18 ms·

PinePhone Review

487 points by Bl4ckb0ne 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ohiovr 7y ago
Can python be used to make an "app"?
- jamii 7y ago
  It's running straight-up linux. You can write apps in python with gtk or qt, or anything else that works on a linux desktop.
  - xur17 7y ago
    I might have to get one... I really miss this from my n900.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Sailfosh OS is being ported to PinePhone & some of the most used third party native Sailfish OS applications are written in Python 3 + QML. :)
  - thekyle 7y ago
    > Sailfosh OS I believe this should be Sailfish OS
- curioussavage 7y ago
  I have a couple gtk apps in progress written in python for phones using purism's libhandy. gnome builder makes it pretty darn easy, though Gtk's docs could use some love.
  - tenkabuto 7y ago
    Woah, I didn't realize that we can use it in Python already! How do you go about using it? I see that there's Python mentioned on https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Purism/libhandy https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Purism/libhandy but would it still not work if the phone itself doesn't have libhandy? Would you be able to install libhandy on Ubuntu Touch or Plasma Mobile?
livueta 7y ago
That's extremely exciting news! Working LTE? No blobs? "Holy shit!" is an understatement. Tangentially, what's an appropriate entry point for a reasonably capable C/C++/Unix systems programmer without prior mobile guts experience interested in working on software for this platform? I'm kind of assuming that'd be "grab a compatible device, clone postmarket, rtfm" but confirmation/pointers would be appreciated.
- kop316 7y ago
  I hate to temper your excitement a little bit (I am excited too!), but I am not a bit surprised that LTE data works. Calling and SMS/MMS over LTE (for T-Mobile USA) are two things that at least that as of today, you need proprietary libraries to have it function on Android, and likely don't work on the Pinephone. I strongly suspect that other USA carriers will have the same issue (I say that because there are additionally several proprietary Verizon and Sprint blobs that are resident in factory images that need to be put in third party ROMs). The Librem 5 has LTE mobile data as well, but it has those same issues (no VoLTE, SMS only over 3g, no MMS for T-Mobile USA). I am hopeful that between Purism and the Pinephone community that this is a solvable (but lengthy) issue.
  - kick 7y ago
    Calling and SMS works without proprietary software already. The ubPorts people already did it: https://twitter.com/thepine64/status/1202162774186582017 https://twitter.com/thepine64/status/1202162774186582017
    - kop316 7y ago
      Is it on 3g or LTE? I wouldn't be surprised if both work over 3g, but I would be very surprised if it works over LTE.
    - pabs3 7y ago
      While the baseband runs Linux (IIRC PinePhone uses a Quectel modem), it probably runs proprietary software for the full LTE/3G/2G stack. https://osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/ https://osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/
kop316 7y ago
Drew (Or sircmpwn? Sorry I don't know how you prefer to be called) since I know you're on here, if I may ask: - What provider are you using? - Is it VoLTE that is working, or does it drop down to 3g for calls? - Does SMS work in LTE mode or do you have to drop it down to 3g? I have a Librem 5 birch, and from my experience in rolling my own Android AOSP version, that to get T-mobile to work with VoLTE, SMS/MMS with LTE, or WiFi Calling, you have to install proprietary blobs. EDIT: I should add the Librem 5 Birch has LTE data on T-mobile, but I have to drop to 3G to get SMS and phone call functionality, and MMS is additionally non-functional at all on T-Mobile. Meant to post that for the Librem 5.
- Avamander 7y ago
  VoLTE requires carrier support unless some very clever hacks I'm unaware. I am pretty sure that's the case with PinePhone as well, meaning it will drop to 3G.
  - kop316 7y ago
    That's my assumption as well, I was just curious. Their latest post indicates that they are wokring on VoLTE: https://www.pine64.org/2019/12/05/december-update-thank-you-for-2019/ https://www.pine64.org/2019/12/05/december-update-thank-you-...
    - Avamander 7y ago
      Maybe they want to support it so that carriers could support it?
      - kop316 7y ago
        I assume they want to support it, as well as any other carrier feature. I just have no knowledge on how difficult it is, nor in what state it is in now.
- swiley 7y ago
  Honestly I'd be happy with just 2g and no mms at this point.
ntw1103 7y ago
Looks pretty sweet, the review is encouraging. It is nice to see no blogs, very nice. I ordered the Braveheart edition, the moment they were available. I am pretty excited about the possibly keyboard accessory talked about in the latest blog post from pine64.
catchmeifyoucan 7y ago
Would be super cool to build a web based distribution like Firefox OS for this.
- kick 7y ago
  Why? Not even Mozilla had faith in Firefox OS, and on a phone like this, it's barely powerful enough to. I'm not trying to attack you, I'm just genuinely confused at this viewpoint.
  - Multicomp 7y ago
    None of my below rants are directed at you personally! FF OS lives on today as KaiOS and is extremely popular in the devloping world where even an Android Go device requires far too much hardware specs for the price a given set of locals want or can afford to pay. If you look at some of the devices that run it like the JioPhone, you can see that it sits quite comfortably in the space formerly occupied by the BREW systems of the world, but has little touches like email sending, Google Assistant, etc. Edit: just to give some scale to the Android Go bloat (let alone plain old Android), the HTC Desire Z (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z) has 512 MB of RAM and a paltry processor, not powerful even for its day. That device ran the current set of Android OSes at the time, and if modded today, can even be made to run Android KitKat, where official support stopped at Android Gingerbread. Today, that device is barely considered Android Go compatible, mostly due to its CPU and storage limitations. In 2010, we took pictures, checked emails, played games, browsed the mobile web, performed calls, texts, IMs, watched videos, streamed music, and drove/bussed/walked with navigation. Today...we do much the same things, but in a 'once more, with ~~feeling~~ AI` manner. There are very few totally new things compared to 2010, we just let mobile apps bloat up to web development-level bloat. In my cynical moments, I look at the processing power eaten on my OS, wasted on wakelocks and ads and think to myself that somewhere, Ralphie is in the ~~Magic School Bus~~ cell phone factory and spinning dials saying 'more RAM, more CPU, more network speed, I don't know what to do, the software is all slow!' because every time he ups a spec, the bloat absorbs it without reducing user latency one bit.
thekyle 7y ago
I'm very enthusiastic about this device and have ordered the Brave Heart addition. I really like the price point of $150. It makes it pretty easy for casual developers to pick one up and should aid with getting new software written for it. I'm sure the Librem 5 is also very nice, but it's higher price makes it much less accessible.
throwawaysea 7y ago
Will this work with US carriers? I am not clear on whether there are limitations imposed by carriers to only allow "certified" phones.
- kick 7y ago
  Drew lives in Philadelphia, and he notes that it works, so yes. Here's a tip, though, if you ever get concerned about whether or not a phone will work with your carrier. Check what modem it has. In the PinePhone's case, it's the EG25-G. http://files.pine64.org/doc/datasheet/project_anakin/LTE_module/Quectel_EG25-G_LTE_Specification_V1.1_Preliminary_20180522%20(002).pdf http://files.pine64.org/doc/datasheet/project_anakin/LTE_mod... So now that we know the name, let's look and see if your carrier mentions it as one it approves. For the sake of brevity, I'll assume you're on AT&T. https://www.att.com/modules https://www.att.com/modules Google's cache nicely and conveniently converts spreadsheets into web documents, so let's view it on that: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G7My6zSEmpAJ:https://www.att.com/modules https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G7My6z... The EG25-G is #51, and is fully supported.
