31 ms·

PinePhone review after a month of daily driving

186 points by yaky 3y ago

Aachen 3y ago
> To install an OS, you flash an image to an SD card, put it in the PinePhone and turn it on. That's it. You can swap OSes by changing SD cards That's really cool actually! Also think of making backups: just plug the sdcard into your laptop and copy the data. But then also this.. > [...] repeated, unpredictable problems both placing and receiving calls [...] > Notifications TLDR: Only calls and SMS notifications are truly real-time. So the only way someone can reliably reach you is via SMS, which basically means sending an explicit money-costing notification to me whenever I'm not already online and hoping I hear the single ping. That suits a pocket computer, but not for a phone :( The keyboard descriptions are also interesting: no suggestions makes it basically unusable unless it comes with a physical keyboard or you want to have typos in every sentence. I've got a "hacker keyboard" enabled on my android as well, but only turn it on when doing terminal things. I tried typing normally on that and I don't think it would reasonably work after a lot of practice either
- jsheard 3y ago
  > That's really cool actually! Cool on paper but SD cards have abysmal write endurance, as any Raspberry Pi user will attest to. Unless you trust the entire software stack to keep writes to a minimum I wouldn't trust the SD card to last.
  - Aachen 3y ago
    I had this issue, presumably because I ran a Debian userspace below Android with a file on the sdcard as filesystem. Every ~3 years, the sdcard would just drop dead. (Other people seemed to upgrade faster than every 3y or don't use sdcards at all, so idk if it was just me.) It hasn't happened anymore recently, and I feel like there's more awareness/support for this type of usage pattern with the higher-end sdcards that are somewhat recent (like, introduced in the last ~8 years, so after the lifespan of an old cheap sdcard, I'm still on my first new-style one and I'm not yet sure it's not randomness that keeps it alive)
    - jsheard 3y ago
      If you must use an SD card then there are industrial-grade ones which use pSLC NAND and are meant to endure a ton of abuse, but they're very expensive compared to an equivalent amount of reliable eMMC/USB/NVMe storage. IME commodity SD cards are still a crapshoot.
      - Aachen 3y ago
        So far, one of these sdcards that claim to be optimised for applications accessing random files (such as on a Pi) works fine in my phone
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    Not so bad, SD cards can be robust. It depends on the file-system and how much work the controller does to catch errors, mark bad cells, etc. I have a few portable handy recorders, a Zoom, a Tascam and a Sound Devices, and all of them handle the same SD cards for years, rarely complaining about format errors or losing files.
  - dannyw 3y ago
    Get an endurance SD card and those have decent lifespans.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  > That's really cool actually! It's cool but it's wrong: SD cards are unreliable.
  - Aachen 3y ago
    From my point of view, you're wrong. They work fine for me for this purpose I don't think you can put a binary label on this (right or wrong): reliability is a number, such as MTBF or write cycles, not a boolean
    - squarefoot 3y ago
      I've experienced a number of file corruptions in various ones, including those inserted in SBCs and not carried around; they all were from reliable brands and never bought online. This wasn't systematic, that is, I cannot say all SD cards will fail, but I certainly saw a very noticeable increase in reliability when using as system disk eMMC/SSD instead of plain SD cards.
  - dannyw 3y ago
    The cheap ones yeah. Get endurance SD cards.
- zilti 3y ago
  Is there really any carrier that still charges for SMS?
  - Aachen 3y ago
    I doubt it's free literally anywhere, you'd pay it through taxes if not more directly, but you probably mean that, where you live, it's included (with a fair use policy) with every subscription you can possibly get? That's not the case in any country I've been to, especially if you want a flat EU rate you pay a crapton of money (probably this is easier if you don't have friends and family 20 minutes driving over a border, but also within NL and DE I know many people that pay per minute because they hardly ever call or SMS anyway; probably a majority in fact)
    - zilti 3y ago
      Show me one, just one. I used to have two different Swiss carriers where SMS were free, and now I have the German WINsim, a cheap carrier, where I pay 10€/month and get 15gb, flat phone calls and flat sms. I haven't paid for sms in at least a decade.
      - Aachen 3y ago
        Germany: my partner's current subscription from O2 is pay per minute/SMS. Checking the site now, that doesn't seem to be offered anymore, but the price also doubled so renewing would be stupid Netherlands (the market I'm actually familiar with): https://www.youfone.nl https://www.youfone.nl (virtual provider, cheapest in recent years) Homepage shows 200 minutes/SMS are now forced with every subscription, that's new since I last renewed about two years ago. You used to pay something like 1.5€/month extra if you chose these 200 https://www.odido.nl/mobiel-abonnement/sim-only https://www.odido.nl/mobiel-abonnement/sim-only (budget network, most popular mobile carrier in NL, about 1/3rd of the market) forces to include 120 minutes/SMS KPN.nl (the K stands for royal; historically state-owned and had the best coverage, now the premium "I want to pay more for nothing" provider) includes unlimited call/SMS with every available subscription apparently. Prepaid would be pay per use, but those offers are even less attractive (I used to have prepaid as an adult because it used to be cheaper and they'd just automatically book a data bundle off the balance and automatically top up the balance from my bank account; but then KPN bought the virtual provider and it became expensive) https://www.simyo.nl/sim-only/bestellen https://www.simyo.nl/sim-only/bestellen forces to include 200. They also offer prepaid but not for an attractive price either (which is weird to me: no credit risk, no minutes or SMSes included, but those internet bundles alone cost more than a monthly cancellable subscription that includes a few hundred minutes/SMSes?) https://www.ben.nl/sim-only https://www.ben.nl/sim-only forces to include 200 Besides premium KPN, a provider called Simpel (means in Dutch what it sounds like in English) seems to be the only one that includes flat rate minutes/SMS with every possible subscription. There's a few more niche providers but I think these are the well-known ones (besides one that gave me a CAPTCHA to view the website so I closed the tab) and should be comprehensive So the market changed since I last renewed: more than a hundred SMSes are always required now. TIL
- 0x1ceb00da 3y ago
  It's scary. Sounds like anyone can replace the os in your phone in 10s and read your browser cookies.
  - megous 3y ago
    Solved by storage encryption.
d--b 3y ago
> Verdict: PinePhone is a great mobile Linux device. I would use it as my daily driver, and probably iron out some issues I ran into, but for me, it failed at... being a phone. I had repeated, unpredictable problems both placing and receiving calls, and I could not resolve them. See below for details. Yeah.
- xethos 3y ago
  > Interestingly enough, while I was writing this, calling using my current (officially supported by T-Mobile) Android phone, I got a very similar scenario: about 30 seconds of attempting to call, phone frantically switching between VoLTE and VoWiFi, then dropping the call. The second attempt went through 2G and connected. Maybe I should not blame PinePhone's modem here...
Tade0 3y ago
> Compare to Android, which involves unlocking the bootloader, flashing recovery, booting into recovery, flashing an OS image, and possibly patching the image to get root. During the holiday break I installed Lineage OS on my father's 10-year-old Motorola Moto G. Turns out in order to unlock the bootloader you have to fill an online form and get a code that unlocks it via email. Additionally initially no custom recovery would install due to an outdated bootloader. I managed to patch it using a script some lone developer wrote for personal use.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >Turns out in order to unlock the bootloader you have to fill an online form and get a code that unlocks it via email. This is to combat groups of people who flash malicious OS builds to phones and resell them to innocent people who have no clue the phone they got is compromised.
