PinePhone Review
drewdevault.com
drewdevault.com
I think he greatly underestimates the number of people with the interest and ability to do this kind of work. If it's easily available, I'll probably get one and hack on it, and maybe contribute to some projects. And I'm far from something special or unusual.
The first Neo phone was released a year before the first Android smartphone even hit the market. It's a bit unfair to compare these new projects with something like OpenMoko.
13k phones won't cover even the costs of production, much less R&D
Seriously, once the software is ready, 30 seconds of any popular celebrity showing one would make it sell hundreds thousands in a week. Problem is the small manufacturers couldn't either pay for that level of advertising or satisfy the demand without turning themselves into what they're fighting against now (venture capital, investors etc. don't come free), so I welcome numbers as small as 13k or even much less if that means the product isn't polluted by the typical corporate mindset (close as much as possible to protect intellectual property, make it obsolete sooner to sell newer models, etc).
Oh and by having an unusual phone I can also play the elitist bastard with friends:*)
Having never used one, I can only speculate that MS wanted to change too much too early by making an user interface very consistent with the one they introduced on PCs but hard to digest just like that one, and this could have brought users away both from the PC and mobile devices. I have always found in the past very hard to migrate non technical users from Windows to Linux, but the adoption of the new interfaces from Windows 8 onward made some people I know so furious that it became really easy to convince them to try Linux; in some cases it was them who asked me to install it. That would be unthinkable before Windows 8. In the mobile world I guess it was even harder to grow an userbase since the alternative was already mainstream.
They probably should have copied or mocked a mainstream mobile interface, that is, offer something an user from either Android or iOS would not find alien to use, then offer something more, say free Office apps, then after the userbase had grown start to build the rest.
Why would the user base grow? The main problem Windows Phone had was the dearth of apps that users actually wanted. MS had to build their own YouTube client (and IIRC got into trouble with Google).
They've sunk billions into it: enticing developers, outright paying for the development of apps, creating apps on their own, spending huge amounts of money on advertisement (I remember at one point when half of popular TV shows featured Windows Phones). The result?
It did sell ~100 million phones in about 5 years and then discontinued the entire enterprise.
So, back to the original claim:
> Give FOSS phones the same media coverage of the iPhone, possibly including its ad induced reality distortion field, and they will sell like candies.
Why would it work for a FOSS phone when it didn't for MS?
It will start as a community toy, then one day, possibly after the 2nd or 3rd model, normal phones users will start to notice that little thing that doesn't get advertising, doesn't ask for DNA when installing apps, doesn't spy what the user says, writes, buys or where he/she goes and when, consumes a fraction of their metered data plan since great part of it (ads/junk/telemetry) has been blocked or never requested/created by design, offers equivalent non spying apps etc, all at the cost of avoiding the usual social media apps (I assume FB/TW will never allow a port of their clients there, especially if sandboxed). For some people losing FB/TW or GMaps could be too much, but others wouldn't care. It will slowly but steadily gain a good mostly technical userbase. If I had a date to be concerned about, it will be the day its growing userbase size could raise a flag in some offices, so that the following day the folks that made it possible will get a huge offer to sell the entire operation. That eventuality would deem the project to become a copy of any other platform out there. There's hardware production involved; forking the blueprints wouldn't be enough.
Why? Where do these potential devs suddenly come from? Just fro the fact it's a FOSS phone? Looking at how Linux has struggled for years (and is still struggling) to get decent software, your premise seems broken.
> If ths thing turns out as interesting as it promises there would be hundreds thousands of people willing to work on various tasks to bring it on par with other platforms.
Why would they? Why would there be hundreds of thousands of such people? Especially considering that the vast majority of software is commercial software that needs users.
Users do not flock to something just because developers do.
> It will start as a community toy, then one day, possibly after the 2nd or 3rd model
And then you list dozens of things each of which has a very low probability of happening. And then those improbabilities compound.
> For some people losing FB/TW or GMaps could be too much, but others wouldn't care. It will slowly but steadily gain a good mostly technical userbase.