- kop316 7y ago
  This was a discussion with the Librem 5. I know that T-mobile USA does not whitelist phones (My Librem 5 makes calls, sends/recieves SMS, and gets LTE data on T-mobile). Calls/SMS don't work on LTE though (I think due to proprietary software, that is true at least on Android). The Pinephone Braveheart Edition is compatible with most of the LTE/3G/2G bands for T-Mobile. However, I think Verizon at the least used to do this, and may still do it. Sprint also has some extra proprietary things on Android and I don't know their functionality.
monoideism 7y ago
"right now, there are very few people, perhaps only dozens, for whom this phone is the right phone, given the current level of software support." I think he greatly underestimates the number of people with the interest and ability to do this kind of work. If it's easily available, I'll probably get one and hack on it, and maybe contribute to some projects. And I'm far from something special or unusual.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  The countless commercial failures of such projects since OpenMoko proves otherwise.
  - heavyset_go 7y ago
    It's becoming easier and easier to develop new products in this space. Hell, there are a few "open source" phone projects out there that are just white label products imported from China. The first Neo phone was released a year before the first Android smartphone even hit the market. It's a bit unfair to compare these new projects with something like OpenMoko.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    Openmoko sold 13000 phones, which is much more than "dozens." Commercial failure does not necessarily mean you can fit all the customers in a room.
    - TylerE 7y ago
      13k is a rounding error. Apple sells that many iphones every 30 minutes. (I'm not kidding... they sell 217M iPhones a year = 594k a day = 24.9k/hr)
      - bildung 7y ago
        This is about open source phones, of which Apple has sold exactly zero.
jancsika 7y ago
I want that touch-drag done yesterday! Or at least the latency in half. Which parts of the UI/hardware stack are the culprits here? I want some butts[1]! 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS9j_-mqSWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS9j_-mqSWc
grizzles 7y ago
Hey Drew: I have a suggestion for sway/mobile. How about a simple windowmanager that shows a webview on screen and that exports a simple js api for window operations like { min,max,restore,setxy } so that frontend guys could make their own window managers. I think we'd see so much innovation on both desktop & mobile.
- dahfizz 7y ago
  I've never seen something more web-dev than asking someone else to do this much work for you so that you don't have to learn a new language. I don't want the "innovation" of having awful web ui on my desktop.
  - grizzles 7y ago
    It's an idea to provoke discussion. If you read the blog post he's got a whole list of app-y type stuff planned. This might be a way for him to save time on all that.
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    > I don't want the "innovation" of having awful web ui on my desktop. Then don't clone/download web ui projects? I don't understand the bile.
  - ge96 7y ago
    > I've never seen something more web-dev ha oh man
- haecceity 7y ago
  Isn't that what KWLP does?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
miohtama 7y ago
Maybe it could be called a 3G modem platform instead of a phone. To write UI software for a modern phone takes 150+ full time engineers in my experience. Only few organisations have this capability and this is why these things will never be phones people use.
- catdog 7y ago
  Wouldn't be too pessimistic on the UI side. Building decent desktop UIs isn't easier and still people managed to do it without a (single) organization in the background.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  At least on the design side, this is a good opportunity for up and coming UX designers to build portfolio pieces while also being useful (instead of redesigning Spotify for the 1000th time).
- curioussavage 7y ago
  150+ full time engineers!! no way... purism already did it with a handful. Their new shell has a great design in my opinion and it runs ok. I'm not a fan of plasma mobile but it seems ok too. The hard part it seems to me is the layers below the actual UI, gpu support, energy consumption etc. I'm confident these shells will get to the point where they are maybe better for the average phone user than desktop linux shells are for the average desktop user, mostly because reasonable phone UI patterns are more narrowly defined. I'll bet apps support and camera quality will remain bigger deal killers after the shells mature some more.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  It takes that much the first time you do it. A lot of time and energy goes not simply into writing the code, but into figuring out (through writing wrong code many times and then rebuilding it) how the UI really should work, feel, look, etc. But now they have the advantage of already seing all those results and knowing exactly what they need to build. This save a lot of time.
- boomlinde 7y ago
tomger 7y ago
Now if they’d create an iPhone SE sized one... I’d have enough passion to figure out how to run Linux on it ;)
- spurgu 7y ago
  This! I am so sad to see that practically all mobile devices on the market right now are 5+ inches. I could even go with 5, which is considered "small" nowadays, but PinePhone and Librem5 are 5.95" and 5.7" respectively. Why did phablets become the norm, at least give us a choice... :(
  - vhodges 7y ago
    Somewhat (?) related: https://palm.com/ https://palm.com/ Perhaps PostmarketOS or at least Lineage might support it one day (or now?!? Didn't look)
    - spurgu 7y ago
      Haha, hate to be that guy, but that's too small. The iPhone SE is about as small as I would go in order to still be able to type somewhat comfortably on a keyboard in portrait mode.
  - squarefoot 7y ago
    Large screens are more usable, small screens are more portable. There's no way to have both unless we completely rethink the mobile platform itself moving away from the dream of having one big clunky jack of all trades, but rather as a group of devices, all interconnected (mesh PAN + shared storage) and equipped with the hardware they need for the task, so that one small screen device is used as a phone, a bigger one to navigate, read bigger documents, watch movies etc, one even smaller one to shoot photos and videos, one to listen to music, record it etc.
    - spurgu 7y ago
      In my experience, having used smartphones since 2008 (Nokia N95, N900, then mostly Android since), I can confidently say that 4-5 inches is a sweet spot for usability/portability. Anything less than that becomes difficult to type on and larger than that obv improves readability but you can go up to 50 inches if you disregard portability and I haven't had a 5+ inch mobile that I haven't had problems with keeping put in my shorts pocket. And handling the phone with one hand gets increasingly more difficult when you go above 5. And I think I have slightly larger than average hands (good pianist fingers). The idiocy is focusing on slim devices. Just make them a bit thicker if the chips/circuits don't fit otherwise (and increase battery life while at it). And yeah this was more of a ramble, not directed at your post. But I agree. I already have an Amazfit Bip (~€60) with a 3-4 week battery life that I use solely to get notifications on my wrist instead of having to pick up my phone. A watch is completely usable for anything else than a passive reading device though (at least until speech-to-text or (some kind of) gestures makes leaps forward). If as you say the devices were more interconnected (Chromecast is a step in this direction, connecting screens/TV's) the form factor of one specific becomes less important. But, since we don't have this now, why not give the consumer a choice? My main gripe is that everything is in the 5-6 range whereas a little while back (2-3 years?) you could find a broad range of smartphones between 4-6 inches. It's gone from 100/0 in <4" vs >4" to 0/100. I would be fine to even have 20/80. /rant