  - okanat 3y ago
    Also many frequency bands that modern phones use are regulated, especially heavily with LTE and later due to mixings with the military and public service frequencies. The baseband chips have modifiable software that can be stored in the same flash memory. The companies are trying to avoid the blame by creating a paper trail, if someone modifies a phone to illegally broadcast protected frequencies.
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    All phones are compromised, see the recent hardware backdoor found in iPhone.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      Having an operating system that uploads all passwords, makes your phone into into a residential proxy, or other bad is no where comparable to the idea that phones can have security bugs. The "backdoor" you are referring to was not a backdoor as the system had to already be compromised to use it.
bhpm 3y ago
So what is the bar for being a “great mobile Linux device” if it doesn’t include “reliably making phone calls”?
- tekla 3y ago
  1) Boots 2) Doesn't immediately crash. My Pinephone seems to still have an issue with crashing randomly all the time.
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    My mobian never crashes. Try it. If it doesn’t help you’ve a hardware problem.
- linmob 3y ago
  I think it's that software is not all bad. ;-)
- yaky 3y ago
  1. Great community 2. It's mobile 3. It's Linux It did not reliably make phone calls *for me*. There are plenty of people on forums and Reddit who use it.
- cookiengineer 3y ago
  Boot2gecko and gaia were pretty much what I wanted. But then vendors acted like assholes, and labelled phones as "open" without any possibility to get the source, let alone develop anything for their devices due to lack of working build tools.
cevn 3y ago
Sadly I had a similar experience. Actually had the Pro too, which was even more of a pain, IIRC because of having to press a reset button to boot with a pin, it was really bad. The OG Pinephone eventually would freeze every time I ran apk update on Postmarketos, I think the internal mmc went bad after a year.
- linmob 3y ago
  The eMMC issue sounds like really bad luck - mine is still fine after more than three years (although I have moved on to other mobile Linux devices a year ago, since they are faster).
  - cevn 3y ago
    What are the good Linux mobile devices nowadays? I still believe in mobile linux, but not necessarily Pine..
- megous 3y ago
  There's no reset button on Pinephone Pro. So this is a bit curious...
  - cevn 3y ago
    It may have been an early version. I tried to look it up but seems the Pine forums are down..
    - megous 3y ago
      On early version reset button can't be used to override boot rom boot order. It's just a literal SoC reset button. Newer revisions have RE button, that can override it. So if it was early revision, I can understand the frustration.
Almondsetat 3y ago
I don't know what to make of the fact that 2005 Nokia or Blackberry feature phones had orders of magnitude better software and performance than the PinePhone. Mine is still sitting in a drawer. I take it out twice a year to update it and see if the lock screen (a static image with a text field) still lags and misses inputs
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  > I take it out twice a year to update it and see if the lock screen (a static image with a text field) still lags and misses inputs Yeah as soon as I got my pinephone and the lag on the lock screen happened I had a sinking feeling it wasn't going to be that great.
  - halcek 3y ago
    That's just a matter of software, not hardware. You can try different UIs, SXMO's quite fun, for example.
    - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
      Well... you don't know that until you go to the trouble of installing different software which can be a significant time investment if you haven't done it before. Also, I tinker with many of my devices but it would be perfectly valid if the pinephone I purchased I wanted to just work out of the box, at least to the extent where the first screen doesn't lag on keyboard input. That's a huge sign of immaturity at least in the QA process (if one even exists).j Mind you, I really want things like Pinephone to work and be a viable alternative to the general ad/spyware infested crap on the market.
      - nsajko 3y ago
        Pinephone is not an end-user product, it's explicitly meant for hacking on it as a hobby.
        deleted 3y ago
Aachen 3y ago
> UNLIMITED POWER! > The "killer feature" of PinePhone is that you can SSH into it as any other Linux machine OP, you might be interested in Android I think. It runs a Linux kernel, you can enable root access, and then use something like Linux Deploy to install a distro of your choosing that runs as though it's a normal app. I've been using that since my first Android device and have been able to ssh into my phone "just like any Linux machine" this whole time. Indeed, I find it a killer feature and don't understand not more people want to access their DCIM folder via sshfs (bookmark it in the file manager for easy access, never get your phone out of your pocket anymore to send a photo to PC) or make full-system backups via something like restic. I also use qalc as calculator on the command line whenever I need more than simple multiplication. Fully recommended. (Do use ssh keys instead of a password to avoid needing to type some super strong password on the phone to connect to localhost, since phones get taken into all sorts of untrustworthy WiFi networks)
- squarefoot 3y ago
  On one of my old tablets (Android 4 or 5) years ago I put and configured Syncthing so that it would sync automatically all user data to the home NAS running Nas4Free (now XigmaNAS). Didn't make much use of it, but it worked.
- cristoperb 3y ago
  Yes. Even without enabling root, you can install Termux[1] and have a full Linux cli environment with ssh. > don't understand not more people want to access their DCIM folder via sshfs I agree. I sync my camera folder with Syncthing[1], so as soon as I take a photo it is available on my laptop. 1: https://termux.dev/ https://termux.dev/ 2 https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
  - hmottestad 3y ago
    I can also recommend the Apple ecosystem. My phone and MacBook keep, messages (and sms), contacts, calendar, clipboard and also photos in sync.
    - 3y ago
bonton89 3y ago
I wish there were more options for phones with hardware switches like this.
WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
> but for me, it failed at... being a phone. Unfortunately, true for any "pure Linux" phone out there since forever. I used to have a Nokia N900 and root for it very very much, but the dialer freezing and that infamous kernel bug when lots I/O could make everything sluggish made it a necessity to also carry a feature phone with my primary SIM around, too, just in case.
- fsflover 3y ago
  >> but for me, it failed at... being a phone. > Unfortunately, true for any "pure Linux" phone out there since forever. Not true for Librem 5, which is my daily driver. See also: https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-daily-driven-in-professional-use-success/22303/40 https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-daily-driven-in-profession...
  - neilsimp1 3y ago
    Seconding this, my L5 has been a daily driver for almost a year and while their are hiccups it's more than usable day to day. I spend a lot of time on the phone for work.
  - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
    However, if you have ever tried to cancel your preorder or return it, good luck getting your money back.
- zilti 3y ago
  I was really hoping for the Astro Slide. Then the fxtex. Both turned out to essentially be a scam. All other "pure Linux" phones out there have hardware that is so laughably bad that I almost take it as a personal insult.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  N900 was the first one and the product line was immediately killed by Microsoft. Who knows how good it would be now if it was kept alive
spieglt 3y ago
I haven't turned on my PinePhone in a long time because none of the OSes was usable for more than a week at a time. Maybe I should try postmarketOS again.
- spieglt 3y ago
