7 ms·

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.

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
        [deleted]
    - sangnoir 3y ago
      > 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. The Pinephone home and order pages had a warning in figurative blinking neon signs clearly stating it's not for consumers and squarely targeted at developers interested in making the software better.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    it is also the hardware. my budget for a phone is about $150. i have been thinking about getting a pinephone (with a keyboard) but that would have been twice my budget, and after i saw a friend with that having trouble getting the keyboard working, i passed on it. before i had a fairphone 3, which i had received as a gift, but its performance was worse than the $150 phone i had before that. now however i got a very good deal (slightly over my budget) on a refurbished 3 year old oneplus nord that new would have cost $400. and boy, i have never had a phone that was that good. not only is it much faster, the battery lasts longer too. i can now understand why people like to spend money on a high end phone. i still won't spend that much but thanks to refurbishing services i don't need to. i really appreciate what fairphone and pinephone are doing. we need these alternative phones. i had my share of them, firefox phone, geeksphone. a sailfish based phone from india, a samsung phone running tizen. i even got a second hand openmoko very cheap because the owner was unsatisfied with it. and i can really see the evolution. the problem is that these phones are a few years behind the curve and that the apps are written for high end phones. (the fairphone was really struggling to run wechat) so actually, in theory you should be right. there should be software that is snapping fast even on these phones. i mean even the openmoko had usable apps. but in practice, sadly the hardware is simply a limitation. perhaps in a few years phones will reach the same state that desktop and laptop computers have now. they can only speed up by adding more cores, and individual applications can't really go any faster, so a 7 year old computer still performs fine, even for my kids as a gaming device.
    - paulproteus 3y ago
      With that kind of budget, you can get an iPhone SE 2020: https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/p/iphone-se-2020-64-gb-black-unlocked/aa9551de-d3f1-4037-a2d4-5fc1893b2301 https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/p/iphone-se-2020-64-gb-blac... . If you can spare an extra $50, I'd go for the current model: https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/p/iphone-se-2022-64-gb-starlight-fully-unlocked-gsm-cdma/862f8c1b-4826-44f4-8805-e50136af893e https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/p/iphone-se-2022-64-gb-star... ($202) That's basically what I did: https://announce.asheesh.org/2022/09/i-switched-to-iphone-for-cost-reasons-i-can-help-you-switch-too/ https://announce.asheesh.org/2022/09/i-switched-to-iphone-fo...
- bitwize 3y ago
  Part of the problem is Phosh is basically fucking GNOME and inherits all the GNOME enshittification including a render path that requires considerable CPU/GPU oomph to draw smoothly. Windows has a smoother UX on old/weak hardware than GNOME. I don't know why this is and why they can't (or won't bother to) get their act together, but when it comes to a responsive UI, a bare X WM that uses regular 2D draw calls trounces GNOME. On the PinePhone that pretty much means SXMO.
  - TingPing 3y ago
    phosh is a custom compositor (phoc) not based on GMOME-Shell at all. It is a simple one made purely in C.
    - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
      Wikipedia says Phosh is based on the GTK toolkit and is in fact a fork of GNOME shell. Even their own webpage says so at https://phosh.mobi/about/ https://phosh.mobi/about/
      - TingPing 3y ago
        You are misreading the Phosh page. It says it uses a custom wlroots compositor on that page. You can see the source yourself: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phoc https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phoc Yes it uses the GTK toolkit but that has nothing to do withe GNOME-Shell or its performance problems. I corrected the Wikipedia article.
  - grey_earthling 3y ago
    > I don't know why this is and why they can't (or won't bother to) get their act together It's because you're not their employer, so they can do (or not do) whatever they want.
vdaea 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 There are some people who do not notice things like this. Or they don't give them importance. Fill your team with them and get prepared for the shitfest.
yaky 3y ago
On one hand, it's disappointing. On the other hand, most of the PinePhone software has been developed, adapted, and patched by enthusiasts. Many applications were never intended to work on mobile devices in the first place. And no top-down direction. Android and iOS have been around for 10+ years, and it would be interesting to compare early Android to PinePhone now. I believe PinePhones ship with Manjaro and Plasma Mobile, which is notoriously slow and unstable, and is part of the reason why I went with Phosh. For a more feature-phone experience, there is an ongoing project to put NuttX RTOS on PinePhone [0]. For a very performant and customizable but unusual (button navigation, terminal-based) experience, there is SXMO [1] 0: https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/pinephone2 https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/pinephone2 1:https://sxmo.org/ https://sxmo.org/
- tetris11 3y ago
  Phosh is amazing. I'm currently running it on an Alcatel Idol 347 (2015) with 1.9GB using PostmarketOS, and it's just snappy and responsive as any Android UI, using ~ 300MB in RAM with the desktop. Very happy with it.
  - pinethrowaway 3y ago
    Does wifi tethering work ok on that phone?
    - xethos 3y ago
      Something I learned recently is that tethering works correctly on the Pro - had to use it for my Kobo. I was looking around for wifi, and eventually figured it was worth looking into for the Pinephone Pro. And it... just worked. Entirely via GUI, with no hiccups (using Phosh)