rsync 7y ago
"Of course, no one wants to place phone calls by typing a lengthy command into their terminal" Are you kidding ? That is all I've ever wanted to do. I have been asking, casually, for a "gnu-phoneutils" package for several years that would give us a small phone tooling suite ... I have largely built this out myself with twilio and, in some ways, it is no longer necessary given that I have built my own little mini-telco inside of twilio, but still ...
- jdillaaa 7y ago
  Can you provide more info on this Twilio mini-telco? I’ve been working on something similar to work around the lack of well supported libraries for telephony
  - rsync 7y ago
    My phone uses a sim card from a verizon MVNO. I don't even know the phone number. "My" phone number was provisioned, and has always lived, in Twilio. I set up a simple call forward and SMS forward to my SIM number. When I land in a foreign country, I get a new sim card and just point the forwards to the new number. Easy. I wrote a shell script that allows me to SMS from the command line from my phone number. So I can SMS people from an airplane even though my handset is off. If I lost my handset I could still SMS you. It's also nice to have a proper date/time stamped SMS log that lives in /var/mail/sms ... I use this a lot. My favorite thing about all of this is that I have finally removed voicemail from my life. Hint: you need to tell your carrier, with star-71, to forward to a "black hole" number at the end of your call sequence, otherwise verizon will jump in and say "the wireless blah blah voicemail box that is not set up blah blah ...". So my twilio number rings for X seconds (whatever I set the timeout to) but then the call progresses to verizon, but verizon has been instructed with star-71 command to forward calls to a second number I set up in twilio that does nothing but hang up. That's my "black hole" number and you can insert that into the end of a lot of workflows like this. Calling has to be done with a voip app on your phone because, of course, you cannot call from your twilio number directly from your phone. Well, you could, if perhaps you called yourself and then set up some logic where you type in the phone number you really want and then twilio forwards you there, but I think it's easier to use a nice VOIP app ... I use groundwire, but whatever works. I might try to formalize all of this and present it at Signal next year ... there are a lot of other neat things you can do ....
mttyng 7y ago
God, I want to mess around with one of these so, so, sooo badly. But with a 14 month-old toddling around the house it would probably end up just sitting, untouched, for a indeterminate amount of time. But still...
- spurgu 7y ago
  Toddlers like smartphones!
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
IMO, Librem5 and PinePhone are the most exciting news of this decade w.r.t mobile ecosystem for hackers, tinkerers, enthusiasts. Librem5 stuck to its security, privacy first agenda and managed to build a phone with PC grade hardware. PinePhone stuck to its affordability first agenda, bringing a Linux capable smartphone hardware to the masses. My only wish is that these project become commercially sustainable and attractive enough for the major smartphone brands to join open-source party to make a dent in the Appstore/Playstore duopoly. Edit: Monoploy->Duopoly.
- unnouinceput 7y ago
  *duopoly
  - Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
    Thanks, edited.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  I think Windows Mobile gave up just prior to the best chance of breaking the duopoly: PWAs. Most app developers will never want to support a half a dozen phone OSes. The solution will inevitably, eventually, be the web.
  - Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
    I'm not sure how much effort went into supporting PWAs for Windows Phone, I used to develop for that ecosystem during 8.x and the browser was a mess; cordova apps for WP required specific hacks to basic elements such as header, footer etc. Besides, they where making good progress with supporting android apps in WP with 'Project Astoria' and iOS apps with 'Project islandwood'; both of those were pulled off abruptly. There was even a rumour in the WP community at that point that Project Astoria became too good that MS brass worried that native WP development may go extinct. Btw, recently german WP enthusiasts managed to get Project Astoria working on several WP phones[1]. [1]https://windowsunited.de/so-koennt-ihr-jede-beliebige-android-app-auf-eurem-windows-phone-nutzen/ https://windowsunited.de/so-koennt-ihr-jede-beliebige-androi...
ge96 7y ago
My concerns are: resting ram usage, could I decrease if I could run like a tiling manager(with some main buttons). And can it run on virgin mobile/cheap networks like that edit: holy crap this sway thing may be the i3 hmm, next question would be can you attach it to a big monitor + keyboard/mouse through the USB C
- mouldysammich 7y ago
  I think hdmi out is supposed to work, according to a blog post from a few months ago anyway. https://www.pine64.org/2019/06/06/june-2019-news-pinephone-pinebook-pro-and-pinetab/ https://www.pine64.org/2019/06/06/june-2019-news-pinephone-p...
  - ge96 7y ago
    that's good to know, I think possibly if it was more powerful would be down to use it as a "single all around device" granted I'm not doing like hardcore video processing/gaming generally just software stuff.
- stamps 7y ago
  The hardware is there. With some work a USB C dock can be plugged in and the phone can be used as a portable work station.
  - ge96 7y ago
    that's the plan hopefully if they keep going
connorgutman 7y ago
I pre-ordered a braveheart and cannot wait to start contributing code to make mobile Linux more usable! Of course it's not the right phone for many people yet, but what the Pinephone symbolizes is the first affordable and (hopefully) widely available Linux phone. What made me pull the trigger is that, unlike others such as Librem, Pine64 seems to be taking a similar approach to the Raspberry Pi. Instead of reinventing the wheel and forcing users into custom software like Librem has done with Phosh, Pine64 is building a launchpad for existing projects such as PostmarketOS, Plasma Mobile, Manjaro ARM, UBports, and others to grow their visions. If you build it, they will come (and hopefully submit pull requests)!
ncmncm 7y ago
Why do these things (pine, librem) have so much trouble producing audio? It seems like that would have been one of the first things to have got working.
- gsich 7y ago
  Shady modem manufacturers.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    I don't think the modem is involved in driving the speaker or microphone.
- blihp 7y ago
  In the case of the PinePhone, they aren't doing any OS/application development. So it will be up to distro spinners and upstream developers to solve the software problem. Part of what Pine64 is trying to do is kickstart an ecosystem that gets people working on these sorts of things. It's a chicken and egg problem: there aren't currently any widely available Linux smartphones so no one is working on drivers/applications, there is minimal driver support so there are no widely available Linux smartphones. By just shipping a reasonably priced, reasonably open (as much as it can be given the cellular modem situation) phone they are solving one of the biggest problems. 2020 should be a fun and interesting year for Open Source on mobile...
- wott 7y ago
  The Linux platform is really really really not famous for the convenience, ease of use, stability and reliability of its audio stack. Or of its stack of audio stacks, actually...
neiman 7y ago
