16 ms·

The pinephone is great, in fact I'm typing this comment from mine. That said, fair warning to anyone thinking about getting one: it's slow, buggy, and flat out

The pinephone is great, in fact I'm typing this comment from mine. That said, fair warning to anyone thinking about getting one: it's slow, buggy, and flat out unreliable if you need to be able to receive / answer calls and texts for anything important (e.g. work). Once they get the software worked out over the next few years though, it'll be the best thing out there. No ads, no bullshit, just a phone with a mainline linux distribution.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"... jut a phone and a mainline linux distribution." From the OP: "... the PinePhone runs mainline Linux as well as anything else you'll get it to run." Linux is great but being able to run several different OS is, IMO, on a whole `nother level. For example, I am interested in running NetBSD. About 12 years ago, there was a phone called the T-Mobile Sidekick. What OS did it run. That phone was allegedly the first to sync the user data to the "cloud" and provide an "app marketplace". The founder of the company that created it later went on to co-found Android.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  The Danger Hiptop was branded as the T-Mobile Sidekick; later T-Mo used the Sidekick name for some other devices. DangerOS required all applications to be written in Java and distributed via their store; if you stopped paying your subscription fee you would lose access to the store and to the online backup service as well. Microsoft bought Danger and eventually closed it, killing all usage. For a while it was the best device for sysadmins and the Deaf community -- because it had a keyboard and an SSH application.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    "DangerOS required all applications to be written in Java..." Was Java a requirement of the OS or was it just a design choice by the developers. The OS was NetBSD AFAIK; of course one can run a JVM on NetBSD but that's not a requirement; I never do. Is Pinephone limited only to running Java applications. I want more programming options than just Java.
    - dsr_ 5y ago
      No end user could run anything on a DangerOS device that didn't come from the store; nothing went into the store that wasn't written in Java and met their guidelines. Pinephone is completely orthogonal to this.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
        "Pinephone is completely orthogonal to this." Do you mean Pine64 has no intention of trying to control what people do with the device? Did anyone ever try to "root" the Sidekick? Always interested to hear more about it.
        dsr_ 5y ago
        I mean that that the Pinephone is not a DangerOS device, so anything that I say about the Danger Hiptop has nothing to do with the Pinephone.
        1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
        Given that each has its own name, and the names look and sound different, maybe it's safe to assume no one is going to confuse the two. Is there such a thing as a "DangerOS device", or are there devices that can or cannot run "DangerOS" (e.g., NetBSD plus proprietary software). The official slogan of the open source project is "Of course it runs NetBSD!" not "Of course it is a NetBSD device." Anything said about an OS does not necessarily have anything to do with the device it runs on. Nor does anything said about a device necessarily have anything to do the OS being run on it. That's why we can have OS that run on a variety of devices (e.g., NetBSD, Linux, etc.), as well as devices on which we can boot a variety of OS (e.g., RPi, Pinephone). Unfortunately this important distinction is carefully omitted from tech company marketing, ignored by sycophant tech bloggers, tech journalists and everyone who follows and subscribes to their brand of anti-competitive "innovation". Hopefully more hardware like RPi and Pinephone can change some people's thinking and allow them to see the possibilities that are constantly being suppressed in the "war on general purpose computing".
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
that_guy_iain 5y ago
> Once they get the software worked out over the next few years though, it'll be the best thing out there. No ads, no bullshit, just a phone with a mainline linux distribution. I'm coming to the realisation that open source projects will always provide a lower quality than comerical ones. How can we honestly expect a small team of developers to compete with the larger teams a commerical project can afford? The reality is, we can't. And we'll always compare PinePhone and other things to iOS and Android and they'll always come up short. Also, a large part of using a smart phone is the apps. Without apps the phone is just really a phone. For me, to want to use PinePhone they would need to make it super easy to have Android on there.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  > I'm coming to the realisation that open source projects will always provide a lower quality than comerical ones. That is not true. As far as I am concerned Linux is clearly superior OS for my laptop over commercial alternatives. > How can we honestly expect a small team of developers to compete with the larger teams a commerical project can afford? In many cases they win by default. If "no leaking of personal data" is on mandatory feature list then Pinephones are already better than Android! And there are many projects where there is simply no commercial product at all and is unlikely to ever appear.
  - deltaonefour 5y ago
    >That is not true. As far as I am concerned Linux is clearly superior OS for my laptop over commercial alternatives. I would argue Linux is only superior from the IT software perspective. This is a very narrow perspective that is only inflated if you're in IT or on an IT related site like HN. From almost every other dimension Linux is inferior and therefore from an Overall perspective it is inferior. The most important dimensions for an operating system are usability and compatibility. Average users are like this while hard core masochist programmers are willing to spend years decoding an interface
    - throwawayswede 5y ago
pabs3 5y ago
> Once they get the software worked out over the next few years though, it'll be the best thing out there. This sentence reminded of the OpenMoko days, hopefully the hardware choices were better than in that era.
- linmob 5y ago
  I had a FreeRunner back in the day and have had a PinePhone for over a year now, and it has gotten me back to blogging [0] and creating videos after years of not doing that. The hardware choices are in so far better, as this looks like a normal phone, is not limited to GPRS in a world where connected services based on 3G are taking off, and there‘s also no graphics decelerator built in. Imho, the biggest design flaw is the size of the battery: You don’t get much screen on time with this. The AllWinner A64 is clearly not the most advanced piece of Silicon though, and support in Linux for that old chip is still advancing so things are a lot better than they were a year ago. As far as user space software is advancing, there‘s more and more coming which I try to list at [1]. The key difference here is that PINE64 is just providing the hardware and is not very involved in software at all. Thankfully Purism make software for their Librem 5 (which would have been shipping for real by now, but than a component shortage hit the industry), which also runs on PinePhone and works quite well. Projects like Plasma Mobile are catching up, and long standing Mobile Linux efforts like Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch have also been ported over. [0] https://linmob.net https://linmob.net [1] https://LINMOBapps.frama.io https://LINMOBapps.frama.io