You underestimate the numbers in this "mostly technical userbase". It's not the first phone to cater to a "mostly technical userbase". None of these phones survived past a first iteration. Somehow, no thought is given to why these projects failed. But the new one will surely become popular, will have multiple iterations and a good user base.
Yeah, sure.
The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results
I don't know if they were right or not.
Given that ~100% of money was going to the iOS and Android ecosystem, MS had no chance to retain even a few percent of the market: developers would not be interested in developing software for an obscure system that brings in no money, users would not be interested in a phone with little to no software.
1999 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.
I too bought it because I thought I'd hack around and "maybe contribute" which quickly turn in "why am I wasting so much time on something that will probably never work".
1. The thing is reasonably cheap with "good enough" specs which makes it far easier to just buy it and accept that it may be just a toy in the worst case.
2. It's likely that the specs will be "good enough" for some time so the Hardware will not be terribly outdated the time the Software reaches a usable state.
3. Smartphone hardware and manufacturing matured a lot in general so it's likely easier to get sth. working with a limited budget. In comparison the Openmoko devices were reasonably advanced for their time but were also ridden by hardware bugs.
Netscape was a commercial failure but Mozilla is still around. Similarly Blender only went open-source after a crowdfunding campaign.
CyanogenMod is another interesting example, mostly open source and mostly successful until it started trying to commercialize the code.
I think the community ends up being a big part of it. It's not like every PinePhone shipped is going to result in another developer for the OS, but there is some critical mass point where the software goes from broken to usable and it seems PinePhone might be getting there.
Don’t get me wrong, I really hope something like PinePhone sees enough adoption to get the apps I need a smartphone to run so I can break away from the two monopolies. I just don’t believe it will happen when Microsoft couldn’t do it.
Now an truly open system might make a difference. Not saying it will, it has it's own problems, but comparing it to Windows Phone is not really apples to apples.
If the user can't interact with their bank, whatchu YouTube, talk to their friends and parents over Snapchat or Skype, call Uber, play Spotify, etc etc etc, it doesn't matter in the least if your phone is 100% open source.
Microsoft had sunk billions into trying to get the ecosystem off the ground. What makes you think that "a truly open system" will get that ecosystem?
All it really needs to do is make calls and have good browser (Firefox would do). Signal would be a nice bonus.
This might not be enough for all (i am sure it wont), but for me and several other people I know, it would be enough, to be our main phone.
The market you're describing is minuscule.
Most of this should be available on the PinePhone at launch (albeit not as nicely as on Android).
Bank - should have a website (and if they don't have a website they most likely don't have an app anyway)
YouTube - website again (youtube.com)
Skype - has a web app and a Electron app available for Linux (web.skype.com)
Uber - has a PWA that can be used for booking rides (m.uber.com)
Spotify - has a web app and a Electron app available for Linux (open.spotify.com)
In my experience mobile banking is more often than not provided via app exclusively.
Doesn't that require Widevine DRM?
For traditional CRUD apps, PWAs are quite alright, and one avoids having to deal with Android's always changing "best practices", with a stagnant Android Java.
I had a Windows Phone. It was bad. Even Microsoft apps were subpar. Skype app was simply unusable. They weren't dogfooding.
Also Google torpedoed it.
Pretty much all the apps were bad though, I agree. Even the official OneNote app was a joke compared to the Android version.
In the first version, the default blank app from Visual Studio's "new project" wizard was slow to load. I think I measured it on the order of 500ms at the time. Not much room for third parties to add more stuff without being slow.
I personaly just need SMS, voice and a browser. The rest, I can live without it (or program it :-)
How would I get on in Denmark?
It's not super hard. Until ~3'ish years ago I did not have a smartphone here in DK. Life is just so much easier with it.
I think they got rid of the 10x Bus ticket you would buy at a kiosk, so now you have to buy a single tickets with coins inside the bus. (depends on the city) Which means you need cash. DK society is very much cashless, I mostly see older people still using it.
Is the bus late or did you just miss it? Check the app to see the bus location.