As long as I can run Firefox on it, and it got a micro-SIM, I'm good. There's a web alternative for most apps I use, where besides that I just need a tiny computer in my pocket with constant connection to the internet (hence, micro-SIM). I still wish FirefoxOS would have come to live..
- pusheenomics 7y ago
  I would love Firefox OS to resurrect...
  - pabs3 7y ago
    The Boot 2 Gecko OS was the community-developed successor of FirefoxOS and KaiOS is the commercial proprietary fork of B2G but unfortunately B2G is no longer maintained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B2G_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B2G_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
    - pusheenomics 7y ago
      At least KaiOS is very successful but it’s weird that it’s proprietary.
  - neiman 7y ago
    I just saw people using it when I visited Mozilla, but it looked fantastic then. Not to mention the moral aspect of it.
- ddevault 7y ago
  I use Firefox (desktop) on mine and it works quite well, and has good performance. I wonder if it can be configured to be a bit more mobile-friendly OOTB, maybe with some about:config flags?
  - MrRadar 7y ago
    There's a meta-bug on Bugzilla for adding a mobile-style frontend to desktop Firefox for the Librem 5 and Pinephone: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1579348 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1579348 Not a lot of work has been done since hardware has been scarce so it has not been a high priority.
SirHound 7y ago
> rumor has it that a call has successfully been placed This has been my perception of Linux in general.
- MartijnBraam 7y ago
  There have been calls made with the PinePhone hardware, it just needs some more integration and we're having some issues with call audio on the speaker on the pinephone.
- smichel17 7y ago
  If you're referring to desktop Linux, it's very much not this way, for the last 5 or so years. Installation Just Works unless you're dual booting, in which case it Just Works until Windows updates and overwrites boot files because it assumes it's the only OS installed. Drivers Just Work as long as you're not using some obscure hardware. Installing apps Just Works. Anything web (and let's face it, that's a lot of things nowadays) Just Works. The only times when "rumor has it someone made it work" happens, that I've come across, is running a subset of Windows games in wine. Specifically, games that use invasive client-side anticheat (eg, EAC, which loads a kernel driver to do its snooping).
hellotomyrars 7y ago
The phone he always wanted is a phone that basically doesn’t work at all? Like, not even as an equivalence to a typical smartphone, but even a dumb phone? I also yearn for a FOSS/Linux phone, and it feels like we’re getting closer, bit I feel like the author is fooling themself a bit.
- boomlinde 7y ago
  > The phone he always wanted is a phone that basically doesn’t work at all? I feel like it is intellectually dishonest to characterize the phone mainly as "not working" and question his decision on that basis. That's not the reason that he wants it. It's the prospect of helping build and eventually having a FOSS phone ecosystem that is the main draw. > I also yearn for a FOSS/Linux phone, and it feels like we’re getting closer Guess why. Is it because a) some driven developers buy this product long before it is generally useful to develop the software necessary to support a full-fledged FOSS phone, or b) because people like you are patiently waiting for that software to drop in your lap?
OrgNet 7y ago
I wish I could use that dream phone on Xfinity/Comcast mobile, but even if they use Verizon tower, they block most phones that are Verizon-compatible... they only allow BYOD if you have an iPhone, Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel. I have a phone that isn't supposed to work with Comcast mobile, but 4g works for about 30 minutes if I reboot... I wonder if it would be the same with this phone.
baybal2 7y ago
I'm very impressed that they managed to ship at all. Commercial enterprises with such small budgets flip very often.
- lunchables 7y ago
  It is amazing that they consistently produce these products, I'm continually impressed by them. They are doing exactly the right thing, at exactly the right price points to kick start some of these things (linux phone, arm laptops).
crashhacker 7y ago
mfw still waiting for google's ara modular phone
padraic7a 7y ago
It's cool that he's writing his own shell but I think that Ubuntu Touch as maintained by Ubports is worth a mention as it's going to be one of the available options for the Pine Phone. The UI is slick and well developed. The app ecosystem isn't amazing but you get a browser, choice of Telegram clients, Signal client etc. You can get an idea of the range of apps here https://open-store.io/?sort=-updated_date&type=app https://open-store.io/?sort=-updated_date&type=app HN readers might like to note that there is also an established developer community and resources like documentation. Well worth a look if you're thinking of getting a Pinephone, and / or developing a anything for it.
- Tepix 7y ago
  I think that too much fragmentation in this space can turn out to be a big problem for Linux phones. Designing and implementing a user-friendly and fast GUI is a very big task. Ubuntu Touch has had a lot of work go into it.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Except that the browser on UBT is bare-bones, allows no extension and has virtually no useful option. Ubuntu Touch could be almost be a usable system if it has a good enough browser, a good enough email client and a good enough chat application. It has none of them.
  - solarkraft 7y ago
    Can't you just install desktop Firefox?
- ColanR 7y ago
  I keep thinking that we might take this opportunity of rebuilding an OS from the ground up to implement something like Plan 9. The usual adoption issue of drivers and apps seems irrelevant here. Fundamentally, its distributed nature would allow far greater integration between desktop and mobile hardware. Mobile + laptop + NAS would be so deeply integrated that they would better be considered a single computer with multiple more-or-less accessible terminals - and if a mobile device was part of that integration, it would represent a sea change in the utility of smartphones. I'm personally a big fan of how a mobile device could 'automatically' use the processing power of a Plan 9 desktop whenever they're both on the home network. (just a plan 9 newbie that is enamoured of the system design) Edit: BTW, pretty sure this is what Google's project fuschia is based on.
throw7 7y ago
I had a neo freerunner and the excitement behind this post is similar to how I felt back then. It's just really depressing that it's a decade later and the realities of making an open phone is still... difficult.
rwmj 7y ago
Could someone who knows say how this compares to the Sony Xperia running Jolla / Sailfish? I guess that Jolla contains some binary blobs in the kernel still whereas this is fully free.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Sailfish OS uses Android driver blobs via libhybris on the Xperia. I guess on the PinePhone either open drivers or native compiled blobs are in use. But from the user perspective likely the main change from the Xperia would be the missing Android emulation layer. This is only available on officially supported devices, which the xperias (X, XA2, 10). On community ports, which Sailfish OS for the PinePhone is at the moment, the Android emulation layer is not available. I guess that could change if there is enough demand to roll it in to the Sailfish X program, like the Gemini PDA. BTW, other than the Android emulator a and two more things (MS Exchange, typing prediction) the community ports are pretty much identical to the officially supported devices, all native apps will work, etc.
NilsIRL 7y ago
Can someone explain to me why Purism has so much trouble making the Librem 5 when the PinePhone exists? Purism has had so many pre orders and the PinePhone only costs $149 but with that budget can't make the Librem. What is it that makes it so difficult?
scalatronn 7y ago
Good opportunity to use Flutter and build apps for that :)

