11 ms·

"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 gr

"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.
      - dmitriid 7y ago
        This makes open source phone cheaper to produce? Cheaper to ship? 13k phones won't cover even the costs of production, much less R&D
        squarefoot 7y ago
        Give FOSS phones the same media coverage of the iPhone, possibly including its ad induced reality distortion field, and they will sell like candies. Seriously, once the software is ready, 30 seconds of any popular celebrity showing one would make it sell hundreds thousands in a week. Problem is the small manufacturers couldn't either pay for that level of advertising or satisfy the demand without turning themselves into what they're fighting against now (venture capital, investors etc. don't come free), so I welcome numbers as small as 13k or even much less if that means the product isn't polluted by the typical corporate mindset (close as much as possible to protect intellectual property, make it obsolete sooner to sell newer models, etc). Oh and by having an unusual phone I can also play the elitist bastard with friends:*)
        dmitriid 7y ago
        Why didn't it work for Windows Phones then?
        squarefoot 7y ago
        Interesting point. I have seen some friends happily using Windows phones but most of them were/are either Microsoft employees or working mostly with Windows software, so I guess they needed the deepest integration with the Windows ecosystem, which is understandable. As for other users, it is possible that Windows phones had either some limitation compared to other platforms or they lacked the killer app that would make it appealing to other userbases. Having never used one, I can only speculate that MS wanted to change too much too early by making an user interface very consistent with the one they introduced on PCs but hard to digest just like that one, and this could have brought users away both from the PC and mobile devices. I have always found in the past very hard to migrate non technical users from Windows to Linux, but the adoption of the new interfaces from Windows 8 onward made some people I know so furious that it became really easy to convince them to try Linux; in some cases it was them who asked me to install it. That would be unthinkable before Windows 8. In the mobile world I guess it was even harder to grow an userbase since the alternative was already mainstream. They probably should have copied or mocked a mainstream mobile interface, that is, offer something an user from either Android or iOS would not find alien to use, then offer something more, say free Office apps, then after the userbase had grown start to build the rest.
    - lostgame 7y ago
      Not sure why this is being downvoted? It’s a fascinating statistic alone.
  - paulcole 7y ago
    During Q4 of 2018, Apple sold something like 20,000 iPhones an hour. 13k is an order of magnitude too low to be considered a commercial failure.
  - dorfsmay 7y ago
    Mine was unusable until I installed Android, at which point I bought an Android phone a quarter of the thickness and mass, and better screen resolution (and likely better radios as well). I too bought it because I thought I'd hack around and "maybe contribute" which quickly turn in "why am I wasting so much time on something that will probably never work".
    - Tepix 7y ago
      The screen resolution of the OpenMoko was very good at the time: It had a 640x480 2.8" screen which means a very good 286ppi.
  - Mashimo 7y ago
    Got one. Never really used it. It was not reliable.
    - seba_dos1 7y ago
      Got one. Used it for a few years. It was amazing (though not without its quirks of course).
      - dzypa 7y ago
        For most people "quirks" are unacceptable in their mobile phones. Normally one can't afford to lose a call or to have the maps application crash when you're trying to get around.
- catdog 7y ago
  I think the PinePhone can be different because 1. The thing is reasonably cheap with "good enough" specs which makes it far easier to just buy it and accept that it may be just a toy in the worst case. 2. It's likely that the specs will be "good enough" for some time so the Hardware will not be terribly outdated the time the Software reaches a usable state. 3. Smartphone hardware and manufacturing matured a lot in general so it's likely easier to get sth. working with a limited budget. In comparison the Openmoko devices were reasonably advanced for their time but were also ridden by hardware bugs.
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  OpenMoko isn't really dead, or at least the kernel isn't: http://git.goldelico.com/?p=letux-kernel.git;a=summary http://git.goldelico.com/?p=letux-kernel.git;a=summary Netscape was a commercial failure but Mozilla is still around. Similarly Blender only went open-source after a crowdfunding campaign. CyanogenMod is another interesting example, mostly open source and mostly successful until it started trying to commercialize the code. I think the community ends up being a big part of it. It's not like every PinePhone shipped is going to result in another developer for the OS, but there is some critical mass point where the software goes from broken to usable and it seems PinePhone might be getting there.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    CyanogenMod lives on, in the form of LineageOS.
  - Mashimo 7y ago
    Hol up .. I have a OpenMoko. Never really used. I can install linux with an up to date Kernel on it? Neat. I wonder what I can do with it.
- realusername 7y ago
  I see the PinePhone as a Raspberry Pi equivalent in the Smartphone world, there's definitely a big niche for that.
  - moksly 7y ago
    You don’t need your Raspberry PI to run your bank app, handle your payments or your bus-tickets. I’m not sure how I’d even purchase a non digital ticket for quite a few things in Denmark. Don’t get me wrong, I really hope something like PinePhone sees enough adoption to get the apps I need a smartphone to run so I can break away from the two monopolies. I just don’t believe it will happen when Microsoft couldn’t do it.
    - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
      Microsoft couldn't do it because everyone new (of the users) that even if they put in their effort to switch and wait for the ecosystem to grow, they will end up with just the same crap: another closed-source monopoly with it's own quirks. We won't have just two overlords, but instead 3 of the same. Wow such a difference... Now an truly open system might make a difference. Not saying it will, it has it's own problems, but comparing it to Windows Phone is not really apples to apples.
      - dmitriid 7y ago
        You greatly overestimate the number of users who care about how closed or how open an ecosystem is. If the user can't interact with their bank, whatchu YouTube, talk to their friends and parents over Snapchat or Skype, call Uber, play Spotify, etc etc etc, it doesn't matter in the least if your phone is 100% open source. Microsoft had sunk billions into trying to get the ecosystem off the ground. What makes you think that "a truly open system" will get that ecosystem?
        valvar 7y ago
        The target audience isn't people who need to use Skype, Snapchat, or Uber. But I'm sure it will be possible to run some of those android apps through anbox. Spotify has a Linux client, and for YouTube there's the FreeTube client, which actually protects users' integrity.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ssivark 7y ago
The following sentence "I am not using it as my daily driver, and I won’t for some time." and "the right phone" make me think that the dozens refer to those who might use this as their singular phone device. I'm sure many more people can afford to splurge on such a device and either play with it, or even forget about it for that matter.
- mr__y 7y ago
  This. It may not (yet) be suitable for every-day use, but it is absolutely great for pet-projects or some tinkering. Also I would love to see enthusiasts creating alternative ecosystem around this, like open, federated social networking apps or maybe something with mesh-network support and hackernews reader app (of course). It won't get mainstream in general public, but could be sort-of mainstream among groups of open/free-everything enthusiasts.
- thinkmassive 7y ago
  This is why I ordered the Brave Heart edition as soon as it was available. I'd rather get it in my hands quickly, customize the software to my liking, and if I have to buy a second device to resolve some hardware issues later this year then I'm still only out 1/4 the cost of a new iPhone, plus I have a backup device for development. I prefer going into it with the expectation of it being a "developer experience" rather than a prepackaged end-to-end solution. This, and the cost, is why I opted to go with Pine Phone over Purism Librem 5.
  - dustfinger 7y ago
    > This, and the cost, is why I opted to go with Pine Phone over Purism Librem 5 I am now considering purchasing a Pine Phone and the cost is definitely motivating. I only wish that the PinePhone had hardware kill switches like the Librem 5 has.
    - thinkmassive 7y ago
      The PinePhone actually has more kill switches for finer grained control, but they’re behind the rear cover instead of exposed on the side. PP: modem, WiFi, microphones, rear camera, front camera L5: modem, WiFi, cameras+audio Check out this comparison by Martijn Braam, a developer of postmarketOS: https://tuxphones.com/yet-another-librem-5-and-pinephone-linux-smartphone-comparison https://tuxphones.com/yet-another-librem-5-and-pinephone-lin...
saagarjha 7y ago
Would you use it as your daily driver?
- monoideism 7y ago
  No, and he says he isn't either. So that's not a distinguisher.
  - gbear605 7y ago
    I’m not sure he’s including himself in that dozen who this is the right phone for.
- jmiskovic 7y ago
  An open internet-connected battery-powered computing device that looks great and can easily fit in pocket? I would gladly carry it along regardless of its phone functionalities. It looks perfect as smart remote for automating stuff around me, maybe one day even as voice-enabled personal assistant device.
blihp 7y ago
You're right that the actual number is too low. But I think he, and Pine64, are just being responsible in managing expectations. The issue isn't just that the software isn't done, but also that the hardware may not be 100% there yet. This happens all the time with devices when something along the lines of 'oh crap, this power rail isn't stable in situation X and causes the device to reset' is discovered with pre-production hardware. The fix is usually trivial but often requires a PCB/component change. I would absolutely have ordered one already if it sounded like the hardware were final... right now it merely sounds very, very close. The message I get from these warnings is the non-zero chance that there will be some annoying hardware issue that comes to light before going into volume production. This would not be unexpected since this is the first time a wider community is getting to work with it.
- newscracker 7y ago
  From personal experience, if the original Pine64 board is anything to go by, I wouldn't expect much on software and software updates from Pine itself (it would be up to the user to figure things out).
jcelerier 7y ago
> And I'm far from something special or unusual. from my experience, the "average" person (if not the majority) has trouble handling a TV remote
- Tepix 7y ago
  That may be true but there are still plenty of people who are able to hack on a developer Linux phone. Far more than a few dozen.
- dqpb 7y ago
  To be fair, TV remotes are terrible interfaces.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
rwmj 7y ago
I dual booted into DOS and Windows 3.1 for a long time after I first installed Linux. I would see a similar situation if I used a stock smartphone and had a free phone, I might use them interchangably for years before switching, but it would still be worthwhile.