  - grey_earthling 3y ago
    I'm using Mobian trixie (basically Debian testing) on a Librem 5. The overall experience is very much “not there yet”, but I reckon most of this is down to relatively few high-impact issues, mostly around touch input. Editing text is very frustrating (but it sounds like the 1st iPhone was on-par). The keyboard doesn't always appear or disappear when you'd expect (but you can manually open or close it in Phosh). The biggest frustration here is that the text editing context menu (Copy, Paste etc) doesn't appear at all consistently. There's also a bug where the context menu appears when it shouldn't (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5540 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5540), which makes several apps more awkward to use. Phosh as a shell is mostly fine. The spatial model doesn't really make sense, so it's not as nice to use as the mobile version of Gnome, but that's still pre-alpha for now. Phosh hides the window's close button for some reason, and overrides that setting on every restart, so until apps switch to the new dialogs (which landed yesterday), even closing a dialog is awkward. Overall it feels very cobbled-together for now. Files and Camera don't work properly yet, so Mobian has replaced them with Portfolio and “Camera (Dev Preview)” (which is actually a completely separate project called Millipixels that looks like a tech demo). Firefox has been heavily modified, including the bizarre decision to put the headerbar at the bottom of the window(?!) unlike any other app, and hide a load of menu options. And then there's the general fit-and-finish I'd expect from Debian (compared with Fedora). There's a useless “Advanced Network Configuration” app that appears in the app grid, but apparently isn't a real app, because when you try to view its details Software says “Sorry! There are no details for that application”, so you can't get rid of it, whatever it is. Also, Evolution Alarm Notify; but at least I know how to prevent that from starting. (There's less of this sort of thing than with Ubuntu, though — there aren't 3 separate apps for installing software, updating software, and everyone's favourite pastime, configuring software repositories.) It is possible to use it for basic tasks, and for me personally, I'd rather put up with good-faith bugginess than have to deal with something that assumes I want a Google account.
rchaud 3y ago
2005 phones weren't running anything close to a desktop OS. A more reasonable parallel would be the barely-released Nokia N9 from 2011 running MaemoOS. It was abandoned upon launch because the company had already agreed to go exclusively with Windows Phone OS. With that said, I think 3GB RAM feels very low for a device running this kind of software. Even the Nokia N9 had 1GB RAM.
- Saris 3y ago
  3GB RAM is wildly low when most Android phones have 8-12GB these days. And the Pinephone is running much heavier software.
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  Asking feature parity with 20yo feature phones is the bare minimum.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    Pull requests welcome.
    - Almondsetat 3y ago
      Decent developing environment welcome.
- Loranubi 3y ago
  The iPhone SE 2 has 3GB memory and runs pretty smoothly.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Mid-range Android phones with 3GB run fine as well. A Linux distro running on off-the-shelf mobile hardware components is a different undertaking.
ElectricSpoon 3y ago
When I look the hardware in it, I feels like the pinephone is just a step above what I would have built from a 3d printer, custom PCB, a microcontroller and an IOT modem from sparkfun. Every part is average, but the sum of it allows calling and has a usable idle battery life. Such a collection of hardware can't realistically compete with mainstream phones which have very tight hardware and software integration to achieve the most performance with the least power draw. It's a bad phone (and bad portable computer), but mine might work for as long as LTE and my desire to recompile exist. Schematics, opensource and spare parts being available are the crux of it. It's the phone for those wanting to build their phones and it's pretty good at that.
pinethrowaway 3y ago
The only usable OS for the PinePhone had been PostmarketOS with sxmo-de-sway. I had to do lots of tasks using the terminal, but it allowed me to have a stable connection and Wifi hotspot. Phosh and Plasma would disconnect or crash often. I also got lots of shifty looks using my phone on the train as if I were a hacker terrorist or something. It's been much smoother using LineageOS on a very old OnePlus One than the Pinephone, but I still keep it around to try out new OS updates.
megous 3y ago
I doubt it. Pinephone can run this on 1920x1080 screen: https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4 https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4 Could 2005 Nokia do that?
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  Do you think a good phone is one that runs Kodi but can't manage calls and messages?
  - megous 3y ago
    No, I just think it's ridiculous to say 2005 Nokia feature phone had better performance.
  - graemep 3y ago
    For some people it probably is. If you want a cheap pocket sized Linux computer rather than a phone. I am quite happy with my Pinetab (I am typing on it now). I see the Pinephone as a smaller version of that. My Pinetab has replaced my phone for quite a lot of things - I use my phone a lot less.
jksmith 3y ago
Yeah agree with similar experience, and yeah, made me pine (no pun) for my Key2 with a physical keyboard, which was generally bulletproof. There's a reason BB dropped out of the phone business, I get that, but I'd pay iphone prices for a new BB Key2 that was de-googled. But I would not pay iphone prices for an iphone. If the market was still free, the future would be a BB committed to trust reciprocation. But it's too late now. So aside from de-googled provided by some specific vendors, just fuck phones.

