honestly just depends on what kind of watchface you want, square is cheaper and in some ways more convenient so if you don't want an analog clockface there's no reason to bother
I tinker more with my pinephone than my pinetime, which is basically "waiting for an update and then applying it". Out of the 2 the Pinetime is the one I use, the Pinephone is currently substituting as a pihole because I broke the Odroid C1.
There's a lot more to do and play with on the phone compared to the watch, but the watch is reliable to use daily.
It does not track sleep as that would require too much info to be sent to a third party. The battery is insane on it as well I get 5 plus days on mine.
What Android software could you use for managing it? Gadgetbridge seems to not have fully-developed support for it, even with their preferred firmware.
I'm using Gadgetbridge with a hacked Amazfit Bip and I'm pretty happy. I like the multicolor TFT LCD w/no default backlight on the Bip, which is very readable in bright light and only requires a quick button press to get the backlight on in the dark, or you can waste more battery life and have it turn on when you turn it towards yourself. It's also got built-in GPS/workout tracking (you have to manually flash the A-GPS data occasionally...), the ability to load little open source apps, sleep tracking, heart rate tracking, notifications, custom watchfaces, etc which I'm sure the Pinetime has most of. The battery also lasts ages since it uses such a low-power LCD.
I'm not saying the Pinetime isn't good, but decent alternatives exist. I would love a truly open-source smart watch, but maybe when the project is slightly more mature. I guess I could always get one and contribute to it... $30 is really not much. I'll definitely try it if my Bip breaks.
I have found nothing that worked, was not spying on you, was not some hipster pipedream, and has lots of people working on it. Oh and gadgetbridge seems to work good, what do you mean not supported?
If you want a successor to the Pebble, also consider Bangle.js 2.
It's a little more expensive compared with the PineTime but I got one and I'm very happy!
If it's been in the drawer for all this time, charge it again, it will ptobably boot. I had a similar issue, but didn't let the thing shut down conpletely (by making sure the battery is completely drained).
I once worked in a software shop where all release packages had the Unix epoch timestamp in the filename. Yes, these sorted brilliantly making it trivial to find the last one. But good luck finding a build from a specific date/time.
Considering it uses day then month, 24hr clock, and distance in km, I'm guessing the reason why it's not "human readable in American" is because it's intended to be "human readable for pretty much everybody else"
I mean, I've never used JSONs before but I imagine you could still write to them in realtime at least, as inefficient as that sounds lol. So you could probably get the same results on an actual text editor if you could modify it to update the text automatically when it detects a change instead of prompting the user