4 ms·

Sometimes I want to buy a PinePhone. Do you mean that one can't send SMS, place phone calls, browse the web, read (not write) emails without a keyboard ? (these

by wiz21c 3y ago

Sometimes I want to buy a PinePhone. Do you mean that one can't send SMS, place phone calls, browse the web, read (not write) emails without a keyboard ? (these four are 99% of my phone usage).

Qwertious 3y ago
Drew Devault (Sway and Sourcehut guy) wrote this on his experience with Linux phones: https://drewdevault.com/2023/06/16/Mobile-linux-retrospective.html https://drewdevault.com/2023/06/16/Mobile-linux-retrospectiv... tldr: it works and it's great, but it's not reliable in phone/SMS in the way a phone needs to be reliable.
- wvh 3y ago
  I've been using the Nokia N9 and some of the Jolla Sailfish offspring to this day. The phone part has been very reliable. The rest of the ecosystem is very minimal, almost non-existent, but I can't complain about the basic phone functionality. With these ARM-style devices that are quite closed down and need their own respective device tree, mass adoption seems a requirement for a company and ecosystem to hit critical mass and be financially viable. I don't think a "Linux phone" is enough of a value proposition to hit that critical mass without any specific features that would appeal to a non-technical crowd and can't easily be replicated by the iOS or Android behemoths. So personally I think it's not that the open-source/Linux approach can't produce a phone that has good-enough basic functionality, but that there's no clear way to market and sell these phones to a sufficiently large crowd to offset the massive investment into a new platform. Linux as a whole might be far ahead of iOS and Android as a general computing platform, but a viable device would have to break through the mass production hardware (and marketing!) barrier.
  - ryukafalz 3y ago
    I used to use Sailfish too, and it was fun at the time. But its messaging capabilities felt like they'd stagnated and it's never gotten support for things like group texting, which has only gotten more common in the years since: https://together.jolla.com/question/75552/messaging-application-does-not-support-group-sms-or-group-mms/ https://together.jolla.com/question/75552/messaging-applicat... I would gladly switch back to a Linux phone if it had reasonable battery life and good support for the modern assortment of at least the open messaging protocols. (Obviously things like Discord are out of the question, but SMS/XMPP/Matrix?)
not_your_vase 3y ago
You can make a phone call, browse the web, send messages. Note that the modem keeps rebooting itself randomly (sometimes once a day, sometimes once every 10 minutes, with all firmware versions - this means entering the PIN again, finding the network, etc), so if you have to make phonecalls at least somewhat reliably, PinePhone is not for you. Same for PinePhonePro - the same crap modem is used in that also. Personally I have a dumb Nokia with me all the time, in case I have to use a phone, and the PP has a data-only SIM. As of 2023 there is 1 actively supported email client with a mobile and touchscreen optimized "interface": Geary (at least that I know about). The scarequotes are there with a reason: you can't set up your account without connecting the phone to an external monitor: the Next/Cancel buttons are out of the screen during the setup. Normally I would laugh, but now I don't feel like it. Have no idea if it works afterwards, I just deleted it at that point. Note if you'd decide to get one: at least original PP is kind of abandoned. It is still a nice toy, but I wouldn't hold my breath that anything widely supported and usable will be published on it.

by wiz21c 3y ago

Sometimes I want to buy a PinePhone. Do you mean that one can't send SMS, place phone calls, browse the web, read (not write) emails without a keyboard ? (these four are 99% of my phone usage).

Qwertious 3y ago

Drew Devault (Sway and Sourcehut guy) wrote this on his experience with Linux phones: https://drewdevault.com/2023/06/16/Mobile-linux-retrospective.html https://drewdevault.com/2023/06/16/Mobile-linux-retrospectiv... tldr: it works and it's great, but it's not reliable in phone/SMS in the way a phone needs to be reliable.

wvh 3y ago
I've been using the Nokia N9 and some of the Jolla Sailfish offspring to this day. The phone part has been very reliable. The rest of the ecosystem is very minimal, almost non-existent, but I can't complain about the basic phone functionality. With these ARM-style devices that are quite closed down and need their own respective device tree, mass adoption seems a requirement for a company and ecosystem to hit critical mass and be financially viable. I don't think a "Linux phone" is enough of a value proposition to hit that critical mass without any specific features that would appeal to a non-technical crowd and can't easily be replicated by the iOS or Android behemoths. So personally I think it's not that the open-source/Linux approach can't produce a phone that has good-enough basic functionality, but that there's no clear way to market and sell these phones to a sufficiently large crowd to offset the massive investment into a new platform. Linux as a whole might be far ahead of iOS and Android as a general computing platform, but a viable device would have to break through the mass production hardware (and marketing!) barrier.
- ryukafalz 3y ago
  I used to use Sailfish too, and it was fun at the time. But its messaging capabilities felt like they'd stagnated and it's never gotten support for things like group texting, which has only gotten more common in the years since: https://together.jolla.com/question/75552/messaging-application-does-not-support-group-sms-or-group-mms/ https://together.jolla.com/question/75552/messaging-applicat... I would gladly switch back to a Linux phone if it had reasonable battery life and good support for the modern assortment of at least the open messaging protocols. (Obviously things like Discord are out of the question, but SMS/XMPP/Matrix?)

not_your_vase 3y ago

You can make a phone call, browse the web, send messages. Note that the modem keeps rebooting itself randomly (sometimes once a day, sometimes once every 10 minutes, with all firmware versions - this means entering the PIN again, finding the network, etc), so if you have to make phonecalls at least somewhat reliably, PinePhone is not for you. Same for PinePhonePro - the same crap modem is used in that also. Personally I have a dumb Nokia with me all the time, in case I have to use a phone, and the PP has a data-only SIM. As of 2023 there is 1 actively supported email client with a mobile and touchscreen optimized "interface": Geary (at least that I know about). The scarequotes are there with a reason: you can't set up your account without connecting the phone to an external monitor: the Next/Cancel buttons are out of the screen during the setup. Normally I would laugh, but now I don't feel like it. Have no idea if it works afterwards, I just deleted it at that point. Note if you'd decide to get one: at least original PP is kind of abandoned. It is still a nice toy, but I wouldn't hold my breath that anything widely supported and usable will be published on it.