May Update: PineTab Pre-Orders, PinePhone Qi Charging and More
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It makes it even more difficult as so many of the OS and vendors advertise SMS and voice call support (which they have), so I have had to play the guessing game on a lot of the OSes that advertise SMS as working to discover this.
That being said, it is really exciting to see how far both have come, and I do think they both will be an awesome replacement to an Android phone sooner than later. Even more exciting is that they both are close to and will have mainline (EDIT: Mainline Linux) support, so they will be supported for a long time and not depend on a vendors willingness to support it.
What is your opinion on the hardware and build quality between the two? The Librem 5 seems so expensive for the hardware it includes, but I also don't have a baseline for knowing what is reasonable (since comparing against Android device makers isn't fair).
My huge annoyance with my Librem 5 is that the Wifi Signal is terrible. I literally have to be within 5 ft of my Wifi AP to have even a useable signal. It won't work if there's any obstruction or if it's beyond 15 ft line of sight. I have tried all of the suggested fixes, but this is still a pervasive issue. I hope it's fixed in a later batch.
The Pinephone has much more of a plastic feel. I have a Google Pixel 3a, and half the time I have to do a double take to see which is which. But the build quality on that is very nice too.
If you have other questions, feel free to let me know!
Have you tried a variety of distributions on each phone? Is there one that runs better/worse on each? Is there one that works good on both?
It seems like there's a very friendly but intense arms race to get stuff working (which I think is awesome) :-)
On the Pinephone I tried a whole bunch at first, but i haven't done that in a while. So far the front runners for a useable phone seem to be Ubuntu Touch and PostmarketOS. I want to try Sailfish OS again, as that seems very tempting as well. But in either case, I like to see the diversity in the OSes for the Pinephone.
I've got my PinePhone early mostly to play with and to support the company, but I feel like it'll probably be at least a year before I'm confident in carrying it around as a daily driver.
Probably the toughest thing to lose will be my bank's app... I was used to not having it when I was on Windows Mobile, but mobile check desposit has been really nice to have since I've been on my little iPhone lifeboat.
Battery life will get there, as will apps I'm sure. The real killer feature will be when Android apps are runnable.
Do you mean support in the mainline Linux kernel?
The current interface options are all going through telepathy-ofono, which works with group MMS messaging and attachments, but can't really handle attachments the right way because the telepathy IM framework itself has no notion of media messages (as mentioned at e.g. https://github.com/TelepathyIM/telepathy-morse/issues/21#iss...). Ubuntu Touch replaces MMSd with a Go rewrite called `nuntium` but still relies on telepathy-ofono for plumbing: http://docs.ubports.com/es/latest/systemdev/mms-infrastructu...
I think the right way to handle SMS+MMS, for now, would be to just write a dedicated GUI client for it that communicates with ofono MMSd via dbus. I'm thinking about doing it with Rust+GTK.
What do you need help with?
If a user complains that 'this commonly used feature no longer works,' it is never a solution to tell them they shouldn't use that feature.
Don't get me wrong, I'm really excited about both projects! But in my area (east coast US), people tend to just assume that you can receive MMS/group texts, they'll send them to you without a second thought, and the idea that you might not receive them won't even be on their minds.
"Small numbers (1-3) of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect."
Absolutely true, but in the last 10 years I've never met a single device with defective pixel, at least to a level I could spot directly. This discourages me a bit although I know the eventuality of defective pixels is flimsy. I deeply hate defective pixels however, so my request to Pine64 is to consider adding a level of checking for the display, then charge for it. I would happily pay €25 to ge that guarantee; it can be done with a pattern generation software paired with a camera in front of the screen which according to an algorithm fills a field in a db with the machine/screen serial number and damage severity. For example, 5 black pixels along the screen border wouldn't be much of a hassle, while even only one in the center of the screen and stuck at $FFFFFF would be a nightmare.
The people who "require perfection" are weeded out because they might have to live with something imperfect.
I've known some people like that. The sort who will drive over somewhere and complain because their $7 thing isn't what they expected.
That said, I think the pinephone being only $199 is selling themselves short. Having an open-source phone is really a special thing and they could charge $399 because they don't have any competition.
I think they're in it for other reasons than profit. good for them.
I'm genuinely excited about the NAS tho.
'In other news, we recently ran a poll on Mastodon and Twitter asking whether you’d be interested in using cryptocurrency for PINE Store payments. On the whole, approximately a quarter of all respondents expressed interest in using such payment options. We’re now happy to announce that we’ll be accepting cryptocurrency payments (BTC, BCH, ETH and XRP) in the very near future. The payment infrastructure is currently being set up, and should be available as an option at checkout starting next month.'
Then an edit was added, like so:
'[edit] We no longer intend to support cryptocurrency payments at this time.'
Can you add more context here? A large minority of backers clearly want purchases via crypto, but I understand that implementations are where the rubber meets the road.
I seem to be OOTL. What happened with BitPay?
This means the vast majority of users see a bitpay invoice, and can't figure out how to pay it with their bitcoin wallets.
I would be interested to see how this thing does with battery life/drawing with a stylus. I'm not an artist but I use sketching to prototype wireframe/mechanical stuff.
I have used the Original Pinebook for about a year as my main private laptop and can say it was an enjoyable experience.
Of course it depends on what you want to do, it’s not high end but definitely usable and fun.
(and then yesterday i just tried windows 7 for the first time in a vm with 2 GiB allocated, and it was far snappier than i could have imagined).
Sad to see the keyboard delayed, that's an ambitious piece of hardware to build and one I am super excited about.
The F(x)tec Pro is the modern phone I want from a hardware standpoint, but it ships with Android. Apparently there's a Sailfish image available, but I'd have to flash it myself and I don't like buying phones preloaded with Android.