axegon_ 5y ago
> buggy, and flat out unreliable if you need to be able to receive / answer calls and texts for anything important (e.g. work). Out of curiosity, how do these bugs/unreliability manifest in realty? I've been fiddling around with making a mobile Linux distro specifically for a car navigation/entertainment system so I'm curious to get some circumstantial feedback.
- fsflover 5y ago
  I have a Pinephone. It works well most of the time, but occasionally apps crash, or it cannot connect to WiFi, or becomes very slow. Reboot usually helps. A good thing is that even if you buy it now and decide it's not reliable enough, you can be sure that the development will never stop and at some point it will be better than Android in every way. I would say in a year.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    "be sure that the development will never stop and at some point it will be better than Android in every way. I would say in a year" The current stage is pretty much unusable if you need a reliable phone. So in one year already, it is supposed to be better than android in every way? That is a very bold assumption. I mean, would be nice, but I doubt it and would be happy if it gets stable enough to simply use it as a phone and chatdevice, without hickups.
theodric 5y ago
You have a strange definition of "great." If any other phone exhibited those characteristics, I would write it off as garbage, not excuse its faults with a promise that they'll be fixed Real Soon Now™
- emteycz 5y ago
  Don't forget about the price: $200 doesn't get you flagship experience.
  - nousermane 5y ago
    Depends on which year's. Pine64's SoC, Allwinner A64 is 4x 1,2 GHz Cortex-A53 chip, giving you about the same level of raw performance as a 2013 flagship phone.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      And it will run smoothly, if you choose simple software: https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/ https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/.
      - lasagnaphil 5y ago
        Though from a few videos it's got an incredibly primitive UI that mainly uses the side buttons instead of the big touchscreen. The interface seems much more apt for a feature phone than a smartphone. (Though I realize there can be some niche demand for a non-touchscreen Linux phone with a hardware keyboard... Maybe that's what might be more achievable in the FOSS Linux hobbyist scene than something like the Pinephone or the Librem 5.)
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    Lately I have been trying out $200 range phones (with Android): the galaxy A31 for instance: it is the experience of a flagship phone from a few years ago. If the pinephone was that, I think everyone would be happy and yes, this is possible for $200. At least if you are Samsung? So yeah, not flagship but close enough for a lot of people (side by side, the a32 vs s21, for me is not worth the 4x+ pricetag, as in the difference between flagship and not flagship is shrinking fast, ymmv), however... The pinephone is worse hardware though (In almost all respects but the dipswitches) and the software, at this point, is really alpha quality mostly. But we know this: the promise it will run Linux smoothly on a phone is enough to buy one. It will take time but I would buy any phone that allows me to freely run multiple OSs new out of the box with all hardware supported.
Aeolun 5y ago
Yeah, that’s my main complaint. I want it to actually work as a phone before I want it to work like a small computer.
dogma1138 5y ago
I think the main thing that PinePhone has going for them is the price $150-200 for what essentially is a hobbyist device at this point is more than reasonable. This is in stark contrast to the Purism phones which offer about the same hardware (slightly better CPU but worse GPU) at flagship prices. This is somewhat also proof that the prices that Purism charges aren’t due to lack of economy of scale you can make these devices on the cheap, the hardware is available. I have a similar complaint about their laptops they charge a hefty premium for what is essentially a bog standard OEM laptop from China which you can get for almost half the price in many cases including from other direct to customer vendors.
- fsflover 5y ago
  > This is in stark contrast to the Purism phones which offer about the same hardware (slightly better CPU but worse GPU) at flagship prices. This is very far from truth: https://forums.puri.sm/t/comparing-specs-of-upcoming-linux-phones/6827 https://forums.puri.sm/t/comparing-specs-of-upcoming-linux-p... The i.MX 8M Quad is better than the Allwinner A64: 30% faster CPU clock speed, 140% faster RAM standard, 140% better OpenGL performance, USB 3.0 and support for higher resolution cameras. (and performance is just one of many reasons to prefer Librem 5 over Pinephone, see the link)
- 29083011397778 5y ago
  > the prices that Purism charges aren’t due to lack of economy of scale you can make these devices on the cheap I've never understood that to be their argument. Purism is actively paying people to improve the mobile experience of Linux. They can't charge for software, and they certainly don't get a cut of app sales like Google or Apple. So to fund the devs that write the software, they mark up their hardware. This improves mobile Linux, makes for a reasonably sustainable company, and gives Pine64 a free ride regarding software like Phosh, Phoc, Calls, Chatty, etc. So without having to pay for developers, Pine can sell their hardware dramatically cheaper. Simply put, I don't think "Good software isn't cheap" should be a surprise to anyone here.
pjmlp 5y ago
Like any other failed attempt so far, assuming that they manage to keep enough money around for delivering those improvements over the next few years.
suifbwish 5y ago
Unfortunately what will likely happen is if the project becomes extremely successful a big corporate interest will buddy up to the project and pretend to have the best interest of the community in mind as they make the project increasingly dependent on their funding and development resources until finally the shoe drops and the corporate interest has unofficial control over the pinephone project similar to Google with Ubuntu and IBM/Redhat with CentOS. Every one has a weakness and a price.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
If hardware acceleration is fixed then user experience can see night and day difference. Unfortunately if anything to be seen from Raspberry Pi or other SBCs HW Acceleration seems like Nuclear Fusion due to different graphics API, standards, application/HW support etc.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"... jut a phone and a mainline linux distribution." From the OP: "... the PinePhone runs mainline Linux as well as anything else you'll get it to run." Linux is great but being able to run several different OS is, IMO, on a whole `nother level. For example, I am interested in running NetBSD. About 12 years ago, there was a phone called the T-Mobile Sidekick. What OS did it run. That phone was allegedly the first to sync the user data to the "cloud" and provide an "app marketplace". The founder of the company that created it later went on to co-found Android.

