Smartq | Tuxology

These holidays, I was refraining from spending huge sums on stocking gadgets I don’t need. But (un)fortunately, I ended up buying a Nexus 5, a Moga Hero controller and a cheap smartwatch. So what do you do when you get an Android device? Exactly! Start hacking on it – root, custom ROMs, custom kernel, cool apps! So, my experimentation started with the SmartQ Z Smartwatch I had bought. For the price (CAD $91, including shipping from China) this was an irresistible piece of tiny Android to start tinkering around with. It packs a 1GHz Ingenic processor (MIPS) – JZ4775, 512MB DDR RAM and 4GB flash. All of this with a tiny 1.54 inch screen with a 240×240 resolution. The latest firmware supplied by the vendor is based on Android 4.4 with a custom launcher. It is a very hacker-friendly device and came with ‘su’ out of the box 🙂 Though its a bit old (2013 launch) and the manufacturer seems to have abandoned the development on this, for the price, its a pretty impressive piece of tech on your hand.

I decided to make my own watchfaces with custom features and more inspiring UI than the watchfaces provided in the watch. Also, the hidden agenda was to check out the new Android Studio. As with everything Chinese, the SDK and docs for the Smartwatch were in Chinese! But fortunately, after surfing through XDA Developers forums, I found a link to the English docs on their website to refer to the weather APIs that I needed to use. With moderate efforts, I was able to make the following watch faces :

They are actually developed as widgets and the launcher apparently sees if the AppWidgetProvicer class you use starts with the string “WatchFace”. If this is the case, it simply puts that widget along with the custom watch faces in the menu.

If you own a similar watch/with similar screen dimensions, you can try installing the apps or use the source code for building your own cool watchfaces. I really wish I had an Android Wear watch rather than this so that I could develop on a more useful and up-to-date platform. Thanks for reading. Happy new year! Here is the source code and specs for these watch faces :