5 ms·

UI responsiveness and polish is a lot better than what I would have expected. Pinephone and mobile Linux are coming a long way!

• twodave 6y ago
  Funny how perspectives can differ. I was just coming to comment how the UI was clearly not as polished as the competition. It's just the obvious stuff: Typing in a passcode: dots are too small, not spaced out enough Keyboard: it feels like the characters are about to run into the borders Camera: lots of just empty black space around the picture--I'd rather they just overscan it a bit to fill up the entire screen. Lack of a splash screen, icons in the app drawer are a bit too large, many of the prompts obviously expecting a mouse input, screens where responsiveness to the screen form factor is just broken. I am overall impressed with how far Linux on a phone has come--it's also still a long way to the top.
  • izacus 6y ago
    The most jarring thing is probably the lack of touch feedback when you tap on screen. There's no confirmation that phone actually registered the tap.
    • jraph 6y ago
      Interesting, I hadn't noticed this because haptic feedback using the vibrator is the first thing I disable on any phone (because of the noise).
      • choward 6y ago
        I do it because I find it annoying and distracting. It feels like I did something wrong. I'm already staring at the screen so visual feedback is all I need.
      • izacus 6y ago
        I didn't mean haptic, but visual feedback. On most OSes when you press your mouse or finger on an interactive element, that element highlights in some manner (e.g. text color changes, ripple appears, background color changes). That's critical for proper feedback and feel of a UI. It's almost entirely missing in that demo video.
        • jraph 6y ago
          Oh, ok. I'm quite sensitive to having feedback and that does not seem to be an issue on the PinePhone. Except for when you open an app on Phosh. Then, no clue that the app is loading.
• Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  I unfortunately must disagree. I have had a Pinephone for over six months and I really dislike using it, in spite of my looking forward to getting a nearly completely libre phone. First of all, the UI is much less responsive than my old Nokia N900 that uses 12-year-old technology. On Phosh, it takes about five seconds just to show the screen where you can turn wifi on or off, for example. Battery life is also a shambles; I thought about using my Pinephone at least as a music player, streaming the music to my Bluetooth headphone amp, but it often happens that playing a single album with the screen off completely depletes the battery.
  • 3np 6y ago
    I wonder why the video makes it seem otherwise... Did he just cut every time he performed a UI action? :P Your experience sounds more like what I would have expected at this stage - we'll get there though!
    • kop316 6y ago
      I have found that the UI is sluggish when one first boots up the Pinephone, and the experience seems to vary greatly between distros. My experience on Mobian is the same as the video (with the exception of start up).
    • linmob 6y ago
      Creator of the video here - I don't do cuts like that. Fedora felt quite good in terms of performance which in part may be due to the very new kernel and their use of F2FS. Now if they can get that app scaling dialed in a bit more, then I can see myself using Fedora (I currently use mobile.danctnix.org, BTW).
  • m463 6y ago
    I tried the purism phone and it was fine. Really, it was snappy and responsive and h/w accelerated. What I did notice is that gnome isn't dialed into phones (so to speak). For example I tried setting the date/time and you have to press +/- on the hour and minute to get to the time you want. The popup for month had a long list of months, but it put jan-mar off the top of the screen.