  Update: tried postmarketOS again and it seems smoother and more stable. Dock works well though the HDMI screen still turns off and back on every few seconds.
singpolyma3 3y ago
> Verdict: PinePhone is a great mobile Linux device. I would use it as my daily driver, and probably iron out some issues I ran into, but for me, it failed at... being a phone. I had repeated, unpredictable problems both placing and receiving calls, and I could not resolve them. See below for details. Sounds like exactly what I want. It has been well over a decade since I used my cell radio for anything but data.
- nomel 3y ago
  For me, it is almost exclusively used for some sort of an emergency, the last being a couple weeks ago, where I had to call in for roadside service with a rental. You're not getting through to customer service from the web. Most of my received calls are also some sort of emergency. I suppose if you have some reliable VoIP setup, it might work. Regardless, it's shoddy, dumb, and shouldn't be celebrated.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    I've put a fair amount of thought into the decision to not carry a phone everywhere I go and this beast always rears its head. Obviously, there was a time when people didn't have phones but society's more or less moved on; people generally expect others to have one and social services reflect that. Anyway, I think reading this comment kinda gave me my answer: be selective about when I take my phone. Kinda the inverse of the murderer not taking their phone when they go to hide the body (I'm not planning to murder anyone); I just don't take my phone unless I plan on being in a situation where there will not be a good alternative to having my own means of communication, e.g., a road trip or vacation. Traveling within my city of residence will likely be feasible, especially if I try to do so primarily with a vehicle smaller than a car. But yeah, if one has this idea, keep in mind that people started taking their phones everywhere because they're useful in many situations.
    - brnt 3y ago
      I had a Palm PDA and have kept using smartphones for productivity apps, calendring, musical, photos as of the beter part of a decade. The fact that it van place and receiver calls really doesnt matter to me, but PDAs dont exist anymore, and so, why not installatie a basic sim? My 'phone' has been really useful to me so I take it basically always with me, unless I specifically know I don't need it (such as going for a swim). I don't take calls if I don't feel like it, but very few people call me. Do you not use you phone for other things than communication?
asah 3y ago
I'd be ok with a phone-form-factor device that lacks cellular and just uses apps over wifi for calls and messages. Kinda like the old iPod Touch.
- cesarb 3y ago
  A smartphone minus the cellular modem is just a PDA. Or rather, the modern smartphone could be viewed as the fusion of the PDA form factor and a cellular phone; this can be more clearly be seen in early smartphones like the Treo 650. Before then, it was common to have both as separate devices, and use Bluetooth (or even IRDA!) to connect both so that the PDA could use the cellular phone as a modem. Unfortunately, like the current "smart TV" situation, it's going to be hard to find a PDA-like device without a built-in modem, since most people do want the built-in modem. There are tablets, but even them seem to be gaining built-in modems nowadays.
- rchaud 3y ago
  I got the Onyx Boox Palma for this. Phone-size E-ink screen (no SIM slot), Android + app store support under the hood.
  - xu_ituairo 3y ago
    How are you finding it?
    - rchaud 3y ago
      Pretty good. One thing to note is that if you're using Android apps, make sure they have a "dark/light mode" setting because in dark mode, UI elements may not be easily visible.
delijati 3y ago
I can recommend droidian or ubuntu touch (uborts.com) and if need (for me it is) use waydroid to run android apps https://docs.waydro.id/usage/install-on-desktops#ubuntu-debian-and-derivatives https://docs.waydro.id/usage/install-on-desktops#ubuntu-debi...
system2 3y ago
[flagged]
autoexec 3y ago
All the open/pro-privacy/pro-consumer cell phones I've seen (pinephone, Fairphone, Librem) never go far enough (non-open cellular modems/wireless chipsets) while also being either insanely priced, unobtainable, barely functional, scammy, broken, or some combination of those things. I really want a product like that to succeed, but I'm just not seeing anything reasonable being produced.
- NoboruWataya 3y ago
  Probably because developing and making those things is extremely expensive. The "traditional" smartphone manufacturers have far lower per-unit costs because of economies of scale and because they externalise many of the production costs by using low-paid labour and environmentally destructive practices. (Some "open" phones probably externalise these costs as well, but Fairphone in particular is so expensive because it tries to avoid doing that.) Not to mention that those lower production costs are then further subsidised by the manufacturers' efforts to extract value from the user in other ways. Every time someone tries to make an open/pro-privacy/pro-consumer phone and doesn't produce a perfect product they get heavily criticised, but I think they are up against some fairly fundamental limitations. The fact that there isn't really a satisfactory option out there despite numerous attempts suggests to me that the problem is not with the specific products or companies but something more fundamental. I don't think it will ever be feasible for ethical phones to compete with non-ethical phones on cost.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    I'll agree that major smartphone manufacturers will probably always be able undercut them on price. I'd be more forgiving on cost if they actually delivered a quality product, especially one with open chipsets.
    - mixmastamyk 3y ago
      How many open modem chipsets that work are there? Honestly even if one exists it’s a luxury until there’s (other) hardware and software that actually works. 1. Get it to work 2. Sell them 3. Profit 4. Reinvest in hardware That’s what Apple did.
filmgirlcw 3y ago
Things like the PinePhone and the Librem 5 are cool on paper but if you can’t use it reliably as a phone, it can’t reliably work in standby, the camera sucks, the battery life is anemic, notifications suck, you can’t stream music from it, and the best thing you can say is “I can ssh into it,” which is cool for sure but I can do that (albeit with limitations) using iSH on iOS and is possible to enable on a number of Android distros. And I fully understand that that isn’t the point. The point is the hard work that has gone into this and the selective-amounts of “freedom” (if we convince ourselves that the modems and firmware in these things being absolutely not free software or open doesn’t to a certain extent obviate the entire thought experiment) you get versus another platform. I get it. I’m glad people are working on this stuff and having fun. And at $200, the Pine Phone is at least cheap enough to try out as a toy if you’re into that kind of thing (I think I’d rather jailbreak an older iPhone or use a modified Android device running an alt-OS, but that’s me). The Librem 5 is either $1000 or $2000 depending on what option you get, and that is to me, only for people who either enjoy setting their money on fire or who have been brainwashed by the marketing that it can do what it cannot do for 99.99999% of the population. I dunno. I don’t like being a hater but I don’t see the real point of having a mobile phone that isn’t a usable phone and that is really only usable if plugged into power all the time and used as a stationary mini computer (and thus, no longer mobile), of which a person could build something much more powerful using a Raspberry Pi or other single-board computer or a used NUC.
- Hackbraten 3y ago
  > The Librem 5 is […] only for people who either enjoy setting their money on fire or who have been brainwashed by the marketing Mind that a huge chunk of the $1000 price point is due to cost of mobile-friendly userspace development (e.g. phosh, phoc, libhandy, libadwaita), driver development, and mainlining drivers. Paying for this is absolutely justified because it’s important work, and it benefits the mobile Linux community as a whole, not just L5 owners.
qa_acc 3y ago
My opinion is different: I had one and I found it a poor platform, construction quality if sufficient to be generous. Then, I had hardware problems and the assistance was a Kafkaesque nightmare. I got rid of it and I took an old Pixel 3A on which I installed Ubuntu Touch: I'm not totally satisfied but, waiting for better Linux platform, IMHO it's another planet.