Train Ticket? Now you have to print that out or buy it at the station. It's so easy to search, buy and show the ticket via the app.
Letter from most public authorities / government? There is an app for that. Or website.
Want to give your mate some money? -> MobilePay app. Now you have to get cash somewhere and convince him to take cash. Or go to a computer and transfer it. Which requires more information then just this number and takes longer.
Crazy but it's the future. It's just a shame that it's gatekept by unaccountable duopolies such as Google...
In summary, fuck Google. This is why I want cryptocurrency to succeed. I don't want corporations deciding how I spend my own money.
And that's the problem, that it's going to be insidiously gradual. These lockouts will mostly be seen as acts of God, things that happen to the less fortunate other people and not us. As long as they're kept rare enough, people won't bother solving them, like what happens with countless other things.
But it certainly helps a lot to have a smartphone, mainly for the government messages and the nem id app.
The biggest mobile-only thing is an app called MobilePay which is used mostly for person-to-person transfers, and a lot of people don't use cash at all anymore. I am starting to see classified ads that specify "MobilePay only", although I guess you could usually convince people to accept a bank transfer instead. A lot of shops also accept it, but there is a law that shops have to accept cash, but some places don't respect it. Very few shops don't accept credit cards, but these generally also like cash...
As for digitization in general, all communication with the municipality and state and things like your bank and insurance company is digital. You're required by law to have a bank account and to have it associated with your personal ID number (all Danish residents are tagged with their birthday + 4 digit code in the Central Person Register). This all goes via a website that works with all browsers, though, but I wouldn't be surprised if down the line some features started being smartphone/app store only.
What are the permissions granted to these apps ?
Do they, as I fear, "require" full access to all contacts, all photos, location data ... ?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/feb/03/mps-slam-an...
Through all of Windows phone 7, 8 and 8.1, the devices that were selling were low end devices -- things like the Lumia 520, especially in markets with more cost sensitivity. Because of software architecture differences, windows phone was often more responsive than android on bottom of the market phones, and that drove sales. But when it came time to release Windows Mobile 10, there were no low end phones.
Having to build out essentially three flavors of your app (one for 7, one for 8, and a 'universal' app for 10) isn't a great way to keep developers engaged either.
Not sure if that ends up being cost effective considering how cheap you can get low-end Android phones these days, and how easy it is to find Android developers, but I'm sure there are some applications along those lines that would be well suited for the equivalent of "a Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen and smaller form factor".
I prefer going into it with the expectation of it being a "developer experience" rather than a prepackaged end-to-end solution. This, and the cost, is why I opted to go with Pine Phone over Purism Librem 5.
I am now considering purchasing a Pine Phone and the cost is definitely motivating. I only wish that the PinePhone had hardware kill switches like the Librem 5 has.
PP: modem, WiFi, microphones, rear camera, front camera
L5: modem, WiFi, cameras+audio
Check out this comparison by Martijn Braam, a developer of postmarketOS: https://tuxphones.com/yet-another-librem-5-and-pinephone-lin...
I shouldn't have just made the assumption that the PinePhone lacked kill switches. I like the fact that the PinePhone kill switches are hidden behind the back cover. It seems like kill switches on the outside might easily be switched by mistake. I also like that the PinePhone kill switches allows greater granularity, since it has six switches, allowing the cameras and microphone to be killed independently. On the other-hand, I really like that the Librem5 kill switches can cut the GPS. Of course, all three have to be switched to accomplish that, but it is still nice to have the option.
Both phones use a Qualcomm modem that is black boxed and connected via the USB so that the phones do not have to deal with the firmware. The downside of this approach is that, I am assuming again, the firmware can't be updated for the modem. So a vulnerability found in the modem's firmware would not be patchable. However; the Librem 5 modem is replaceable.
> Modem: On enables 2G/3G/4G communication and GNSS hardware, off disables.
That is because the GPS is bundled with the modem.
> GNSS: GPS/GLONASS/BeiDou/Galileo/QZSS, with A-GPS
The PinePhone sounds great!
[1]: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone#Killswitch_confi...