PinePhone Review

487 points by Bl4ckb0ne 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ohiovr 7y ago

Can python be used to make an "app"?

jamii 7y ago
It's running straight-up linux. You can write apps in python with gtk or qt, or anything else that works on a linux desktop.
- xur17 7y ago
  I might have to get one... I really miss this from my n900.
m4rtink 7y ago
Sailfosh OS is being ported to PinePhone & some of the most used third party native Sailfish OS applications are written in Python 3 + QML. :)
- thekyle 7y ago
  > Sailfosh OS I believe this should be Sailfish OS
curioussavage 7y ago
I have a couple gtk apps in progress written in python for phones using purism's libhandy. gnome builder makes it pretty darn easy, though Gtk's docs could use some love.
- tenkabuto 7y ago
  Woah, I didn't realize that we can use it in Python already! How do you go about using it? I see that there's Python mentioned on https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Purism/libhandy https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Purism/libhandy but would it still not work if the phone itself doesn't have libhandy? Would you be able to install libhandy on Ubuntu Touch or Plasma Mobile?

livueta 7y ago

That's extremely exciting news! Working LTE? No blobs? "Holy shit!" is an understatement. Tangentially, what's an appropriate entry point for a reasonably capable C/C++/Unix systems programmer without prior mobile guts experience interested in working on software for this platform? I'm kind of assuming that'd be "grab a compatible device, clone postmarket, rtfm" but confirmation/pointers would be appreciated.

kop316 7y ago
I hate to temper your excitement a little bit (I am excited too!), but I am not a bit surprised that LTE data works. Calling and SMS/MMS over LTE (for T-Mobile USA) are two things that at least that as of today, you need proprietary libraries to have it function on Android, and likely don't work on the Pinephone. I strongly suspect that other USA carriers will have the same issue (I say that because there are additionally several proprietary Verizon and Sprint blobs that are resident in factory images that need to be put in third party ROMs). The Librem 5 has LTE mobile data as well, but it has those same issues (no VoLTE, SMS only over 3g, no MMS for T-Mobile USA). I am hopeful that between Purism and the Pinephone community that this is a solvable (but lengthy) issue.
- kick 7y ago
  Calling and SMS works without proprietary software already. The ubPorts people already did it: https://twitter.com/thepine64/status/1202162774186582017 https://twitter.com/thepine64/status/1202162774186582017
  - kop316 7y ago
    Is it on 3g or LTE? I wouldn't be surprised if both work over 3g, but I would be very surprised if it works over LTE.
  - pabs3 7y ago
    While the baseband runs Linux (IIRC PinePhone uses a Quectel modem), it probably runs proprietary software for the full LTE/3G/2G stack. https://osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/ https://osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/

kop316 7y ago

Drew (Or sircmpwn? Sorry I don't know how you prefer to be called) since I know you're on here, if I may ask: - What provider are you using? - Is it VoLTE that is working, or does it drop down to 3g for calls? - Does SMS work in LTE mode or do you have to drop it down to 3g? I have a Librem 5 birch, and from my experience in rolling my own Android AOSP version, that to get T-mobile to work with VoLTE, SMS/MMS with LTE, or WiFi Calling, you have to install proprietary blobs. EDIT: I should add the Librem 5 Birch has LTE data on T-mobile, but I have to drop to 3G to get SMS and phone call functionality, and MMS is additionally non-functional at all on T-Mobile. Meant to post that for the Librem 5.

Avamander 7y ago
VoLTE requires carrier support unless some very clever hacks I'm unaware. I am pretty sure that's the case with PinePhone as well, meaning it will drop to 3G.
- kop316 7y ago
  That's my assumption as well, I was just curious. Their latest post indicates that they are wokring on VoLTE: https://www.pine64.org/2019/12/05/december-update-thank-you-for-2019/ https://www.pine64.org/2019/12/05/december-update-thank-you-...
  - Avamander 7y ago
    Maybe they want to support it so that carriers could support it?
    - kop316 7y ago
      I assume they want to support it, as well as any other carrier feature. I just have no knowledge on how difficult it is, nor in what state it is in now.
swiley 7y ago
Honestly I'd be happy with just 2g and no mms at this point.

ntw1103 7y ago

Looks pretty sweet, the review is encouraging. It is nice to see no blogs, very nice. I ordered the Braveheart edition, the moment they were available. I am pretty excited about the possibly keyboard accessory talked about in the latest blog post from pine64.

catchmeifyoucan 7y ago

Would be super cool to build a web based distribution like Firefox OS for this.

kick 7y ago
Why? Not even Mozilla had faith in Firefox OS, and on a phone like this, it's barely powerful enough to. I'm not trying to attack you, I'm just genuinely confused at this viewpoint.
- Multicomp 7y ago
  None of my below rants are directed at you personally! FF OS lives on today as KaiOS and is extremely popular in the devloping world where even an Android Go device requires far too much hardware specs for the price a given set of locals want or can afford to pay. If you look at some of the devices that run it like the JioPhone, you can see that it sits quite comfortably in the space formerly occupied by the BREW systems of the world, but has little touches like email sending, Google Assistant, etc. Edit: just to give some scale to the Android Go bloat (let alone plain old Android), the HTC Desire Z (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z) has 512 MB of RAM and a paltry processor, not powerful even for its day. That device ran the current set of Android OSes at the time, and if modded today, can even be made to run Android KitKat, where official support stopped at Android Gingerbread. Today, that device is barely considered Android Go compatible, mostly due to its CPU and storage limitations. In 2010, we took pictures, checked emails, played games, browsed the mobile web, performed calls, texts, IMs, watched videos, streamed music, and drove/bussed/walked with navigation. Today...we do much the same things, but in a 'once more, with ~~feeling~~ AI` manner. There are very few totally new things compared to 2010, we just let mobile apps bloat up to web development-level bloat. In my cynical moments, I look at the processing power eaten on my OS, wasted on wakelocks and ads and think to myself that somewhere, Ralphie is in the ~~Magic School Bus~~ cell phone factory and spinning dials saying 'more RAM, more CPU, more network speed, I don't know what to do, the software is all slow!' because every time he ups a spec, the bloat absorbs it without reducing user latency one bit.

thekyle 7y ago

I'm very enthusiastic about this device and have ordered the Brave Heart addition. I really like the price point of $150. It makes it pretty easy for casual developers to pick one up and should aid with getting new software written for it. I'm sure the Librem 5 is also very nice, but it's higher price makes it much less accessible.

throwawaysea 7y ago

Will this work with US carriers? I am not clear on whether there are limitations imposed by carriers to only allow "certified" phones.