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.
    - dmitriid 7y ago
      This makes open source phone cheaper to produce? Cheaper to ship? 13k phones won't cover even the costs of production, much less R&D
      - squarefoot 7y ago
        Give FOSS phones the same media coverage of the iPhone, possibly including its ad induced reality distortion field, and they will sell like candies. Seriously, once the software is ready, 30 seconds of any popular celebrity showing one would make it sell hundreds thousands in a week. Problem is the small manufacturers couldn't either pay for that level of advertising or satisfy the demand without turning themselves into what they're fighting against now (venture capital, investors etc. don't come free), so I welcome numbers as small as 13k or even much less if that means the product isn't polluted by the typical corporate mindset (close as much as possible to protect intellectual property, make it obsolete sooner to sell newer models, etc). Oh and by having an unusual phone I can also play the elitist bastard with friends:*)
        dmitriid 7y ago
        Why didn't it work for Windows Phones then?
        squarefoot 7y ago
        Interesting point. I have seen some friends happily using Windows phones but most of them were/are either Microsoft employees or working mostly with Windows software, so I guess they needed the deepest integration with the Windows ecosystem, which is understandable. As for other users, it is possible that Windows phones had either some limitation compared to other platforms or they lacked the killer app that would make it appealing to other userbases. Having never used one, I can only speculate that MS wanted to change too much too early by making an user interface very consistent with the one they introduced on PCs but hard to digest just like that one, and this could have brought users away both from the PC and mobile devices. I have always found in the past very hard to migrate non technical users from Windows to Linux, but the adoption of the new interfaces from Windows 8 onward made some people I know so furious that it became really easy to convince them to try Linux; in some cases it was them who asked me to install it. That would be unthinkable before Windows 8. In the mobile world I guess it was even harder to grow an userbase since the alternative was already mainstream. They probably should have copied or mocked a mainstream mobile interface, that is, offer something an user from either Android or iOS would not find alien to use, then offer something more, say free Office apps, then after the userbase had grown start to build the rest.
  - lostgame 7y ago
    Not sure why this is being downvoted? It’s a fascinating statistic alone.
- paulcole 7y ago
  During Q4 of 2018, Apple sold something like 20,000 iPhones an hour. 13k is an order of magnitude too low to be considered a commercial failure.
- dorfsmay 7y ago
  Mine was unusable until I installed Android, at which point I bought an Android phone a quarter of the thickness and mass, and better screen resolution (and likely better radios as well). I too bought it because I thought I'd hack around and "maybe contribute" which quickly turn in "why am I wasting so much time on something that will probably never work".
  - Tepix 7y ago
    The screen resolution of the OpenMoko was very good at the time: It had a 640x480 2.8" screen which means a very good 286ppi.
- Mashimo 7y ago
  Got one. Never really used it. It was not reliable.
  - seba_dos1 7y ago
    Got one. Used it for a few years. It was amazing (though not without its quirks of course).
    - dzypa 7y ago