jraph 3y ago
> PinePhone's GNSS/GPS module works through the modem. Which sort of makes sense, but then, you can't use GPS without a SIM card installed... Soon a thing of the past. I worked on a ModemManager patch to fix this, and a MM maintainer reworked and merged it last month [1] > When GPS is enabled, it takes 10-15 minutes to get a precise location. You can manually inject AGPS data to get an instant precise location. Not ideal but this shows the situation is fixable. See instructions for this also at [1]. As for offline mapping, PureMaps with OSM Scout Server works well enough. [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager/-/issues/183 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager...
- yaky 3y ago
  Thank you! This will be useful as I have considered PinePhone as a carputer / navigation device.
geoffeg 3y ago
That reminds me of something I've been thinking about: Does anyone make a modern Nokia N900? I miss having a small, open Linux machine with a good keyboard in my pocket. I don't want something running Android, I want a common(-ish) Linux distro.
jraph 3y ago
I daily drove it for a year. I now use a feature phone (my first phone!) because the PinePhone took water because of a big rain and took some time to recover. In the meantime I got used to my old feature phone again and the voice quality doesn't suck for the person at the other end of the call with this. Moreover, the PinePhone is unreliable as a phone and I think SMS and call reliability is critical. I also have a PinePhone Pro from when it was affordable. It totally fixes the lags and is fast, making it difficult to use the regular PinePhone again. However, it heats too much and doesn't last long enough on the battery. The PinePhone in general should not be expected to replace your main phone unless you know otherwise. It is still a prototype Linux mobile phone for testing and developing Linux stuff. I still use it daily though. Still useful as a GPS device, to display train tickets and QR codes, to watch videos, listen to things and casually browse e.g. in bed (make sure you don't wrap it in your sheets though). It's not generally practical yet. An Android phone will beat it. It is one of the most practical mobile devices if you care about FOSS and need some smartphone-like features besides calling. Is also occasionally use it as a 4G access point, I also just use my feature phone as a 3G access point through bluetooth for the pinephone when I both want both the calls to work and the smartphone feature or when I'm lazy and don't want to move the sim card but this can be slow. It is an essential device that may make it possible to have an actual fully working Linux mobile device in a few years.
Ologn 3y ago
I primarily program Android phones, but instead of getting an Android watch I decided to get a PineTime in November. I've been happy with it. I primarily use it to calculate my BPM - while doing cardiovascular exercise, or resting, or whatever. I put GadgetBridge on my Android phone and hooked the watch into it and now get BPM charts of my workouts. I also connected it to my phone notifications so if I get a notification on my phone that I got a Signal message, the message appears on my watch. Cost $27 plus $12 shipping. I upgraded the firmware via Bluetooth - the newer firmware is said to do BPMs better (I checked before and after, and it does seem to). They sell a dev kit for the same price, although you don't need the dev kit to develop unless you're really getting into it. It's very developer friendly - you can write your own OS for it, or modify InfiniTime which is the OS it is shipped with. Source code is on Github. Have been happy with it so far.
mixmastamyk 3y ago
I like mine after installing mobian rather than the disaster it shipped with. Just needed something as good as my old iPhone 6s… but not quite there yet. :-/ Also assumed there’d be new hardware by now. Skipped the Pro, when does a new one come out? Been four years I think, which is worse than shipping a phone ten years out of date at launch.
pxeboot 3y ago
I run Phosh on a OnePlus 6. It is honestly pretty good these days. There are certainly bugs and missing functionality, but it works great for many tasks. I especially like having desktop Firefox with uBlock on a phone. Unfortunately, without popular apps being readily available, there is zero chance this goes mainstream. Desktop Linux has a better chance of surpassing Windows.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  What is the base os, did you have to break in?
  - pxeboot 3y ago
    postmarketOS. It installs pretty much the same as any Android ROM. Once your bootloader is unlocked, you just flash it with fastboot.
cookiengineer 3y ago
Honestly there are so many "pinephone is great" reviews out there, and they just cannot be truthful. They are always along the lines of "yeah it is great but actually it was not my daily driver because nothing works". The pinephone would be great in comparison to a Nokia 3310. Everything that came after, even the i models with Bluetooth, would be better daily drivers than anything running on the pinephone. The bluetooth disconnects alone make me throw this thing into the trashbox, because my 5$ usb mp3 flash stick can handle that better these days. This includes SXMO, phosh, and all the rust weekend projects that nobody cares about. We don't need type safety, we don't need GTK or QT, we don't need X on mobile. These are all outdated ways of thinking about what a mobile computer can do, it's ridiculous that you have to even mention it. There was a reason Android 2.3 moved away from anything related to X at the time. And the reason was: OpenGLES. Nothing in the tech stack that GNOME and KDE provides is made for a quick and efficient shader pipeline, let alone a compositor that can be programmed/influenced from userspace. Just use ANGLE and get over your damned opinions about how you can do it better. If the pinephone had boot2chromium or sth like boot2electron, it probably would be a million times less sluggish. Nobody needs an SSH toy terminal that they cannot exit if it cannot render a special character and crashes, because the process management has a single UI thread. If I cannot make a phone call and cannot use WhatsApp on a phone in 2024, it's utterly useless and can only be described as an expensive brick. I get that it's not the hardware, but the software folks seem to be busy reinventing their own opinions about how to do things without even looking for the reasons why thousands of devs before them with decades more experience might have a point. Linux on the phone will fail as long as this cultural problem of "not invented here so I can do it better" isn't fixed.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > If I cannot make a phone call, and cannot use WhatsApp on a phone in 2024, it's utterly useless and can only be described as an expensive brick. Different people care about different things. I've never used WhatsApp in my life. > Nobody needs an SSH toy terminal that they cannot exit if it cannot render a special character and crashes, because the process management has a single UI thread. Er, is that a thing that can happen? I can't see any reason the software would be any less robust just because it's on a phone. In general, it sounds like you're arguing the view that if everyone just reinvented the wheel your way it'd work, but most of those decisions were made for a reason; generally, either for software compatibility, or because just reimplementing Android seems like a questionable value proposition. (And also the usual thing that it's almost all volunteers, so the choice isn't diversity or uniformity, it's diversity or nothing.)
linmob 3y ago
For everyone interested in the whole "Linux on Phones" thing attending FOSDEM, make sure to check out the dev room schedule [0] and relevant stands [1]. [0]: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/foss-on-mobile-devices/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/foss-on-mobile-device... [1]: https://fosdem.org/2024/stands/ https://fosdem.org/2024/stands/
mmvasq 3y ago
Great writeup. I have only used mine as a fast burner due to extraordinary circumstance- yet my biggest issue by far was simply getting a prepaid card that worked. Lost $200 and about 4 hours of my life trying to sort that out in a hurry. AT&T worked it out.