kick 7y ago
Drew lives in Philadelphia, and he notes that it works, so yes. Here's a tip, though, if you ever get concerned about whether or not a phone will work with your carrier. Check what modem it has. In the PinePhone's case, it's the EG25-G. http://files.pine64.org/doc/datasheet/project_anakin/LTE_module/Quectel_EG25-G_LTE_Specification_V1.1_Preliminary_20180522%20(002).pdf http://files.pine64.org/doc/datasheet/project_anakin/LTE_mod... So now that we know the name, let's look and see if your carrier mentions it as one it approves. For the sake of brevity, I'll assume you're on AT&T. https://www.att.com/modules https://www.att.com/modules Google's cache nicely and conveniently converts spreadsheets into web documents, so let's view it on that: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G7My6zSEmpAJ:https://www.att.com/modules https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G7My6z... The EG25-G is #51, and is fully supported.
kop316 7y ago
This was a discussion with the Librem 5. I know that T-mobile USA does not whitelist phones (My Librem 5 makes calls, sends/recieves SMS, and gets LTE data on T-mobile). Calls/SMS don't work on LTE though (I think due to proprietary software, that is true at least on Android). The Pinephone Braveheart Edition is compatible with most of the LTE/3G/2G bands for T-Mobile. However, I think Verizon at the least used to do this, and may still do it. Sprint also has some extra proprietary things on Android and I don't know their functionality.

monoideism 7y ago

"right now, there are very few people, perhaps only dozens, for whom this phone is the right phone, given the current level of software support." I think he greatly underestimates the number of people with the interest and ability to do this kind of work. If it's easily available, I'll probably get one and hack on it, and maybe contribute to some projects. And I'm far from something special or unusual.

pjmlp 7y ago
The countless commercial failures of such projects since OpenMoko proves otherwise.
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  It's becoming easier and easier to develop new products in this space. Hell, there are a few "open source" phone projects out there that are just white label products imported from China. The first Neo phone was released a year before the first Android smartphone even hit the market. It's a bit unfair to compare these new projects with something like OpenMoko.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  Openmoko sold 13000 phones, which is much more than "dozens." Commercial failure does not necessarily mean you can fit all the customers in a room.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    13k is a rounding error. Apple sells that many iphones every 30 minutes. (I'm not kidding... they sell 217M iPhones a year = 594k a day = 24.9k/hr)
    - bildung 7y ago
      This is about open source phones, of which Apple has sold exactly zero.

jancsika 7y ago

I want that touch-drag done yesterday! Or at least the latency in half. Which parts of the UI/hardware stack are the culprits here? I want some butts[1]! 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS9j_-mqSWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS9j_-mqSWc

grizzles 7y ago

Hey Drew: I have a suggestion for sway/mobile. How about a simple windowmanager that shows a webview on screen and that exports a simple js api for window operations like { min,max,restore,setxy } so that frontend guys could make their own window managers. I think we'd see so much innovation on both desktop & mobile.

dahfizz 7y ago
I've never seen something more web-dev than asking someone else to do this much work for you so that you don't have to learn a new language. I don't want the "innovation" of having awful web ui on my desktop.
- grizzles 7y ago
  It's an idea to provoke discussion. If you read the blog post he's got a whole list of app-y type stuff planned. This might be a way for him to save time on all that.
- sangnoir 7y ago
  > I don't want the "innovation" of having awful web ui on my desktop. Then don't clone/download web ui projects? I don't understand the bile.
- ge96 7y ago
  > I've never seen something more web-dev ha oh man
haecceity 7y ago
Isn't that what KWLP does?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

miohtama 7y ago

Maybe it could be called a 3G modem platform instead of a phone. To write UI software for a modern phone takes 150+ full time engineers in my experience. Only few organisations have this capability and this is why these things will never be phones people use.

catdog 7y ago
Wouldn't be too pessimistic on the UI side. Building decent desktop UIs isn't easier and still people managed to do it without a (single) organization in the background.
nerdponx 7y ago
At least on the design side, this is a good opportunity for up and coming UX designers to build portfolio pieces while also being useful (instead of redesigning Spotify for the 1000th time).
curioussavage 7y ago
150+ full time engineers!! no way... purism already did it with a handful. Their new shell has a great design in my opinion and it runs ok. I'm not a fan of plasma mobile but it seems ok too. The hard part it seems to me is the layers below the actual UI, gpu support, energy consumption etc. I'm confident these shells will get to the point where they are maybe better for the average phone user than desktop linux shells are for the average desktop user, mostly because reasonable phone UI patterns are more narrowly defined. I'll bet apps support and camera quality will remain bigger deal killers after the shells mature some more.
Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
It takes that much the first time you do it. A lot of time and energy goes not simply into writing the code, but into figuring out (through writing wrong code many times and then rebuilding it) how the UI really should work, feel, look, etc. But now they have the advantage of already seing all those results and knowing exactly what they need to build. This save a lot of time.
boomlinde 7y ago

tomger 7y ago

Now if they’d create an iPhone SE sized one... I’d have enough passion to figure out how to run Linux on it ;)

spurgu 7y ago
This! I am so sad to see that practically all mobile devices on the market right now are 5+ inches. I could even go with 5, which is considered "small" nowadays, but PinePhone and Librem5 are 5.95" and 5.7" respectively. Why did phablets become the norm, at least give us a choice... :(
- vhodges 7y ago
  Somewhat (?) related: https://palm.com/ https://palm.com/ Perhaps PostmarketOS or at least Lineage might support it one day (or now?!? Didn't look)
  - spurgu 7y ago
    Haha, hate to be that guy, but that's too small. The iPhone SE is about as small as I would go in order to still be able to type somewhat comfortably on a keyboard in portrait mode.
- squarefoot 7y ago
  Large screens are more usable, small screens are more portable. There's no way to have both unless we completely rethink the mobile platform itself moving away from the dream of having one big clunky jack of all trades, but rather as a group of devices, all interconnected (mesh PAN + shared storage) and equipped with the hardware they need for the task, so that one small screen device is used as a phone, a bigger one to navigate, read bigger documents, watch movies etc, one even smaller one to shoot photos and videos, one to listen to music, record it etc.
  - spurgu 7y ago
    In my experience, having used smartphones since 2008 (Nokia N95, N900, then mostly Android since), I can confidently say that 4-5 inches is a sweet spot for usability/portability. Anything less than that becomes difficult to type on and larger than that obv improves readability but you can go up to 50 inches if you disregard portability and I haven't had a 5+ inch mobile that I haven't had problems with keeping put in my shorts pocket. And handling the phone with one hand gets increasingly more difficult when you go above 5. And I think I have slightly larger than average hands (good pianist fingers). The idiocy is focusing on slim devices. Just make them a bit thicker if the chips/circuits don't fit otherwise (and increase battery life while at it). And yeah this was more of a ramble, not directed at your post. But I agree. I already have an Amazfit Bip (~€60) with a 3-4 week battery life that I use solely to get notifications on my wrist instead of having to pick up my phone. A watch is completely usable for anything else than a passive reading device though (at least until speech-to-text or (some kind of) gestures makes leaps forward). If as you say the devices were more interconnected (Chromecast is a step in this direction, connecting screens/TV's) the form factor of one specific becomes less important. But, since we don't have this now, why not give the consumer a choice? My main gripe is that everything is in the 5-6 range whereas a little while back (2-3 years?) you could find a broad range of smartphones between 4-6 inches. It's gone from 100/0 in <4" vs >4" to 0/100. I would be fine to even have 20/80. /rant

rsync 7y ago

"Of course, no one wants to place phone calls by typing a lengthy command into their terminal" Are you kidding ? That is all I've ever wanted to do. I have been asking, casually, for a "gnu-phoneutils" package for several years that would give us a small phone tooling suite ... I have largely built this out myself with twilio and, in some ways, it is no longer necessary given that I have built my own little mini-telco inside of twilio, but still ...