      For most people "quirks" are unacceptable in their mobile phones. Normally one can't afford to lose a call or to have the maps application crash when you're trying to get around.
catdog 7y ago
I think the PinePhone can be different because 1. The thing is reasonably cheap with "good enough" specs which makes it far easier to just buy it and accept that it may be just a toy in the worst case. 2. It's likely that the specs will be "good enough" for some time so the Hardware will not be terribly outdated the time the Software reaches a usable state. 3. Smartphone hardware and manufacturing matured a lot in general so it's likely easier to get sth. working with a limited budget. In comparison the Openmoko devices were reasonably advanced for their time but were also ridden by hardware bugs.
Mathnerd314 7y ago
OpenMoko isn't really dead, or at least the kernel isn't: http://git.goldelico.com/?p=letux-kernel.git;a=summary http://git.goldelico.com/?p=letux-kernel.git;a=summary Netscape was a commercial failure but Mozilla is still around. Similarly Blender only went open-source after a crowdfunding campaign. CyanogenMod is another interesting example, mostly open source and mostly successful until it started trying to commercialize the code. I think the community ends up being a big part of it. It's not like every PinePhone shipped is going to result in another developer for the OS, but there is some critical mass point where the software goes from broken to usable and it seems PinePhone might be getting there.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  CyanogenMod lives on, in the form of LineageOS.
- Mashimo 7y ago
  Hol up .. I have a OpenMoko. Never really used. I can install linux with an up to date Kernel on it? Neat. I wonder what I can do with it.
realusername 7y ago
I see the PinePhone as a Raspberry Pi equivalent in the Smartphone world, there's definitely a big niche for that.
- moksly 7y ago
  You don’t need your Raspberry PI to run your bank app, handle your payments or your bus-tickets. I’m not sure how I’d even purchase a non digital ticket for quite a few things in Denmark. Don’t get me wrong, I really hope something like PinePhone sees enough adoption to get the apps I need a smartphone to run so I can break away from the two monopolies. I just don’t believe it will happen when Microsoft couldn’t do it.
  - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
    Microsoft couldn't do it because everyone new (of the users) that even if they put in their effort to switch and wait for the ecosystem to grow, they will end up with just the same crap: another closed-source monopoly with it's own quirks. We won't have just two overlords, but instead 3 of the same. Wow such a difference... Now an truly open system might make a difference. Not saying it will, it has it's own problems, but comparing it to Windows Phone is not really apples to apples.
    - dmitriid 7y ago
      You greatly overestimate the number of users who care about how closed or how open an ecosystem is. If the user can't interact with their bank, whatchu YouTube, talk to their friends and parents over Snapchat or Skype, call Uber, play Spotify, etc etc etc, it doesn't matter in the least if your phone is 100% open source. Microsoft had sunk billions into trying to get the ecosystem off the ground. What makes you think that "a truly open system" will get that ecosystem?
      - valvar 7y ago
        The target audience isn't people who need to use Skype, Snapchat, or Uber. But I'm sure it will be possible to run some of those android apps through anbox. Spotify has a Linux client, and for YouTube there's the FreeTube client, which actually protects users' integrity.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ssivark 7y ago