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
      [deleted]
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    > 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. The Pinephone home and order pages had a warning in figurative blinking neon signs clearly stating it's not for consumers and squarely targeted at developers interested in making the software better.
- em-bee 3y ago
  it is also the hardware. my budget for a phone is about $150. i have been thinking about getting a pinephone (with a keyboard) but that would have been twice my budget, and after i saw a friend with that having trouble getting the keyboard working, i passed on it. before i had a fairphone 3, which i had received as a gift, but its performance was worse than the $150 phone i had before that. now however i got a very good deal (slightly over my budget) on a refurbished 3 year old oneplus nord that new would have cost $400. and boy, i have never had a phone that was that good. not only is it much faster, the battery lasts longer too. i can now understand why people like to spend money on a high end phone. i still won't spend that much but thanks to refurbishing services i don't need to. i really appreciate what fairphone and pinephone are doing. we need these alternative phones. i had my share of them, firefox phone, geeksphone. a sailfish based phone from india, a samsung phone running tizen. i even got a second hand openmoko very cheap because the owner was unsatisfied with it. and i can really see the evolution. the problem is that these phones are a few years behind the curve and that the apps are written for high end phones. (the fairphone was really struggling to run wechat) so actually, in theory you should be right. there should be software that is snapping fast even on these phones. i mean even the openmoko had usable apps. but in practice, sadly the hardware is simply a limitation. perhaps in a few years phones will reach the same state that desktop and laptop computers have now. they can only speed up by adding more cores, and individual applications can't really go any faster, so a 7 year old computer still performs fine, even for my kids as a gaming device.
  - paulproteus 3y ago
    With that kind of budget, you can get an iPhone SE 2020: https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/p/iphone-se-2020-64-gb-black-unlocked/aa9551de-d3f1-4037-a2d4-5fc1893b2301 https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/p/iphone-se-2020-64-gb-blac... . If you can spare an extra $50, I'd go for the current model: https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/p/iphone-se-2022-64-gb-starlight-fully-unlocked-gsm-cdma/862f8c1b-4826-44f4-8805-e50136af893e https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/p/iphone-se-2022-64-gb-star... ($202) That's basically what I did: https://announce.asheesh.org/2022/09/i-switched-to-iphone-for-cost-reasons-i-can-help-you-switch-too/ https://announce.asheesh.org/2022/09/i-switched-to-iphone-fo...
bitwize 3y ago
Part of the problem is Phosh is basically fucking GNOME and inherits all the GNOME enshittification including a render path that requires considerable CPU/GPU oomph to draw smoothly. Windows has a smoother UX on old/weak hardware than GNOME. I don't know why this is and why they can't (or won't bother to) get their act together, but when it comes to a responsive UI, a bare X WM that uses regular 2D draw calls trounces GNOME. On the PinePhone that pretty much means SXMO.
- TingPing 3y ago
  phosh is a custom compositor (phoc) not based on GMOME-Shell at all. It is a simple one made purely in C.
  - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
    Wikipedia says Phosh is based on the GTK toolkit and is in fact a fork of GNOME shell. Even their own webpage says so at https://phosh.mobi/about/ https://phosh.mobi/about/
    - TingPing 3y ago
      You are misreading the Phosh page. It says it uses a custom wlroots compositor on that page. You can see the source yourself: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phoc https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phoc Yes it uses the GTK toolkit but that has nothing to do withe GNOME-Shell or its performance problems. I corrected the Wikipedia article.
- grey_earthling 3y ago
  > I don't know why this is and why they can't (or won't bother to) get their act together It's because you're not their employer, so they can do (or not do) whatever they want.