I would absolutely have ordered one already if it sounded like the hardware were final... right now it merely sounds very, very close. The message I get from these warnings is the non-zero chance that there will be some annoying hardware issue that comes to light before going into volume production. This would not be unexpected since this is the first time a wider community is getting to work with it.
from my experience, the "average" person (if not the majority) has trouble handling a TV remote
Are you kidding ? That is all I've ever wanted to do.
I have been asking, casually, for a "gnu-phoneutils" package for several years that would give us a small phone tooling suite ...
I have largely built this out myself with twilio and, in some ways, it is no longer necessary given that I have built my own little mini-telco inside of twilio, but still ...
"My" phone number was provisioned, and has always lived, in Twilio.
I set up a simple call forward and SMS forward to my SIM number. When I land in a foreign country, I get a new sim card and just point the forwards to the new number. Easy.
I wrote a shell script that allows me to SMS from the command line from my phone number. So I can SMS people from an airplane even though my handset is off. If I lost my handset I could still SMS you.
It's also nice to have a proper date/time stamped SMS log that lives in /var/mail/sms ... I use this a lot.
My favorite thing about all of this is that I have finally removed voicemail from my life. Hint: you need to tell your carrier, with star-71, to forward to a "black hole" number at the end of your call sequence, otherwise verizon will jump in and say "the wireless blah blah voicemail box that is not set up blah blah ...". So my twilio number rings for X seconds (whatever I set the timeout to) but then the call progresses to verizon, but verizon has been instructed with star-71 command to forward calls to a second number I set up in twilio that does nothing but hang up. That's my "black hole" number and you can insert that into the end of a lot of workflows like this.
Calling has to be done with a voip app on your phone because, of course, you cannot call from your twilio number directly from your phone. Well, you could, if perhaps you called yourself and then set up some logic where you type in the phone number you really want and then twilio forwards you there, but I think it's easier to use a nice VOIP app ... I use groundwire, but whatever works.
I might try to formalize all of this and present it at Signal next year ... there are a lot of other neat things you can do ....
So I have some weirdness in my workflow just to connect to VZW.
Oh, btw - if you use a verizon MVNO, use US Mobile and not straighttalk because straighttalk does not allow tethering whereas US Mobile does ...
EDIT: one more thing ... using a voip dialer instead of the native iOS dialer is a bit clunky but it also gives me the ability to dial from any of my twilio numbers. So I can pick my "from" number - either personal or rsync.net or (throwaway personal that we give to salespeople). So there is a pro/con involved in using a twilio SIM and the native dialer vs. using a voip dialer...
Certainly it costs some amount more because I pay for US Mobile (verizon MVNO) and then the twilio fees, but I think my monthly Twilio bill is negligible ...
I have the Twilio SIM (T-Mobile coverage) in my primary SIM (iPhone dual sim), and then Verizon/ATT/Sprint/TMobile on my e-sim. The e-sim is for data only, because data is expensive (and slow) on Twilio. If you don't have Dual Sim then the data element may be a bit of a roadblock for you to totally switch over to the Twilio SIM depending on your data needs. Tthe goal of my setup is to be completely cell phone agnostic. I wanted to be able to send a single signal into the PSTN over an IP connection OR over a cell-only connection (no data). The native support on this is great when you use the Twilio SIM, but with call forwarding and some other hacks you can get support without the Twilio SIM. Also, the great thing about the SIM is that I can pop it into a phone from 2002, and have it talk to the internet through a series of signals sent via SMS (e.g. server maintenance, open up a firewall for a few moments, etc). I wrote a server that I point the SIM endpoint to, and this server handles all of the forwarding/reception of voice and SMS.
I also built out a CLI for messaging (pulls in SMS history, deletes from Twilio, stores locally encrypted, lets you send out messages on a "convo" view, etc)... using the python API, and then built out a Web UI for making phone calls using client.js (receiving phone calls TBD). This has integrated support with my CardDav contacts (and depending on if someone is in my contacts, they get a different number on the caller ID), which makes for a more powerful (IMO) app than an iOS VOIP app, of which the options are fairly clunky and limited.