The following sentence "I am not using it as my daily driver, and I won’t for some time." and "the right phone" make me think that the dozens refer to those who might use this as their singular phone device. I'm sure many more people can afford to splurge on such a device and either play with it, or even forget about it for that matter.

mr__y 7y ago
This. It may not (yet) be suitable for every-day use, but it is absolutely great for pet-projects or some tinkering. Also I would love to see enthusiasts creating alternative ecosystem around this, like open, federated social networking apps or maybe something with mesh-network support and hackernews reader app (of course). It won't get mainstream in general public, but could be sort-of mainstream among groups of open/free-everything enthusiasts.
thinkmassive 7y ago
This is why I ordered the Brave Heart edition as soon as it was available. I'd rather get it in my hands quickly, customize the software to my liking, and if I have to buy a second device to resolve some hardware issues later this year then I'm still only out 1/4 the cost of a new iPhone, plus I have a backup device for development. I prefer going into it with the expectation of it being a "developer experience" rather than a prepackaged end-to-end solution. This, and the cost, is why I opted to go with Pine Phone over Purism Librem 5.
- dustfinger 7y ago
  > This, and the cost, is why I opted to go with Pine Phone over Purism Librem 5 I am now considering purchasing a Pine Phone and the cost is definitely motivating. I only wish that the PinePhone had hardware kill switches like the Librem 5 has.
  - thinkmassive 7y ago
    The PinePhone actually has more kill switches for finer grained control, but they’re behind the rear cover instead of exposed on the side. PP: modem, WiFi, microphones, rear camera, front camera L5: modem, WiFi, cameras+audio Check out this comparison by Martijn Braam, a developer of postmarketOS: https://tuxphones.com/yet-another-librem-5-and-pinephone-linux-smartphone-comparison https://tuxphones.com/yet-another-librem-5-and-pinephone-lin...

saagarjha 7y ago

Would you use it as your daily driver?

monoideism 7y ago
No, and he says he isn't either. So that's not a distinguisher.
- gbear605 7y ago
  I’m not sure he’s including himself in that dozen who this is the right phone for.
jmiskovic 7y ago
An open internet-connected battery-powered computing device that looks great and can easily fit in pocket? I would gladly carry it along regardless of its phone functionalities. It looks perfect as smart remote for automating stuff around me, maybe one day even as voice-enabled personal assistant device.

blihp 7y ago

You're right that the actual number is too low. But I think he, and Pine64, are just being responsible in managing expectations. The issue isn't just that the software isn't done, but also that the hardware may not be 100% there yet. This happens all the time with devices when something along the lines of 'oh crap, this power rail isn't stable in situation X and causes the device to reset' is discovered with pre-production hardware. The fix is usually trivial but often requires a PCB/component change. I would absolutely have ordered one already if it sounded like the hardware were final... right now it merely sounds very, very close. The message I get from these warnings is the non-zero chance that there will be some annoying hardware issue that comes to light before going into volume production. This would not be unexpected since this is the first time a wider community is getting to work with it.

newscracker 7y ago
From personal experience, if the original Pine64 board is anything to go by, I wouldn't expect much on software and software updates from Pine itself (it would be up to the user to figure things out).

jcelerier 7y ago

> And I'm far from something special or unusual. from my experience, the "average" person (if not the majority) has trouble handling a TV remote

Tepix 7y ago
That may be true but there are still plenty of people who are able to hack on a developer Linux phone. Far more than a few dozen.
dqpb 7y ago
To be fair, TV remotes are terrible interfaces.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

rwmj 7y ago

I dual booted into DOS and Windows 3.1 for a long time after I first installed Linux. I would see a similar situation if I used a stock smartphone and had a free phone, I might use them interchangably for years before switching, but it would still be worthwhile.