vdaea 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 There are some people who do not notice things like this. Or they don't give them importance. Fill your team with them and get prepared for the shitfest.

yaky 3y ago

On one hand, it's disappointing. On the other hand, most of the PinePhone software has been developed, adapted, and patched by enthusiasts. Many applications were never intended to work on mobile devices in the first place. And no top-down direction. Android and iOS have been around for 10+ years, and it would be interesting to compare early Android to PinePhone now. I believe PinePhones ship with Manjaro and Plasma Mobile, which is notoriously slow and unstable, and is part of the reason why I went with Phosh. For a more feature-phone experience, there is an ongoing project to put NuttX RTOS on PinePhone [0]. For a very performant and customizable but unusual (button navigation, terminal-based) experience, there is SXMO [1] 0: https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/pinephone2 https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/pinephone2 1:https://sxmo.org/ https://sxmo.org/

tetris11 3y ago
Phosh is amazing. I'm currently running it on an Alcatel Idol 347 (2015) with 1.9GB using PostmarketOS, and it's just snappy and responsive as any Android UI, using ~ 300MB in RAM with the desktop. Very happy with it.
- pinethrowaway 3y ago
  Does wifi tethering work ok on that phone?
  - xethos 3y ago
    Something I learned recently is that tethering works correctly on the Pro - had to use it for my Kobo. I was looking around for wifi, and eventually figured it was worth looking into for the Pinephone Pro. And it... just worked. Entirely via GUI, with no hiccups (using Phosh)
- grey_earthling 3y ago
  I'm using Mobian trixie (basically Debian testing) on a Librem 5. The overall experience is very much “not there yet”, but I reckon most of this is down to relatively few high-impact issues, mostly around touch input. Editing text is very frustrating (but it sounds like the 1st iPhone was on-par). The keyboard doesn't always appear or disappear when you'd expect (but you can manually open or close it in Phosh). The biggest frustration here is that the text editing context menu (Copy, Paste etc) doesn't appear at all consistently. There's also a bug where the context menu appears when it shouldn't (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5540 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5540), which makes several apps more awkward to use. Phosh as a shell is mostly fine. The spatial model doesn't really make sense, so it's not as nice to use as the mobile version of Gnome, but that's still pre-alpha for now. Phosh hides the window's close button for some reason, and overrides that setting on every restart, so until apps switch to the new dialogs (which landed yesterday), even closing a dialog is awkward. Overall it feels very cobbled-together for now. Files and Camera don't work properly yet, so Mobian has replaced them with Portfolio and “Camera (Dev Preview)” (which is actually a completely separate project called Millipixels that looks like a tech demo). Firefox has been heavily modified, including the bizarre decision to put the headerbar at the bottom of the window(?!) unlike any other app, and hide a load of menu options. And then there's the general fit-and-finish I'd expect from Debian (compared with Fedora). There's a useless “Advanced Network Configuration” app that appears in the app grid, but apparently isn't a real app, because when you try to view its details Software says “Sorry! There are no details for that application”, so you can't get rid of it, whatever it is. Also, Evolution Alarm Notify; but at least I know how to prevent that from starting. (There's less of this sort of thing than with Ubuntu, though — there aren't 3 separate apps for installing software, updating software, and everyone's favourite pastime, configuring software repositories.) It is possible to use it for basic tasks, and for me personally, I'd rather put up with good-faith bugginess than have to deal with something that assumes I want a Google account.