186 points by yaky 3y ago

> To install an OS, you flash an image to an SD card, put it in the PinePhone and turn it on. That's it. You can swap OSes by changing SD cards That's really cool actually! Also think of making backups: just plug the sdcard into your laptop and copy the data. But then also this.. > [...] repeated, unpredictable problems both placing and receiving calls [...] > Notifications TLDR: Only calls and SMS notifications are truly real-time. So the only way someone can reliably reach you is via SMS, which basically means sending an explicit money-costing notification to me whenever I'm not already online and hoping I hear the single ping. That suits a pocket computer, but not for a phone :( The keyboard descriptions are also interesting: no suggestions makes it basically unusable unless it comes with a physical keyboard or you want to have typos in every sentence. I've got a "hacker keyboard" enabled on my android as well, but only turn it on when doing terminal things. I tried typing normally on that and I don't think it would reasonably work after a lot of practice either

jsheard 3y ago
> That's really cool actually! Cool on paper but SD cards have abysmal write endurance, as any Raspberry Pi user will attest to. Unless you trust the entire software stack to keep writes to a minimum I wouldn't trust the SD card to last.
- Aachen 3y ago
  I had this issue, presumably because I ran a Debian userspace below Android with a file on the sdcard as filesystem. Every ~3 years, the sdcard would just drop dead. (Other people seemed to upgrade faster than every 3y or don't use sdcards at all, so idk if it was just me.) It hasn't happened anymore recently, and I feel like there's more awareness/support for this type of usage pattern with the higher-end sdcards that are somewhat recent (like, introduced in the last ~8 years, so after the lifespan of an old cheap sdcard, I'm still on my first new-style one and I'm not yet sure it's not randomness that keeps it alive)
  - jsheard 3y ago
    If you must use an SD card then there are industrial-grade ones which use pSLC NAND and are meant to endure a ton of abuse, but they're very expensive compared to an equivalent amount of reliable eMMC/USB/NVMe storage. IME commodity SD cards are still a crapshoot.
    - Aachen 3y ago
      So far, one of these sdcards that claim to be optimised for applications accessing random files (such as on a Pi) works fine in my phone
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Not so bad, SD cards can be robust. It depends on the file-system and how much work the controller does to catch errors, mark bad cells, etc. I have a few portable handy recorders, a Zoom, a Tascam and a Sound Devices, and all of them handle the same SD cards for years, rarely complaining about format errors or losing files.
- dannyw 3y ago
  Get an endurance SD card and those have decent lifespans.
squarefoot 3y ago
> That's really cool actually! It's cool but it's wrong: SD cards are unreliable.
- Aachen 3y ago
  From my point of view, you're wrong. They work fine for me for this purpose I don't think you can put a binary label on this (right or wrong): reliability is a number, such as MTBF or write cycles, not a boolean
  - squarefoot 3y ago
    I've experienced a number of file corruptions in various ones, including those inserted in SBCs and not carried around; they all were from reliable brands and never bought online. This wasn't systematic, that is, I cannot say all SD cards will fail, but I certainly saw a very noticeable increase in reliability when using as system disk eMMC/SSD instead of plain SD cards.
- dannyw 3y ago
  The cheap ones yeah. Get endurance SD cards.
zilti 3y ago
Is there really any carrier that still charges for SMS?
- Aachen 3y ago
  I doubt it's free literally anywhere, you'd pay it through taxes if not more directly, but you probably mean that, where you live, it's included (with a fair use policy) with every subscription you can possibly get? That's not the case in any country I've been to, especially if you want a flat EU rate you pay a crapton of money (probably this is easier if you don't have friends and family 20 minutes driving over a border, but also within NL and DE I know many people that pay per minute because they hardly ever call or SMS anyway; probably a majority in fact)
  - zilti 3y ago
    Show me one, just one. I used to have two different Swiss carriers where SMS were free, and now I have the German WINsim, a cheap carrier, where I pay 10€/month and get 15gb, flat phone calls and flat sms. I haven't paid for sms in at least a decade.
    - Aachen 3y ago
      Germany: my partner's current subscription from O2 is pay per minute/SMS. Checking the site now, that doesn't seem to be offered anymore, but the price also doubled so renewing would be stupid Netherlands (the market I'm actually familiar with): https://www.youfone.nl https://www.youfone.nl (virtual provider, cheapest in recent years) Homepage shows 200 minutes/SMS are now forced with every subscription, that's new since I last renewed about two years ago. You used to pay something like 1.5€/month extra if you chose these 200 https://www.odido.nl/mobiel-abonnement/sim-only https://www.odido.nl/mobiel-abonnement/sim-only (budget network, most popular mobile carrier in NL, about 1/3rd of the market) forces to include 120 minutes/SMS KPN.nl (the K stands for royal; historically state-owned and had the best coverage, now the premium "I want to pay more for nothing" provider) includes unlimited call/SMS with every available subscription apparently. Prepaid would be pay per use, but those offers are even less attractive (I used to have prepaid as an adult because it used to be cheaper and they'd just automatically book a data bundle off the balance and automatically top up the balance from my bank account; but then KPN bought the virtual provider and it became expensive) https://www.simyo.nl/sim-only/bestellen https://www.simyo.nl/sim-only/bestellen forces to include 200. They also offer prepaid but not for an attractive price either (which is weird to me: no credit risk, no minutes or SMSes included, but those internet bundles alone cost more than a monthly cancellable subscription that includes a few hundred minutes/SMSes?) https://www.ben.nl/sim-only https://www.ben.nl/sim-only forces to include 200 Besides premium KPN, a provider called Simpel (means in Dutch what it sounds like in English) seems to be the only one that includes flat rate minutes/SMS with every possible subscription. There's a few more niche providers but I think these are the well-known ones (besides one that gave me a CAPTCHA to view the website so I closed the tab) and should be comprehensive So the market changed since I last renewed: more than a hundred SMSes are always required now. TIL
0x1ceb00da 3y ago
It's scary. Sounds like anyone can replace the os in your phone in 10s and read your browser cookies.
- megous 3y ago
  Solved by storage encryption.

d--b 3y ago

> Verdict: PinePhone is a great mobile Linux device. I would use it as my daily driver, and probably iron out some issues I ran into, but for me, it failed at... being a phone. I had repeated, unpredictable problems both placing and receiving calls, and I could not resolve them. See below for details. Yeah.

xethos 3y ago
> Interestingly enough, while I was writing this, calling using my current (officially supported by T-Mobile) Android phone, I got a very similar scenario: about 30 seconds of attempting to call, phone frantically switching between VoLTE and VoWiFi, then dropping the call. The second attempt went through 2G and connected. Maybe I should not blame PinePhone's modem here...