dsr_ 5y ago
The Danger Hiptop was branded as the T-Mobile Sidekick; later T-Mo used the Sidekick name for some other devices. DangerOS required all applications to be written in Java and distributed via their store; if you stopped paying your subscription fee you would lose access to the store and to the online backup service as well. Microsoft bought Danger and eventually closed it, killing all usage. For a while it was the best device for sysadmins and the Deaf community -- because it had a keyboard and an SSH application.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  "DangerOS required all applications to be written in Java..." Was Java a requirement of the OS or was it just a design choice by the developers. The OS was NetBSD AFAIK; of course one can run a JVM on NetBSD but that's not a requirement; I never do. Is Pinephone limited only to running Java applications. I want more programming options than just Java.
  - dsr_ 5y ago
    No end user could run anything on a DangerOS device that didn't come from the store; nothing went into the store that wasn't written in Java and met their guidelines. Pinephone is completely orthogonal to this.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
      "Pinephone is completely orthogonal to this." Do you mean Pine64 has no intention of trying to control what people do with the device? Did anyone ever try to "root" the Sidekick? Always interested to hear more about it.
      - dsr_ 5y ago
        I mean that that the Pinephone is not a DangerOS device, so anything that I say about the Danger Hiptop has nothing to do with the Pinephone.
        1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
        Given that each has its own name, and the names look and sound different, maybe it's safe to assume no one is going to confuse the two. Is there such a thing as a "DangerOS device", or are there devices that can or cannot run "DangerOS" (e.g., NetBSD plus proprietary software). The official slogan of the open source project is "Of course it runs NetBSD!" not "Of course it is a NetBSD device." Anything said about an OS does not necessarily have anything to do with the device it runs on. Nor does anything said about a device necessarily have anything to do the OS being run on it. That's why we can have OS that run on a variety of devices (e.g., NetBSD, Linux, etc.), as well as devices on which we can boot a variety of OS (e.g., RPi, Pinephone). Unfortunately this important distinction is carefully omitted from tech company marketing, ignored by sycophant tech bloggers, tech journalists and everyone who follows and subscribes to their brand of anti-competitive "innovation". Hopefully more hardware like RPi and Pinephone can change some people's thinking and allow them to see the possibilities that are constantly being suppressed in the "war on general purpose computing".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

