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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

The PinePhone is _so close_.

Some suggestions, as a user, to get it over the edge:

1. Every app in the Manjaro distribution that ships pre-installed should at least fit on the screen; many apps have popups that do not.

2. Dialing should never cause a reboot; calling voicemail has crashed the phone for me.

3. Either give up on having a camera or make it _fast_.

4. Some kind of loading indicator for apps would be nice.

5. Either don't allow X apps to be installed or make the X wrapper work; I can install gtk emacs but it doesn't run.

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> Every app in the Manjaro distribution that ships pre-installed should at least fit on the screen; many apps have popups that do not.

Sounds like an issue you should bring up with the application authors. These are usually easy fixes.

> Either give up on having a camera or make it _fast_.

We've already seen demos of the camera running at 60fps. Why would you want people to "give up" on a perfectly achievable goal?

Camera framerate may have been fixed, but just opening the camera app on Mobian takes a few seconds. People are used nowadays to their camera app opening near-instantly, so they can capture fleeting moments.

I've pushed a Megapixels update that makes the app launch a bunch faster and the camera preview is a lot smoother too

It's really great, thank you for your hard work Martijn!

> Sounds like an issue you should bring up with the application authors. These are usually easy fixes.

The application authors are mostly unaware. The Manjaro ARM team is using libhandy to port desktop applications on a case-by-case.

They are also in charge of what applications are preinstalled; IMHO, they shouldn't be preinstalling any applications which do not _at least_ fit on the display in every popup and window they open.

> We've already seen demos of the camera running at 60fps.

It displays at 60fps, but I still can't seem to get it to take non-blurry photos of my kids.

Would love a phone w/out a camera. I do not know why they are seen as necessity.

I use a fancy Sony mirrorless camera for photography that is meant to be kept and looked at in the future. However, it is pretty obvious why cameras on phones are necessary even to people with good cameras: when communicating with people over a messenger app like Signal or Whatsapp, one quite often has to send them a quick pic to get their opinion. (For example, today I didn't know which kind of olive oil my partner wanted me to pick up from the supermarket, so I just sent a picture of what was available on the shelf.)

Sure, I could have lugged my full-size camera along and then sent it over to the phone via wi-fi, but using a real camera in a supermarket is going to get you some unpleasant attention from staff.

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