The PineTime is a very underpowered device that is really only capable of showing messages from a nearby smartphone. It doesn’t even run Linux, it runs a low-footprint firmware. Don't expect to video chat through it.

It's got a 64MHz cortex M4. It won't do 4k h.265, but you could definitely stream crappy low-res video. You'd need an external camera too though.

The display is controlled over an 8MHz spi bus, you can only write to it as a bitmap (no functions to draw stuff like lines or filled rectangles) you give a square to draw in, and then a rectangle to bitmap to draw in the square. With the speed of the spi bus, the max speed you'll be able to update the entire display at is 8fps.

And to be honest I'm mostly looking for notifications and some info available at a glance when I'm looking at a "smartwatch".

I currently have an Amazfit Bip paired to Gadgetbridge, but I'd definitely like to see something less proprietary on my wrist. Crossing my fingers to see a transflective display version one day for an even longer battery lifetime.

The inclusion of a camera on a watch unfortunately would 1) take up a lot of space and 2) move around a lot.

I'm not sure it'll ever be popular.

I both do and don't want to believe that someday soon enough a generative AI will be able to take what it knows about me and my mannerisms, and combine that with an image of two of me looking into the camera in the moment, along with my voice audio stream, and out of all of that, create a totally convincing video feed of me speaking for the person on the other end of the call

The shaky video could easily be fixed with some anti-shake algorithms. Well, "easily" in that it's already a solved problem.