jdillaaa 7y ago
Can you provide more info on this Twilio mini-telco? I’ve been working on something similar to work around the lack of well supported libraries for telephony
- rsync 7y ago
  My phone uses a sim card from a verizon MVNO. I don't even know the phone number. "My" phone number was provisioned, and has always lived, in Twilio. I set up a simple call forward and SMS forward to my SIM number. When I land in a foreign country, I get a new sim card and just point the forwards to the new number. Easy. I wrote a shell script that allows me to SMS from the command line from my phone number. So I can SMS people from an airplane even though my handset is off. If I lost my handset I could still SMS you. It's also nice to have a proper date/time stamped SMS log that lives in /var/mail/sms ... I use this a lot. My favorite thing about all of this is that I have finally removed voicemail from my life. Hint: you need to tell your carrier, with star-71, to forward to a "black hole" number at the end of your call sequence, otherwise verizon will jump in and say "the wireless blah blah voicemail box that is not set up blah blah ...". So my twilio number rings for X seconds (whatever I set the timeout to) but then the call progresses to verizon, but verizon has been instructed with star-71 command to forward calls to a second number I set up in twilio that does nothing but hang up. That's my "black hole" number and you can insert that into the end of a lot of workflows like this. Calling has to be done with a voip app on your phone because, of course, you cannot call from your twilio number directly from your phone. Well, you could, if perhaps you called yourself and then set up some logic where you type in the phone number you really want and then twilio forwards you there, but I think it's easier to use a nice VOIP app ... I use groundwire, but whatever works. I might try to formalize all of this and present it at Signal next year ... there are a lot of other neat things you can do ....

mttyng 7y ago

God, I want to mess around with one of these so, so, sooo badly. But with a 14 month-old toddling around the house it would probably end up just sitting, untouched, for a indeterminate amount of time. But still...

spurgu 7y ago
Toddlers like smartphones!

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

IMO, Librem5 and PinePhone are the most exciting news of this decade w.r.t mobile ecosystem for hackers, tinkerers, enthusiasts. Librem5 stuck to its security, privacy first agenda and managed to build a phone with PC grade hardware. PinePhone stuck to its affordability first agenda, bringing a Linux capable smartphone hardware to the masses. My only wish is that these project become commercially sustainable and attractive enough for the major smartphone brands to join open-source party to make a dent in the Appstore/Playstore duopoly. Edit: Monoploy->Duopoly.

unnouinceput 7y ago
*duopoly
- Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
  Thanks, edited.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
I think Windows Mobile gave up just prior to the best chance of breaking the duopoly: PWAs. Most app developers will never want to support a half a dozen phone OSes. The solution will inevitably, eventually, be the web.
- Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
  I'm not sure how much effort went into supporting PWAs for Windows Phone, I used to develop for that ecosystem during 8.x and the browser was a mess; cordova apps for WP required specific hacks to basic elements such as header, footer etc. Besides, they where making good progress with supporting android apps in WP with 'Project Astoria' and iOS apps with 'Project islandwood'; both of those were pulled off abruptly. There was even a rumour in the WP community at that point that Project Astoria became too good that MS brass worried that native WP development may go extinct. Btw, recently german WP enthusiasts managed to get Project Astoria working on several WP phones[1]. [1]https://windowsunited.de/so-koennt-ihr-jede-beliebige-android-app-auf-eurem-windows-phone-nutzen/ https://windowsunited.de/so-koennt-ihr-jede-beliebige-androi...

ge96 7y ago

My concerns are: resting ram usage, could I decrease if I could run like a tiling manager(with some main buttons). And can it run on virgin mobile/cheap networks like that edit: holy crap this sway thing may be the i3 hmm, next question would be can you attach it to a big monitor + keyboard/mouse through the USB C

mouldysammich 7y ago
I think hdmi out is supposed to work, according to a blog post from a few months ago anyway. https://www.pine64.org/2019/06/06/june-2019-news-pinephone-pinebook-pro-and-pinetab/ https://www.pine64.org/2019/06/06/june-2019-news-pinephone-p...
- ge96 7y ago
  that's good to know, I think possibly if it was more powerful would be down to use it as a "single all around device" granted I'm not doing like hardcore video processing/gaming generally just software stuff.
stamps 7y ago
The hardware is there. With some work a USB C dock can be plugged in and the phone can be used as a portable work station.
- ge96 7y ago
  that's the plan hopefully if they keep going

connorgutman 7y ago

I pre-ordered a braveheart and cannot wait to start contributing code to make mobile Linux more usable! Of course it's not the right phone for many people yet, but what the Pinephone symbolizes is the first affordable and (hopefully) widely available Linux phone. What made me pull the trigger is that, unlike others such as Librem, Pine64 seems to be taking a similar approach to the Raspberry Pi. Instead of reinventing the wheel and forcing users into custom software like Librem has done with Phosh, Pine64 is building a launchpad for existing projects such as PostmarketOS, Plasma Mobile, Manjaro ARM, UBports, and others to grow their visions. If you build it, they will come (and hopefully submit pull requests)!

ncmncm 7y ago

Why do these things (pine, librem) have so much trouble producing audio? It seems like that would have been one of the first things to have got working.

gsich 7y ago
Shady modem manufacturers.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  I don't think the modem is involved in driving the speaker or microphone.
blihp 7y ago
In the case of the PinePhone, they aren't doing any OS/application development. So it will be up to distro spinners and upstream developers to solve the software problem. Part of what Pine64 is trying to do is kickstart an ecosystem that gets people working on these sorts of things. It's a chicken and egg problem: there aren't currently any widely available Linux smartphones so no one is working on drivers/applications, there is minimal driver support so there are no widely available Linux smartphones. By just shipping a reasonably priced, reasonably open (as much as it can be given the cellular modem situation) phone they are solving one of the biggest problems. 2020 should be a fun and interesting year for Open Source on mobile...
wott 7y ago
The Linux platform is really really really not famous for the convenience, ease of use, stability and reliability of its audio stack. Or of its stack of audio stacks, actually...