It is all pretty hacky but if you want to talk more about it I am curious to see what you have built out. I am not totally dependent on it for a few reasons, a big one being that I don't want to send all of my communications through the unencrypted telephone network.. The long-term goal here is to package it and open-source it so that people can easily "free" their communications, but it is pretty scattered right now.
Eagerly awaiting the PinePhone to give me more flexibility with all of this.
Interesting how you are sending SMS with different caller-ID based on contacts, but I am curious - without a VOIP dialer, can you place voice calls from your native dialer with different caller ID ?
Please, please email (or trouble ticket) twilio and ask them to add an "email" verb to twiml ...
That is one of the big missing links in all of this - you should be able to fire off email alerts/messages in your twiml workflow without any third-party[1] integration or other accounts/logins, etc.
[1] I would still consider sendgrid third party since I need a different login, account, etc.
Yes it is not very pleasant, and it is how you basically described it where you call a Twilio number, and then type in the destination. You could set up some sort of signaling where you activate the outbound number with an SMS which may be less cumbersome than dialing on a phone call, but for native support that is the only way I can think of -- just dialing the target number would of course route from your main Telco
A decent SIP app might be an alternative here, I haven't explored them thoroughly because of Twilio Wireless (last I checked they weren't spectacular, but SIP is good)
Thanks - that is a great idea and I might consider implementing that ...
I think a SIP/VOIP app might be cleaner, and I see that some VOIP apps now support SMS, if I understand correctly ? Call quality and volume issues are a side-effect of the voip dialers, though ...
One can prepend a calling card-like sequence, using hard and soft pauses, before the actual telephone number gets called so all calls get routed through twilio (or any VoIP carrier) for managing the caller id.
In other words, you are calling your personal calling card telephone number for every call so you will enter in your code and then enter the telephone number that you would like to call.
Just message the JMP support number (+1 416 993 8000) or my Jabber ID, denver@ozg.ca , to let us know which area code(s) you're interested in and we can send you a number list.
It would be cumbersome to have to do that manually, but have you looked into any of the 3rd-party dialer apps on Android? They'll dial the prefix specified before dialing the number that was entered.
Google's uses Google Voice as part of GoogleFi, so hopeful it won't be killed off any time soon.
Similar to what the parents does, I use "conditional call forwarding" to send all non-answered calls to Google Voice. When I get a voicemail, GVoice then sends me a transcription of the message.
It's packaged and available for Maemo Leste and postmarketOS, both of which run on the PinePhone.
There's a program called "cli-framework" for commandline interaction; it opens a Python terminal with a library that wraps the DBus API. I've not used the commandline for calls, but I have used it to read and delete SMS (when I'm too lazy to go and pick up the handset, so I SSH into it instead ;) ).
One project I've not gotten round to yet is an answering machine, so calls are immediately answered and audible (via headset), and I can choose whether or not to "pick up". This looks like it would be easy enough with the freesmartphone.org API, some Python and GTK+.
From what I can tell, this isn't possible on Android due to the API not allowing access to calls. Symbian allowed it, and it seems to have a few answering machine apps.
Tangentially, what's an appropriate entry point for a reasonably capable C/C++/Unix systems programmer without prior mobile guts experience interested in working on software for this platform? I'm kind of assuming that'd be "grab a compatible device, clone postmarket, rtfm" but confirmation/pointers would be appreciated.
The Librem 5 has LTE mobile data as well, but it has those same issues (no VoLTE, SMS only over 3g, no MMS for T-Mobile USA). I am hopeful that between Purism and the Pinephone community that this is a solvable (but lengthy) issue.
I wouldn't be surprised if both work over 3g, but I would be very surprised if it works over LTE.
It seems right to me that the FCC et al shouldn't allow uncertified amateur radio firmwares.
https://osmocom.org/projects/baseband https://media.ccc.de/v/osmodevcon2019-109-osmocombb-layer1-o...
