After reading what others have said and feedback on PineTime and what a good hackable watch should have, it seems like Pebble should resurrect from the grave as a hackable watch. I mean the pebble time had 128kb ram (this only has 64k ram), an color epaper display, 150mAh battery (over a week battery life), heart rate sensors, etc. Heck its even being supported by the open source community AFTER it was discontinued.
Maybe Fitbit can be petitioned to make the Pebble's hardware fully open source too.
Go on ebay and purchase a Pebble Time. Color epaper display, fully hackable even after being discontinued thanks to the dev community who continues to update it with "Rebble" the open source version of the OS it ran on.
I mentioned in another comment about how I had the Pebble watch (before Apple and Android watches were a thing) and it had 128 kb ram total, but it lasted 11 days. That thing was a beast, but as someone else mentioned cost is a. big consideration too. It had 150 mAh on the newer models, before it was discontinued, so while I'm sure it definitely eats up energy I think it's definitely possible to fit more RAM in the power constraints.
Granted that was an e-paper display. (They had color and black and white options)
> it's extremely hard to get access to powerful SoCs - the vendors simply won't work with you
That's a really good point. I remember having the Pebble watch (this was pre-Apple and Android watches) and I think it had 128 KB of RAM total, including OS, background tasks, apps, etc. That was a mass produced and commercialized item though.
Yeah, the original Apple watch had like half a GB, and a raspberry pi zero ($5 price) has the same. Couldn't they have fit that within both budget and size?