neiman 7y ago

As long as I can run Firefox on it, and it got a micro-SIM, I'm good. There's a web alternative for most apps I use, where besides that I just need a tiny computer in my pocket with constant connection to the internet (hence, micro-SIM). I still wish FirefoxOS would have come to live..

pusheenomics 7y ago
I would love Firefox OS to resurrect...
- pabs3 7y ago
  The Boot 2 Gecko OS was the community-developed successor of FirefoxOS and KaiOS is the commercial proprietary fork of B2G but unfortunately B2G is no longer maintained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B2G_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B2G_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
  - pusheenomics 7y ago
    At least KaiOS is very successful but it’s weird that it’s proprietary.
- neiman 7y ago
  I just saw people using it when I visited Mozilla, but it looked fantastic then. Not to mention the moral aspect of it.
ddevault 7y ago
I use Firefox (desktop) on mine and it works quite well, and has good performance. I wonder if it can be configured to be a bit more mobile-friendly OOTB, maybe with some about:config flags?
- MrRadar 7y ago
  There's a meta-bug on Bugzilla for adding a mobile-style frontend to desktop Firefox for the Librem 5 and Pinephone: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1579348 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1579348 Not a lot of work has been done since hardware has been scarce so it has not been a high priority.

SirHound 7y ago

> rumor has it that a call has successfully been placed This has been my perception of Linux in general.

MartijnBraam 7y ago
There have been calls made with the PinePhone hardware, it just needs some more integration and we're having some issues with call audio on the speaker on the pinephone.
smichel17 7y ago
If you're referring to desktop Linux, it's very much not this way, for the last 5 or so years. Installation Just Works unless you're dual booting, in which case it Just Works until Windows updates and overwrites boot files because it assumes it's the only OS installed. Drivers Just Work as long as you're not using some obscure hardware. Installing apps Just Works. Anything web (and let's face it, that's a lot of things nowadays) Just Works. The only times when "rumor has it someone made it work" happens, that I've come across, is running a subset of Windows games in wine. Specifically, games that use invasive client-side anticheat (eg, EAC, which loads a kernel driver to do its snooping).

hellotomyrars 7y ago

The phone he always wanted is a phone that basically doesn’t work at all? Like, not even as an equivalence to a typical smartphone, but even a dumb phone? I also yearn for a FOSS/Linux phone, and it feels like we’re getting closer, bit I feel like the author is fooling themself a bit.

boomlinde 7y ago
> The phone he always wanted is a phone that basically doesn’t work at all? I feel like it is intellectually dishonest to characterize the phone mainly as "not working" and question his decision on that basis. That's not the reason that he wants it. It's the prospect of helping build and eventually having a FOSS phone ecosystem that is the main draw. > I also yearn for a FOSS/Linux phone, and it feels like we’re getting closer Guess why. Is it because a) some driven developers buy this product long before it is generally useful to develop the software necessary to support a full-fledged FOSS phone, or b) because people like you are patiently waiting for that software to drop in your lap?

OrgNet 7y ago

I wish I could use that dream phone on Xfinity/Comcast mobile, but even if they use Verizon tower, they block most phones that are Verizon-compatible... they only allow BYOD if you have an iPhone, Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel. I have a phone that isn't supposed to work with Comcast mobile, but 4g works for about 30 minutes if I reboot... I wonder if it would be the same with this phone.

baybal2 7y ago

I'm very impressed that they managed to ship at all. Commercial enterprises with such small budgets flip very often.

lunchables 7y ago
It is amazing that they consistently produce these products, I'm continually impressed by them. They are doing exactly the right thing, at exactly the right price points to kick start some of these things (linux phone, arm laptops).

crashhacker 7y ago

mfw still waiting for google's ara modular phone

padraic7a 7y ago

It's cool that he's writing his own shell but I think that Ubuntu Touch as maintained by Ubports is worth a mention as it's going to be one of the available options for the Pine Phone. The UI is slick and well developed. The app ecosystem isn't amazing but you get a browser, choice of Telegram clients, Signal client etc. You can get an idea of the range of apps here https://open-store.io/?sort=-updated_date&type=app https://open-store.io/?sort=-updated_date&type=app HN readers might like to note that there is also an established developer community and resources like documentation. Well worth a look if you're thinking of getting a Pinephone, and / or developing a anything for it.

Tepix 7y ago
I think that too much fragmentation in this space can turn out to be a big problem for Linux phones. Designing and implementing a user-friendly and fast GUI is a very big task. Ubuntu Touch has had a lot of work go into it.
ekianjo 7y ago
Except that the browser on UBT is bare-bones, allows no extension and has virtually no useful option. Ubuntu Touch could be almost be a usable system if it has a good enough browser, a good enough email client and a good enough chat application. It has none of them.
- solarkraft 7y ago
  Can't you just install desktop Firefox?
ColanR 7y ago
I keep thinking that we might take this opportunity of rebuilding an OS from the ground up to implement something like Plan 9. The usual adoption issue of drivers and apps seems irrelevant here. Fundamentally, its distributed nature would allow far greater integration between desktop and mobile hardware. Mobile + laptop + NAS would be so deeply integrated that they would better be considered a single computer with multiple more-or-less accessible terminals - and if a mobile device was part of that integration, it would represent a sea change in the utility of smartphones. I'm personally a big fan of how a mobile device could 'automatically' use the processing power of a Plan 9 desktop whenever they're both on the home network. (just a plan 9 newbie that is enamoured of the system design) Edit: BTW, pretty sure this is what Google's project fuschia is based on.

throw7 7y ago

I had a neo freerunner and the excitement behind this post is similar to how I felt back then. It's just really depressing that it's a decade later and the realities of making an open phone is still... difficult.

rwmj 7y ago

Could someone who knows say how this compares to the Sony Xperia running Jolla / Sailfish? I guess that Jolla contains some binary blobs in the kernel still whereas this is fully free.

m4rtink 7y ago
Sailfish OS uses Android driver blobs via libhybris on the Xperia. I guess on the PinePhone either open drivers or native compiled blobs are in use. But from the user perspective likely the main change from the Xperia would be the missing Android emulation layer. This is only available on officially supported devices, which the xperias (X, XA2, 10). On community ports, which Sailfish OS for the PinePhone is at the moment, the Android emulation layer is not available. I guess that could change if there is enough demand to roll it in to the Sailfish X program, like the Gemini PDA. BTW, other than the Android emulator a and two more things (MS Exchange, typing prediction) the community ports are pretty much identical to the officially supported devices, all native apps will work, etc.

NilsIRL 7y ago

Can someone explain to me why Purism has so much trouble making the Librem 5 when the PinePhone exists? Purism has had so many pre orders and the PinePhone only costs $149 but with that budget can't make the Librem. What is it that makes it so difficult?

scalatronn 7y ago

Good opportunity to use Flutter and build apps for that :)