, or Strava might ban you, or whatever. Well, if you're worried about that, what else is there?

Jailbreak

You can buy a commercial watch that has the ability to install alternative operating systems. Watches are sufficiently constrained devices that there is a lot of fragmentation in the ecosystem. Most independent watch-builders write their own custom OS for the chip they're able to get access to. And I think most watches are just unable to run Android, so there aren't many companies doing that.

The only device-agnostic OS I've seen is AsteroidOS, which is a bona-fide Linux distribution. This harms the battery life of the device, but ensures you have a lot of freedom. Unfortunately, a little like postmarketOS for smartphones, there are only so many supported devices and most devices do not support their full feature set. Since for me GPS tracking is non-negotiable, I think the best option is the OPPO watch (codenamed "beluga"). This is tricky because asteroid don't list the exact model number on their site, so if you buy one you run the risk it won't flash or you accidentally brick the device.

I've flashed devices before, I flashed a PinePhone with SXMO a few years ago, so I'm not *scared* of that per se, but the risk of getting the model wrong puts me off. I also doubt OPPO is anything more than a planet-burning profit-maximiser, so I don't especially want to give them money if I can avoid it. I could get one second-hand, though, potentially.

Pinetime

Speaking of Pine64, they have a watch too (the PineTime)! I generally think they are good members of the Open Hardware movement, and I'd be delighted to give them money. My PinePhone works perfectly well (although, in my shame, I rarely use it). The custom firmware is called InfiniTime and it's compatible with a few different OSes, including WaspOS and SailfishOS Unfortunately they don't have a GPS chip, which is a killer for me. It looks like the PineTime Pro *does*, but it's under active development and doesn't have a release date as of yet. I will probably be first in line when it does come out.

Pebble

Pebble is an e-ink watch series that originally started back in 2013 or so. I think e-ink devices are kind of cool, they're generally very low power and suitable for use in daylight, as long as you're prepared to compromise on refresh rate (I am). As far as I can tell, they were a bit of a cult hit, and people who had them seem to love them. The comapny originally launched as closed-source, but after they kind of died off in 2016, it was acquired first by Fitbit and then later Google. An internal team at Google pushed to release the source code in 2025, and the hardware company "rose from the ashes" with a new model, running on the newly freed software.

There's now a couple of "Pebble 2" models, and even a Pebble Index "smart ring". The displays are in colour, which makes a big difference (although monochrome was never really a killer for me). The Pebble Round 2 looks absolutely gorgeous to me, and they're recently out (due for delivery in July this year). Unfortunately, there's no GPS chip, so there's no chance I'd use it. I feel neutral on the whole aboutPebble the company - they started out as a Silicon Valley money pump, but the reboot seems much more community-focussed. I gather than PebbleOS had a pretty active community making apps for it, but given it's only that one device, it might be a bit of a shallow pool. I never really looked into it deeply from that perspective.

Bangle.js

Bangle.js looks essentially like a hobby project. It was kickstarted back in 2021 for about £200,000. The screen seems pretty low-resolution even for a watch, and trying to use it for anything resembling a conventional desktop is not going to work. But it *does* have GPS and Bluetooth, with the former meaning I can use it for tracking, and the latter meaning I can drive it from my phone. It has first-party support for gadgetbridge which means I can send messages and control Android apps using the watch interface.

The storage and memory capacity is extremely limited: 256kb of RAM and 8MB of storage. So you can't really store anything significant on the device itself. It has a GPS recorder, and 8MB is enough to store a few GPX tracks. But you are basically going to be treating this thing as a slave to your phone. All the apps are written in JS, and the watch's OS is essentially just a JS interpreter. You are not exactly going to be storing NPM modules on this thing, so I'm not sure why they made that choice. I do know JS well, though, so it might be fun to write or tweak some of the existing apps. From what I can gather they're no more than a couple hundred lines of code usually (since you couldn't store them on the watch otherwise!).

The battery life is very high (4 weeks!) and the screen is "transflective", whatever that means. Apparently it's like a normal LCD but you can see it better in sunlight.

My choice

In the end, I decided to go with the bangle. I will keep an eye out for the PineTime Pro when it eventually does get released, and I might pick up a second hand OPPO to experiment on. I'll post back when it arrives!