that_guy_iain 5y ago

> Once they get the software worked out over the next few years though, it'll be the best thing out there. No ads, no bullshit, just a phone with a mainline linux distribution. I'm coming to the realisation that open source projects will always provide a lower quality than comerical ones. How can we honestly expect a small team of developers to compete with the larger teams a commerical project can afford? The reality is, we can't. And we'll always compare PinePhone and other things to iOS and Android and they'll always come up short. Also, a large part of using a smart phone is the apps. Without apps the phone is just really a phone. For me, to want to use PinePhone they would need to make it super easy to have Android on there.

matkoniecz 5y ago
> I'm coming to the realisation that open source projects will always provide a lower quality than comerical ones. That is not true. As far as I am concerned Linux is clearly superior OS for my laptop over commercial alternatives. > How can we honestly expect a small team of developers to compete with the larger teams a commerical project can afford? In many cases they win by default. If "no leaking of personal data" is on mandatory feature list then Pinephones are already better than Android! And there are many projects where there is simply no commercial product at all and is unlikely to ever appear.
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  >That is not true. As far as I am concerned Linux is clearly superior OS for my laptop over commercial alternatives. I would argue Linux is only superior from the IT software perspective. This is a very narrow perspective that is only inflated if you're in IT or on an IT related site like HN. From almost every other dimension Linux is inferior and therefore from an Overall perspective it is inferior. The most important dimensions for an operating system are usability and compatibility. Average users are like this while hard core masochist programmers are willing to spend years decoding an interface
  - throwawayswede 5y ago

pabs3 5y ago

> Once they get the software worked out over the next few years though, it'll be the best thing out there. This sentence reminded of the OpenMoko days, hopefully the hardware choices were better than in that era.

linmob 5y ago
I had a FreeRunner back in the day and have had a PinePhone for over a year now, and it has gotten me back to blogging [0] and creating videos after years of not doing that. The hardware choices are in so far better, as this looks like a normal phone, is not limited to GPRS in a world where connected services based on 3G are taking off, and there‘s also no graphics decelerator built in. Imho, the biggest design flaw is the size of the battery: You don’t get much screen on time with this. The AllWinner A64 is clearly not the most advanced piece of Silicon though, and support in Linux for that old chip is still advancing so things are a lot better than they were a year ago. As far as user space software is advancing, there‘s more and more coming which I try to list at [1]. The key difference here is that PINE64 is just providing the hardware and is not very involved in software at all. Thankfully Purism make software for their Librem 5 (which would have been shipping for real by now, but than a component shortage hit the industry), which also runs on PinePhone and works quite well. Projects like Plasma Mobile are catching up, and long standing Mobile Linux efforts like Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch have also been ported over. [0] https://linmob.net https://linmob.net [1] https://LINMOBapps.frama.io https://LINMOBapps.frama.io

axegon_ 5y ago

> buggy, and flat out unreliable if you need to be able to receive / answer calls and texts for anything important (e.g. work). Out of curiosity, how do these bugs/unreliability manifest in realty? I've been fiddling around with making a mobile Linux distro specifically for a car navigation/entertainment system so I'm curious to get some circumstantial feedback.

fsflover 5y ago
I have a Pinephone. It works well most of the time, but occasionally apps crash, or it cannot connect to WiFi, or becomes very slow. Reboot usually helps. A good thing is that even if you buy it now and decide it's not reliable enough, you can be sure that the development will never stop and at some point it will be better than Android in every way. I would say in a year.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "be sure that the development will never stop and at some point it will be better than Android in every way. I would say in a year" The current stage is pretty much unusable if you need a reliable phone. So in one year already, it is supposed to be better than android in every way? That is a very bold assumption. I mean, would be nice, but I doubt it and would be happy if it gets stable enough to simply use it as a phone and chatdevice, without hickups.