rchaud 3y ago

2005 phones weren't running anything close to a desktop OS. A more reasonable parallel would be the barely-released Nokia N9 from 2011 running MaemoOS. It was abandoned upon launch because the company had already agreed to go exclusively with Windows Phone OS. With that said, I think 3GB RAM feels very low for a device running this kind of software. Even the Nokia N9 had 1GB RAM.

Saris 3y ago
3GB RAM is wildly low when most Android phones have 8-12GB these days. And the Pinephone is running much heavier software.
Almondsetat 3y ago
Asking feature parity with 20yo feature phones is the bare minimum.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Pull requests welcome.
  - Almondsetat 3y ago
    Decent developing environment welcome.
Loranubi 3y ago
The iPhone SE 2 has 3GB memory and runs pretty smoothly.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Mid-range Android phones with 3GB run fine as well. A Linux distro running on off-the-shelf mobile hardware components is a different undertaking.

ElectricSpoon 3y ago

When I look the hardware in it, I feels like the pinephone is just a step above what I would have built from a 3d printer, custom PCB, a microcontroller and an IOT modem from sparkfun. Every part is average, but the sum of it allows calling and has a usable idle battery life. Such a collection of hardware can't realistically compete with mainstream phones which have very tight hardware and software integration to achieve the most performance with the least power draw. It's a bad phone (and bad portable computer), but mine might work for as long as LTE and my desire to recompile exist. Schematics, opensource and spare parts being available are the crux of it. It's the phone for those wanting to build their phones and it's pretty good at that.

pinethrowaway 3y ago

The only usable OS for the PinePhone had been PostmarketOS with sxmo-de-sway. I had to do lots of tasks using the terminal, but it allowed me to have a stable connection and Wifi hotspot. Phosh and Plasma would disconnect or crash often. I also got lots of shifty looks using my phone on the train as if I were a hacker terrorist or something. It's been much smoother using LineageOS on a very old OnePlus One than the Pinephone, but I still keep it around to try out new OS updates.

megous 3y ago

I doubt it. Pinephone can run this on 1920x1080 screen: https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4 https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4 Could 2005 Nokia do that?

Almondsetat 3y ago
Do you think a good phone is one that runs Kodi but can't manage calls and messages?
- megous 3y ago
  No, I just think it's ridiculous to say 2005 Nokia feature phone had better performance.
- graemep 3y ago
  For some people it probably is. If you want a cheap pocket sized Linux computer rather than a phone. I am quite happy with my Pinetab (I am typing on it now). I see the Pinephone as a smaller version of that. My Pinetab has replaced my phone for quite a lot of things - I use my phone a lot less.

jksmith 3y ago

Yeah agree with similar experience, and yeah, made me pine (no pun) for my Key2 with a physical keyboard, which was generally bulletproof. There's a reason BB dropped out of the phone business, I get that, but I'd pay iphone prices for a new BB Key2 that was de-googled. But I would not pay iphone prices for an iphone. If the market was still free, the future would be a BB committed to trust reciprocation. But it's too late now. So aside from de-googled provided by some specific vendors, just fuck phones.