Tade0 3y ago

> Compare to Android, which involves unlocking the bootloader, flashing recovery, booting into recovery, flashing an OS image, and possibly patching the image to get root. During the holiday break I installed Lineage OS on my father's 10-year-old Motorola Moto G. Turns out in order to unlock the bootloader you have to fill an online form and get a code that unlocks it via email. Additionally initially no custom recovery would install due to an outdated bootloader. I managed to patch it using a script some lone developer wrote for personal use.

charcircuit 3y ago
>Turns out in order to unlock the bootloader you have to fill an online form and get a code that unlocks it via email. This is to combat groups of people who flash malicious OS builds to phones and resell them to innocent people who have no clue the phone they got is compromised.
- okanat 3y ago
  Also many frequency bands that modern phones use are regulated, especially heavily with LTE and later due to mixings with the military and public service frequencies. The baseband chips have modifiable software that can be stored in the same flash memory. The companies are trying to avoid the blame by creating a paper trail, if someone modifies a phone to illegally broadcast protected frequencies.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  All phones are compromised, see the recent hardware backdoor found in iPhone.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    Having an operating system that uploads all passwords, makes your phone into into a residential proxy, or other bad is no where comparable to the idea that phones can have security bugs. The "backdoor" you are referring to was not a backdoor as the system had to already be compromised to use it.

bhpm 3y ago

So what is the bar for being a “great mobile Linux device” if it doesn’t include “reliably making phone calls”?

tekla 3y ago
1) Boots 2) Doesn't immediately crash. My Pinephone seems to still have an issue with crashing randomly all the time.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  My mobian never crashes. Try it. If it doesn’t help you’ve a hardware problem.
linmob 3y ago
I think it's that software is not all bad. ;-)
yaky 3y ago
1. Great community 2. It's mobile 3. It's Linux It did not reliably make phone calls *for me*. There are plenty of people on forums and Reddit who use it.
cookiengineer 3y ago
Boot2gecko and gaia were pretty much what I wanted. But then vendors acted like assholes, and labelled phones as "open" without any possibility to get the source, let alone develop anything for their devices due to lack of working build tools.

cevn 3y ago

Sadly I had a similar experience. Actually had the Pro too, which was even more of a pain, IIRC because of having to press a reset button to boot with a pin, it was really bad. The OG Pinephone eventually would freeze every time I ran apk update on Postmarketos, I think the internal mmc went bad after a year.

linmob 3y ago
The eMMC issue sounds like really bad luck - mine is still fine after more than three years (although I have moved on to other mobile Linux devices a year ago, since they are faster).
- cevn 3y ago
  What are the good Linux mobile devices nowadays? I still believe in mobile linux, but not necessarily Pine..
megous 3y ago
There's no reset button on Pinephone Pro. So this is a bit curious...
- cevn 3y ago
  It may have been an early version. I tried to look it up but seems the Pine forums are down..
  - megous 3y ago
    On early version reset button can't be used to override boot rom boot order. It's just a literal SoC reset button. Newer revisions have RE button, that can override it. So if it was early revision, I can understand the frustration.

Almondsetat 3y ago

I don't know what to make of the fact that 2005 Nokia or Blackberry feature phones had orders of magnitude better software and performance than the PinePhone. Mine is still sitting in a drawer. I take it out twice a year to update it and see if the lock screen (a static image with a text field) still lags and misses inputs

ParetoOptimal 3y ago
> I take it out twice a year to update it and see if the lock screen (a static image with a text field) still lags and misses inputs Yeah as soon as I got my pinephone and the lag on the lock screen happened I had a sinking feeling it wasn't going to be that great.
- halcek 3y ago
  That's just a matter of software, not hardware. You can try different UIs, SXMO's quite fun, for example.
  - ParetoOptimal 3y ago
    Well... you don't know that until you go to the trouble of installing different software which can be a significant time investment if you haven't done it before. Also, I tinker with many of my devices but it would be perfectly valid if the pinephone I purchased I wanted to just work out of the box, at least to the extent where the first screen doesn't lag on keyboard input. That's a huge sign of immaturity at least in the QA process (if one even exists).j Mind you, I really want things like Pinephone to work and be a viable alternative to the general ad/spyware infested crap on the market.
    - nsajko 3y ago
      Pinephone is not an end-user product, it's explicitly meant for hacking on it as a hobby.
      - deleted 3y ago

Aachen 3y ago

> UNLIMITED POWER! > The "killer feature" of PinePhone is that you can SSH into it as any other Linux machine OP, you might be interested in Android I think. It runs a Linux kernel, you can enable root access, and then use something like Linux Deploy to install a distro of your choosing that runs as though it's a normal app. I've been using that since my first Android device and have been able to ssh into my phone "just like any Linux machine" this whole time. Indeed, I find it a killer feature and don't understand not more people want to access their DCIM folder via sshfs (bookmark it in the file manager for easy access, never get your phone out of your pocket anymore to send a photo to PC) or make full-system backups via something like restic. I also use qalc as calculator on the command line whenever I need more than simple multiplication. Fully recommended. (Do use ssh keys instead of a password to avoid needing to type some super strong password on the phone to connect to localhost, since phones get taken into all sorts of untrustworthy WiFi networks)

squarefoot 3y ago
On one of my old tablets (Android 4 or 5) years ago I put and configured Syncthing so that it would sync automatically all user data to the home NAS running Nas4Free (now XigmaNAS). Didn't make much use of it, but it worked.
cristoperb 3y ago
Yes. Even without enabling root, you can install Termux[1] and have a full Linux cli environment with ssh. > don't understand not more people want to access their DCIM folder via sshfs I agree. I sync my camera folder with Syncthing[1], so as soon as I take a photo it is available on my laptop. 1: https://termux.dev/ https://termux.dev/ 2 https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- hmottestad 3y ago
  I can also recommend the Apple ecosystem. My phone and MacBook keep, messages (and sms), contacts, calendar, clipboard and also photos in sync.
  - 3y ago

bonton89 3y ago

I wish there were more options for phones with hardware switches like this.

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago

> but for me, it failed at... being a phone. Unfortunately, true for any "pure Linux" phone out there since forever. I used to have a Nokia N900 and root for it very very much, but the dialer freezing and that infamous kernel bug when lots I/O could make everything sluggish made it a necessity to also carry a feature phone with my primary SIM around, too, just in case.

fsflover 3y ago
>> but for me, it failed at... being a phone. > Unfortunately, true for any "pure Linux" phone out there since forever. Not true for Librem 5, which is my daily driver. See also: https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-daily-driven-in-professional-use-success/22303/40 https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-daily-driven-in-profession...
- neilsimp1 3y ago
  Seconding this, my L5 has been a daily driver for almost a year and while their are hiccups it's more than usable day to day. I spend a lot of time on the phone for work.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  However, if you have ever tried to cancel your preorder or return it, good luck getting your money back.
zilti 3y ago
I was really hoping for the Astro Slide. Then the fxtex. Both turned out to essentially be a scam. All other "pure Linux" phones out there have hardware that is so laughably bad that I almost take it as a personal insult.
coffeebeqn 3y ago
N900 was the first one and the product line was immediately killed by Microsoft. Who knows how good it would be now if it was kept alive

spieglt 3y ago

I haven't turned on my PinePhone in a long time because none of the OSes was usable for more than a week at a time. Maybe I should try postmarketOS again.