Most of the time when we speak about the baseband, we are talking about the telco network interface between your handset and the carrier ... and so it's tempting to think of the baseband as just some black-box modem that you can firewall yourself from.
However, the baseband processor also performs a number of real-time voice quality / noise cancelling / audio functions that really have nothing to do with the network interface, but are very important depending on how sensitive you are to call quality and things like echo, etc.
This is unfortunate because, like you, I would like to just wall of the baseband and use it as a modem and forget about it, but that perceptible difference in call-quality between "actual carrier" calls and VOIP calls is due to the baseband.
I believe that is all still true in the 2019 LTE era ...
https://github.com/DoubangoTelecom/doubango
It looks like it could be. They have client-side proof of concepts.
- What provider are you using?
- Is it VoLTE that is working, or does it drop down to 3g for calls?
- Does SMS work in LTE mode or do you have to drop it down to 3g?
I have a Librem 5 birch, and from my experience in rolling my own Android AOSP version, that to get T-mobile to work with VoLTE, SMS/MMS with LTE, or WiFi Calling, you have to install proprietary blobs.
EDIT: I should add the Librem 5 Birch has LTE data on T-mobile, but I have to drop to 3G to get SMS and phone call functionality, and MMS is additionally non-functional at all on T-Mobile. Meant to post that for the Librem 5.
https://www.pine64.org/2019/12/05/december-update-thank-you-...
Finally broke down and ordered a Moto g7 on Black Friday.
Haven't had the heart to actually go in and get a sim card for it yet though...
Not trying to downplay, other people might prefer it. VoLTE provides a security and usability benefit over 2G, as does not using 2G/3G as backward compatibility.
Has anyone in Europe used PinePhone?
- I am not giving another company personal data (Facebook, Google, etc.)
Ideally, I would prefer to run my own server for a chat program (i.e. Matrix, Nextcloud Chat), then I know where the traffic is coming to and from, and I have a lot of confidence that personal data isn't being leaked.
My second option would probably be Signal, as they seem to do to great lengths to avoid collecting data on you. However, trying to convince family/friends to use either is an uphill battle (a great deal of my family goes "why don't you just get an iPhone?"). So the pragmatist in me just uses MMS for group chat.
- I don't know what VoLTE is
- SMS seems to work fine in LTE mode, but don't quote me on that. I tested everything once just to understand how it worked, then put it on the backburner to work on other stuff.
Understand, that's how I have been playing with My Librem 5, I pull it out every so often to try out different things.
The UI is slick and well developed. The app ecosystem isn't amazing but you get a browser, choice of Telegram clients, Signal client etc. You can get an idea of the range of apps here https://open-store.io/?sort=-updated_date&type=app
HN readers might like to note that there is also an established developer community and resources like documentation.
Well worth a look if you're thinking of getting a Pinephone, and / or developing a anything for it.
Designing and implementing a user-friendly and fast GUI is a very big task. Ubuntu Touch has had a lot of work go into it.
Fundamentally, its distributed nature would allow far greater integration between desktop and mobile hardware. Mobile + laptop + NAS would be so deeply integrated that they would better be considered a single computer with multiple more-or-less accessible terminals - and if a mobile device was part of that integration, it would represent a sea change in the utility of smartphones. I'm personally a big fan of how a mobile device could 'automatically' use the processing power of a Plan 9 desktop whenever they're both on the home network.
(just a plan 9 newbie that is enamoured of the system design)
Edit: BTW, pretty sure this is what Google's project fuschia is based on.
Librem5 stuck to its security, privacy first agenda and managed to build a phone with PC grade hardware. PinePhone stuck to its affordability first agenda, bringing a Linux capable smartphone hardware to the masses.
My only wish is that these project become commercially sustainable and attractive enough for the major smartphone brands to join open-source party to make a dent in the Appstore/Playstore duopoly.
Edit: Monoploy->Duopoly.
Besides, they where making good progress with supporting android apps in WP with 'Project Astoria' and iOS apps with 'Project islandwood'; both of those were pulled off abruptly. There was even a rumour in the WP community at that point that Project Astoria became too good that MS brass worried that native WP development may go extinct.