theodric 5y ago

You have a strange definition of "great." If any other phone exhibited those characteristics, I would write it off as garbage, not excuse its faults with a promise that they'll be fixed Real Soon Now™

emteycz 5y ago
Don't forget about the price: $200 doesn't get you flagship experience.
- nousermane 5y ago
  Depends on which year's. Pine64's SoC, Allwinner A64 is 4x 1,2 GHz Cortex-A53 chip, giving you about the same level of raw performance as a 2013 flagship phone.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    And it will run smoothly, if you choose simple software: https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/ https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/.
    - lasagnaphil 5y ago
      Though from a few videos it's got an incredibly primitive UI that mainly uses the side buttons instead of the big touchscreen. The interface seems much more apt for a feature phone than a smartphone. (Though I realize there can be some niche demand for a non-touchscreen Linux phone with a hardware keyboard... Maybe that's what might be more achievable in the FOSS Linux hobbyist scene than something like the Pinephone or the Librem 5.)
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- tluyben2 5y ago
  Lately I have been trying out $200 range phones (with Android): the galaxy A31 for instance: it is the experience of a flagship phone from a few years ago. If the pinephone was that, I think everyone would be happy and yes, this is possible for $200. At least if you are Samsung? So yeah, not flagship but close enough for a lot of people (side by side, the a32 vs s21, for me is not worth the 4x+ pricetag, as in the difference between flagship and not flagship is shrinking fast, ymmv), however... The pinephone is worse hardware though (In almost all respects but the dipswitches) and the software, at this point, is really alpha quality mostly. But we know this: the promise it will run Linux smoothly on a phone is enough to buy one. It will take time but I would buy any phone that allows me to freely run multiple OSs new out of the box with all hardware supported.

Aeolun 5y ago

Yeah, that’s my main complaint. I want it to actually work as a phone before I want it to work like a small computer.

dogma1138 5y ago

I think the main thing that PinePhone has going for them is the price $150-200 for what essentially is a hobbyist device at this point is more than reasonable. This is in stark contrast to the Purism phones which offer about the same hardware (slightly better CPU but worse GPU) at flagship prices. This is somewhat also proof that the prices that Purism charges aren’t due to lack of economy of scale you can make these devices on the cheap, the hardware is available. I have a similar complaint about their laptops they charge a hefty premium for what is essentially a bog standard OEM laptop from China which you can get for almost half the price in many cases including from other direct to customer vendors.

fsflover 5y ago
> This is in stark contrast to the Purism phones which offer about the same hardware (slightly better CPU but worse GPU) at flagship prices. This is very far from truth: https://forums.puri.sm/t/comparing-specs-of-upcoming-linux-phones/6827 https://forums.puri.sm/t/comparing-specs-of-upcoming-linux-p... The i.MX 8M Quad is better than the Allwinner A64: 30% faster CPU clock speed, 140% faster RAM standard, 140% better OpenGL performance, USB 3.0 and support for higher resolution cameras. (and performance is just one of many reasons to prefer Librem 5 over Pinephone, see the link)
29083011397778 5y ago
> the prices that Purism charges aren’t due to lack of economy of scale you can make these devices on the cheap I've never understood that to be their argument. Purism is actively paying people to improve the mobile experience of Linux. They can't charge for software, and they certainly don't get a cut of app sales like Google or Apple. So to fund the devs that write the software, they mark up their hardware. This improves mobile Linux, makes for a reasonably sustainable company, and gives Pine64 a free ride regarding software like Phosh, Phoc, Calls, Chatty, etc. So without having to pay for developers, Pine can sell their hardware dramatically cheaper. Simply put, I don't think "Good software isn't cheap" should be a surprise to anyone here.

pjmlp 5y ago

Like any other failed attempt so far, assuming that they manage to keep enough money around for delivering those improvements over the next few years.

suifbwish 5y ago

Unfortunately what will likely happen is if the project becomes extremely successful a big corporate interest will buddy up to the project and pretend to have the best interest of the community in mind as they make the project increasingly dependent on their funding and development resources until finally the shoe drops and the corporate interest has unofficial control over the pinephone project similar to Google with Ubuntu and IBM/Redhat with CentOS. Every one has a weakness and a price.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

If hardware acceleration is fixed then user experience can see night and day difference. Unfortunately if anything to be seen from Raspberry Pi or other SBCs HW Acceleration seems like Nuclear Fusion due to different graphics API, standards, application/HW support etc.