spieglt 3y ago
Update: tried postmarketOS again and it seems smoother and more stable. Dock works well though the HDMI screen still turns off and back on every few seconds.

singpolyma3 3y ago

nomel 3y ago
For me, it is almost exclusively used for some sort of an emergency, the last being a couple weeks ago, where I had to call in for roadside service with a rental. You're not getting through to customer service from the web. Most of my received calls are also some sort of emergency. I suppose if you have some reliable VoIP setup, it might work. Regardless, it's shoddy, dumb, and shouldn't be celebrated.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  I've put a fair amount of thought into the decision to not carry a phone everywhere I go and this beast always rears its head. Obviously, there was a time when people didn't have phones but society's more or less moved on; people generally expect others to have one and social services reflect that. Anyway, I think reading this comment kinda gave me my answer: be selective about when I take my phone. Kinda the inverse of the murderer not taking their phone when they go to hide the body (I'm not planning to murder anyone); I just don't take my phone unless I plan on being in a situation where there will not be a good alternative to having my own means of communication, e.g., a road trip or vacation. Traveling within my city of residence will likely be feasible, especially if I try to do so primarily with a vehicle smaller than a car. But yeah, if one has this idea, keep in mind that people started taking their phones everywhere because they're useful in many situations.
  - brnt 3y ago
    I had a Palm PDA and have kept using smartphones for productivity apps, calendring, musical, photos as of the beter part of a decade. The fact that it van place and receiver calls really doesnt matter to me, but PDAs dont exist anymore, and so, why not installatie a basic sim? My 'phone' has been really useful to me so I take it basically always with me, unless I specifically know I don't need it (such as going for a swim). I don't take calls if I don't feel like it, but very few people call me. Do you not use you phone for other things than communication?

asah 3y ago

I'd be ok with a phone-form-factor device that lacks cellular and just uses apps over wifi for calls and messages. Kinda like the old iPod Touch.

cesarb 3y ago
A smartphone minus the cellular modem is just a PDA. Or rather, the modern smartphone could be viewed as the fusion of the PDA form factor and a cellular phone; this can be more clearly be seen in early smartphones like the Treo 650. Before then, it was common to have both as separate devices, and use Bluetooth (or even IRDA!) to connect both so that the PDA could use the cellular phone as a modem. Unfortunately, like the current "smart TV" situation, it's going to be hard to find a PDA-like device without a built-in modem, since most people do want the built-in modem. There are tablets, but even them seem to be gaining built-in modems nowadays.
rchaud 3y ago
I got the Onyx Boox Palma for this. Phone-size E-ink screen (no SIM slot), Android + app store support under the hood.
- xu_ituairo 3y ago
  How are you finding it?
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Pretty good. One thing to note is that if you're using Android apps, make sure they have a "dark/light mode" setting because in dark mode, UI elements may not be easily visible.

delijati 3y ago

I can recommend droidian or ubuntu touch (uborts.com) and if need (for me it is) use waydroid to run android apps https://docs.waydro.id/usage/install-on-desktops#ubuntu-debian-and-derivatives https://docs.waydro.id/usage/install-on-desktops#ubuntu-debi...

system2 3y ago

[flagged]

autoexec 3y ago

All the open/pro-privacy/pro-consumer cell phones I've seen (pinephone, Fairphone, Librem) never go far enough (non-open cellular modems/wireless chipsets) while also being either insanely priced, unobtainable, barely functional, scammy, broken, or some combination of those things. I really want a product like that to succeed, but I'm just not seeing anything reasonable being produced.

NoboruWataya 3y ago
Probably because developing and making those things is extremely expensive. The "traditional" smartphone manufacturers have far lower per-unit costs because of economies of scale and because they externalise many of the production costs by using low-paid labour and environmentally destructive practices. (Some "open" phones probably externalise these costs as well, but Fairphone in particular is so expensive because it tries to avoid doing that.) Not to mention that those lower production costs are then further subsidised by the manufacturers' efforts to extract value from the user in other ways. Every time someone tries to make an open/pro-privacy/pro-consumer phone and doesn't produce a perfect product they get heavily criticised, but I think they are up against some fairly fundamental limitations. The fact that there isn't really a satisfactory option out there despite numerous attempts suggests to me that the problem is not with the specific products or companies but something more fundamental. I don't think it will ever be feasible for ethical phones to compete with non-ethical phones on cost.
- autoexec 3y ago
  I'll agree that major smartphone manufacturers will probably always be able undercut them on price. I'd be more forgiving on cost if they actually delivered a quality product, especially one with open chipsets.
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    How many open modem chipsets that work are there? Honestly even if one exists it’s a luxury until there’s (other) hardware and software that actually works. 1. Get it to work 2. Sell them 3. Profit 4. Reinvest in hardware That’s what Apple did.

filmgirlcw 3y ago

Things like the PinePhone and the Librem 5 are cool on paper but if you can’t use it reliably as a phone, it can’t reliably work in standby, the camera sucks, the battery life is anemic, notifications suck, you can’t stream music from it, and the best thing you can say is “I can ssh into it,” which is cool for sure but I can do that (albeit with limitations) using iSH on iOS and is possible to enable on a number of Android distros. And I fully understand that that isn’t the point. The point is the hard work that has gone into this and the selective-amounts of “freedom” (if we convince ourselves that the modems and firmware in these things being absolutely not free software or open doesn’t to a certain extent obviate the entire thought experiment) you get versus another platform. I get it. I’m glad people are working on this stuff and having fun. And at $200, the Pine Phone is at least cheap enough to try out as a toy if you’re into that kind of thing (I think I’d rather jailbreak an older iPhone or use a modified Android device running an alt-OS, but that’s me). The Librem 5 is either $1000 or $2000 depending on what option you get, and that is to me, only for people who either enjoy setting their money on fire or who have been brainwashed by the marketing that it can do what it cannot do for 99.99999% of the population. I dunno. I don’t like being a hater but I don’t see the real point of having a mobile phone that isn’t a usable phone and that is really only usable if plugged into power all the time and used as a stationary mini computer (and thus, no longer mobile), of which a person could build something much more powerful using a Raspberry Pi or other single-board computer or a used NUC.