Btw, recently german WP enthusiasts managed to get Project Astoria working on several WP phones[1].
[1]https://windowsunited.de/so-koennt-ihr-jede-beliebige-androi...
Also, I have an Astoria phone in a drawer somewhere. Worked fantastically.
Even the web does not look like the web anymore. I am not even sure what do you mean by "the solution will inevitably be the web". The solution for supporting half a dozen phone OSes will be fewer phone OSes. If you think that nobody will want to develop half a dozen versions of the app natively, why do you think they will want to debug PWAs on half a dozen OSes?
I'm sure the Librem 5 is also very nice, but it's higher price makes it much less accessible.
I still wish FirefoxOS would have come to live..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B2G_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS
To write UI software for a modern phone takes 150+ full time engineers in my experience. Only few organisations have this capability and this is why these things will never be phones people use.
purism already did it with a handful. Their new shell has a great design in my opinion and it runs ok. I'm not a fan of plasma mobile but it seems ok too. The hard part it seems to me is the layers below the actual UI, gpu support, energy consumption etc.
I'm confident these shells will get to the point where they are maybe better for the average phone user than desktop linux shells are for the average desktop user, mostly because reasonable phone UI patterns are more narrowly defined.
I'll bet apps support and camera quality will remain bigger deal killers after the shells mature some more.
That's a bit like saying that you have to drive 150 km/h to get to Paris. What's the time budget? Where are they now? What are the goals? Surely you can imagine ways that the answers to these questions can vary enough between commercial and open source community projects that saying that you need 150+ engineers is a meaningless statement on its own.
I also yearn for a FOSS/Linux phone, and it feels like we’re getting closer, bit I feel like the author is fooling themself a bit.
I feel like it is intellectually dishonest to characterize the phone mainly as "not working" and question his decision on that basis. That's not the reason that he wants it. It's the prospect of helping build and eventually having a FOSS phone ecosystem that is the main draw.
> I also yearn for a FOSS/Linux phone, and it feels like we’re getting closer
Guess why. Is it because a) some driven developers buy this product long before it is generally useful to develop the software necessary to support a full-fledged FOSS phone, or b) because people like you are patiently waiting for that software to drop in your lap?
Perhaps PostmarketOS or at least Lineage might support it one day (or now?!? Didn't look)
The idiocy is focusing on slim devices. Just make them a bit thicker if the chips/circuits don't fit otherwise (and increase battery life while at it).
And yeah this was more of a ramble, not directed at your post. But I agree. I already have an Amazfit Bip (~€60) with a 3-4 week battery life that I use solely to get notifications on my wrist instead of having to pick up my phone. A watch is completely usable for anything else than a passive reading device though (at least until speech-to-text or (some kind of) gestures makes leaps forward). If as you say the devices were more interconnected (Chromecast is a step in this direction, connecting screens/TV's) the form factor of one specific becomes less important.
But, since we don't have this now, why not give the consumer a choice? My main gripe is that everything is in the 5-6 range whereas a little while back (2-3 years?) you could find a broad range of smartphones between 4-6 inches. It's gone from 100/0 in <4" vs >4" to 0/100. I would be fine to even have 20/80.
/rant
FF OS lives on today as KaiOS and is extremely popular in the devloping world where even an Android Go device requires far too much hardware specs for the price a given set of locals want or can afford to pay.
If you look at some of the devices that run it like the JioPhone, you can see that it sits quite comfortably in the space formerly occupied by the BREW systems of the world, but has little touches like email sending, Google Assistant, etc.
Edit: just to give some scale to the Android Go bloat (let alone plain old Android), the HTC Desire Z (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z) has 512 MB of RAM and a paltry processor, not powerful even for its day.
That device ran the current set of Android OSes at the time, and if modded today, can even be made to run Android KitKat, where official support stopped at Android Gingerbread. Today, that device is barely considered Android Go compatible, mostly due to its CPU and storage limitations.
In 2010, we took pictures, checked emails, played games, browsed the mobile web, performed calls, texts, IMs, watched videos, streamed music, and drove/bussed/walked with navigation.
Today...we do much the same things, but in a 'once more, with ~~feeling~~ AI` manner. There are very few totally new things compared to 2010, we just let mobile apps bloat up to web development-level bloat.
In my cynical moments, I look at the processing power eaten on my OS, wasted on wakelocks and ads and think to myself that somewhere, Ralphie is in the ~~Magic School Bus~~ cell phone factory and spinning dials saying 'more RAM, more CPU, more network speed, I don't know what to do, the software is all slow!' because every time he ups a spec, the bloat absorbs it without reducing user latency one bit.
Mozilla did not want to maintain XUL or Fennec (which was hard to develop for, jumping between layers in C++ & javascript), but Qualcomm, Facebook, Google & the bevy of manufacturers and carriers that Mozilla had rallied behind FirefoxOS forked it and continued carrying on...
Or at least the latency in half.
Which parts of the UI/hardware stack are the culprits here?
I want some butts[1]!
I believe this should be Sailfish OS
How do you go about using it? I see that there's Python mentioned on https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Purism/libhandy but would it still not work if the phone itself doesn't have libhandy? Would you be able to install libhandy on Ubuntu Touch or Plasma Mobile?
Part of what Pine64 is trying to do is kickstart an ecosystem that gets people working on these sorts of things. It's a chicken and egg problem: there aren't currently any widely available Linux smartphones so no one is working on drivers/applications, there is minimal driver support so there are no widely available Linux smartphones. By just shipping a reasonably priced, reasonably open (as much as it can be given the cellular modem situation) phone they are solving one of the biggest problems. 2020 should be a fun and interesting year for Open Source on mobile...
And can it run on virgin mobile/cheap networks like that
edit: holy crap this sway thing may be the i3 hmm, next question would be can you attach it to a big monitor + keyboard/mouse through the USB C
https://www.pine64.org/2019/06/06/june-2019-news-pinephone-p...
This has been my perception of Linux in general.
Installation Just Works unless you're dual booting, in which case it Just Works until Windows updates and overwrites boot files because it assumes it's the only OS installed. Drivers Just Work as long as you're not using some obscure hardware. Installing apps Just Works. Anything web (and let's face it, that's a lot of things nowadays) Just Works.
The only times when "rumor has it someone made it work" happens, that I've come across, is running a subset of Windows games in wine. Specifically, games that use invasive client-side anticheat (eg, EAC, which loads a kernel driver to do its snooping).
Purism has had so many pre orders and the PinePhone only costs $149 but with that budget can't make the Librem.
What is it that makes it so difficult?
But from the user perspective likely the main change from the Xperia would be the missing Android emulation layer. This is only available on officially supported devices, which the xperias (X, XA2, 10). On community ports, which Sailfish OS for the PinePhone is at the moment, the Android emulation layer is not available. I guess that could change if there is enough demand to roll it in to the Sailfish X program, like the Gemini PDA.
BTW, other than the Android emulator a and two more things (MS Exchange, typing prediction) the community ports are pretty much identical to the officially supported devices, all native apps will work, etc.
Then don't clone/download web ui projects? I don't understand the bile.
ha oh man
I have a phone that isn't supposed to work with Comcast mobile, but 4g works for about 30 minutes if I reboot... I wonder if it would be the same with this phone.
Here's a tip, though, if you ever get concerned about whether or not a phone will work with your carrier. Check what modem it has. In the PinePhone's case, it's the EG25-G.
http://files.pine64.org/doc/datasheet/project_anakin/LTE_mod...
So now that we know the name, let's look and see if your carrier mentions it as one it approves. For the sake of brevity, I'll assume you're on AT&T.
Google's cache nicely and conveniently converts spreadsheets into web documents, so let's view it on that:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G7My6z...
The EG25-G is #51, and is fully supported.
However, I think Verizon at the least used to do this, and may still do it. Sprint also has some extra proprietary things on Android and I don't know their functionality.
Commercial enterprises with such small budgets flip very often.