Hackbraten 3y ago
> The Librem 5 is […] only for people who either enjoy setting their money on fire or who have been brainwashed by the marketing Mind that a huge chunk of the $1000 price point is due to cost of mobile-friendly userspace development (e.g. phosh, phoc, libhandy, libadwaita), driver development, and mainlining drivers. Paying for this is absolutely justified because it’s important work, and it benefits the mobile Linux community as a whole, not just L5 owners.

qa_acc 3y ago

My opinion is different: I had one and I found it a poor platform, construction quality if sufficient to be generous. Then, I had hardware problems and the assistance was a Kafkaesque nightmare. I got rid of it and I took an old Pixel 3A on which I installed Ubuntu Touch: I'm not totally satisfied but, waiting for better Linux platform, IMHO it's another planet.

jraph 3y ago

> PinePhone's GNSS/GPS module works through the modem. Which sort of makes sense, but then, you can't use GPS without a SIM card installed... Soon a thing of the past. I worked on a ModemManager patch to fix this, and a MM maintainer reworked and merged it last month [1] > When GPS is enabled, it takes 10-15 minutes to get a precise location. You can manually inject AGPS data to get an instant precise location. Not ideal but this shows the situation is fixable. See instructions for this also at [1]. As for offline mapping, PureMaps with OSM Scout Server works well enough. [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager/-/issues/183 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager...

yaky 3y ago
Thank you! This will be useful as I have considered PinePhone as a carputer / navigation device.

geoffeg 3y ago

That reminds me of something I've been thinking about: Does anyone make a modern Nokia N900? I miss having a small, open Linux machine with a good keyboard in my pocket. I don't want something running Android, I want a common(-ish) Linux distro.

jraph 3y ago

I daily drove it for a year. I now use a feature phone (my first phone!) because the PinePhone took water because of a big rain and took some time to recover. In the meantime I got used to my old feature phone again and the voice quality doesn't suck for the person at the other end of the call with this. Moreover, the PinePhone is unreliable as a phone and I think SMS and call reliability is critical. I also have a PinePhone Pro from when it was affordable. It totally fixes the lags and is fast, making it difficult to use the regular PinePhone again. However, it heats too much and doesn't last long enough on the battery. The PinePhone in general should not be expected to replace your main phone unless you know otherwise. It is still a prototype Linux mobile phone for testing and developing Linux stuff. I still use it daily though. Still useful as a GPS device, to display train tickets and QR codes, to watch videos, listen to things and casually browse e.g. in bed (make sure you don't wrap it in your sheets though). It's not generally practical yet. An Android phone will beat it. It is one of the most practical mobile devices if you care about FOSS and need some smartphone-like features besides calling. Is also occasionally use it as a 4G access point, I also just use my feature phone as a 3G access point through bluetooth for the pinephone when I both want both the calls to work and the smartphone feature or when I'm lazy and don't want to move the sim card but this can be slow. It is an essential device that may make it possible to have an actual fully working Linux mobile device in a few years.

Ologn 3y ago

I primarily program Android phones, but instead of getting an Android watch I decided to get a PineTime in November. I've been happy with it. I primarily use it to calculate my BPM - while doing cardiovascular exercise, or resting, or whatever. I put GadgetBridge on my Android phone and hooked the watch into it and now get BPM charts of my workouts. I also connected it to my phone notifications so if I get a notification on my phone that I got a Signal message, the message appears on my watch. Cost $27 plus $12 shipping. I upgraded the firmware via Bluetooth - the newer firmware is said to do BPMs better (I checked before and after, and it does seem to). They sell a dev kit for the same price, although you don't need the dev kit to develop unless you're really getting into it. It's very developer friendly - you can write your own OS for it, or modify InfiniTime which is the OS it is shipped with. Source code is on Github. Have been happy with it so far.

mixmastamyk 3y ago

I like mine after installing mobian rather than the disaster it shipped with. Just needed something as good as my old iPhone 6s… but not quite there yet. :-/ Also assumed there’d be new hardware by now. Skipped the Pro, when does a new one come out? Been four years I think, which is worse than shipping a phone ten years out of date at launch.

pxeboot 3y ago

I run Phosh on a OnePlus 6. It is honestly pretty good these days. There are certainly bugs and missing functionality, but it works great for many tasks. I especially like having desktop Firefox with uBlock on a phone. Unfortunately, without popular apps being readily available, there is zero chance this goes mainstream. Desktop Linux has a better chance of surpassing Windows.

mixmastamyk 3y ago
What is the base os, did you have to break in?
- pxeboot 3y ago
  postmarketOS. It installs pretty much the same as any Android ROM. Once your bootloader is unlocked, you just flash it with fastboot.

cookiengineer 3y ago

Honestly there are so many "pinephone is great" reviews out there, and they just cannot be truthful. They are always along the lines of "yeah it is great but actually it was not my daily driver because nothing works". The pinephone would be great in comparison to a Nokia 3310. Everything that came after, even the i models with Bluetooth, would be better daily drivers than anything running on the pinephone. The bluetooth disconnects alone make me throw this thing into the trashbox, because my 5$ usb mp3 flash stick can handle that better these days. This includes SXMO, phosh, and all the rust weekend projects that nobody cares about. We don't need type safety, we don't need GTK or QT, we don't need X on mobile. These are all outdated ways of thinking about what a mobile computer can do, it's ridiculous that you have to even mention it. There was a reason Android 2.3 moved away from anything related to X at the time. And the reason was: OpenGLES. Nothing in the tech stack that GNOME and KDE provides is made for a quick and efficient shader pipeline, let alone a compositor that can be programmed/influenced from userspace. Just use ANGLE and get over your damned opinions about how you can do it better. If the pinephone had boot2chromium or sth like boot2electron, it probably would be a million times less sluggish. Nobody needs an SSH toy terminal that they cannot exit if it cannot render a special character and crashes, because the process management has a single UI thread. If I cannot make a phone call and cannot use WhatsApp on a phone in 2024, it's utterly useless and can only be described as an expensive brick. I get that it's not the hardware, but the software folks seem to be busy reinventing their own opinions about how to do things without even looking for the reasons why thousands of devs before them with decades more experience might have a point. Linux on the phone will fail as long as this cultural problem of "not invented here so I can do it better" isn't fixed.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> If I cannot make a phone call, and cannot use WhatsApp on a phone in 2024, it's utterly useless and can only be described as an expensive brick. Different people care about different things. I've never used WhatsApp in my life. > Nobody needs an SSH toy terminal that they cannot exit if it cannot render a special character and crashes, because the process management has a single UI thread. Er, is that a thing that can happen? I can't see any reason the software would be any less robust just because it's on a phone. In general, it sounds like you're arguing the view that if everyone just reinvented the wheel your way it'd work, but most of those decisions were made for a reason; generally, either for software compatibility, or because just reimplementing Android seems like a questionable value proposition. (And also the usual thing that it's almost all volunteers, so the choice isn't diversity or uniformity, it's diversity or nothing.)

linmob 3y ago

For everyone interested in the whole "Linux on Phones" thing attending FOSDEM, make sure to check out the dev room schedule [0] and relevant stands [1]. [0]: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/foss-on-mobile-devices/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/foss-on-mobile-device... [1]: https://fosdem.org/2024/stands/ https://fosdem.org/2024/stands/

mmvasq 3y ago

Great writeup. I have only used mine as a fast burner due to extraordinary circumstance- yet my biggest issue by far was simply getting a prepaid card that worked. Lost $200 and about 4 hours of my life trying to sort that out in a hurry. AT&T worked it out.