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Comment by tetrisgm | Hacker News Reader

I want the PinePhone to work. The Librem too. In fact I had preorders for both. I canceled them looking at the performance.

They’re excellent toys. Great effort to ship such a difficult product. But if your phone is going to struggle with running things besides terminal, it’s not going to be a great daily phone.

I’d love them to be on par with the latest Android flagships in terms of power. Cost is not an issue. I just want to be able to actually use Linux on a phone, rather than just run it.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the Windows side of things. Windows 10x looked really promising on top of the Surface Neo, but both seem to be shelved. Now the closest alternative is handheld devices like the GPD Win 3, but that lacks LTE unfortunately. No ditching Android just yet.

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Personally, I'd rather something equivalent to a mid-range android phone. Something that works decently well, but still affordable enough adoption isn't limited only to the wealthy looking for toys. I see most flagship phones that way myself.

For me, i need more than what the pinephone offers, but it doesn't need to have all the features of a high end phone. A decent processor and RAM would make the pinephone a lot more appealing just by itself.

if it was equivalent to a $300-$500 android phone, you still wouldn't have all the bells and whistles, but it would be a lot more viable for daily use.

> A decent processor and RAM would make the pinephone a lot more appealing just by itself.

The 3GB of the bigger model are enough for most users (LibreOffice or Firefox with several tabs open can run on a XFCE PC deskop with 2GB), but the CPU is indeed limited, and battery life is short. Admittedly just by optimizing the software they recently squeezed out a lot more compared to the first iterations of the software, however we're not there yet. I wonder if having a much beefier battery could allow the use of faster processors although not aimed at the mobile world. Personally I can't even keep in my hand a modern phone without it risking to fall, I find their thinness extremely uncomfortable, and would be thankful if producers made a full 1.5 - 2cm thick one with the additional space occupied by a decent battery.

I have heard rumors that something on a level of a mid-range Android phone would already be on sale, but the component shortage has introduced delays.

I don't need much performance-- my present phone is a 2-year-old $220 Umidigi F1, and it's entirely performant for my needs-- but the problem is the likelihood of showstopper app needs.

I don't want to carry two devices, or have to reboot twice daily, so that I can still the weird 2FA app my employer uses. I wonder if the ideal endgame is a VM style model-- you have an Android VM that you give 2% of CPU to, just enough to keep that app alive, but normally spend your day in LumeOS or whatever your flavour is.

> things besides terminal

I think this (terminal) might be a key market segment to focus on, though. Lots of people are turned off by the colorful yet wasteful designs of modern smartphone apps. Third parties are never going to get anywhere trying to compete with Android or iOS. If you want buy-in, you have to target the people who want to leave the mobile app paradigm. This is either people who want all-in on web (Firefox OS) or people who want all-in on CLI (nothing really exists here except SSHing into a Linux VM).

It might honestly be pleasant to use a smartphone with a terminal-like interface if you can provide vim-esque keyboard shortcuts to accomplish complicated tasks, like creating content (documents / todos / calendar events / songs / photos / videos / websites / etc). It would only ever appear to power users, but those power users would become life long customers.

I think if they can nail the low-end or mid-end phone, and get enough volume out there to make an ecosystem possible, ramping up to high-end phones is the easy part. It's not like the factories manufacturing these phones don't know how to make high-end phones.

But the problem with $800 phones is people can't afford to buy them unless they're daily driver ready. At $150, you can buy it as a testing phone/a spare phone, and start building apps for it.

Windows Mobile was murdered first and foremost by the lack of wider support and a larger app ecosystem. Getting as many phones out there as possible is the key to avoiding this with Linux phones.

This is why we're really very lucky, IMO: We have two companies doing both, right now. We have an $800 device for the "high" end, and a cheaper device to get the word out. The timing seems better than if it had been one or the other.

I’m not convinced that low cost devices are the way to go. Android has it covered. Tizen tried and failed. If Linux can be a viable system that most of the Chinese and Korean manufacturers can adopt and push, I would agree. But I don’t see how that would shape up in practice.

It's not just about performance: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....

I mean, I just stated that I cared about performance. Your opinion may differ.

Which performance exactly? Both phones can play video and provide smooth scrolling in Firefox. They support not too heavy desktop applications (convergence). Are you going to run GPT3 on them?

I wanna run music players, docker images, a bunch of browser tabs, password manager, play HD video, various messengers. Without compromise.

AFAIK it all should work on Librem 5 just fine. Even Pinephone shouldn't have a problem here. See demo videos here: https://media.lrdu.org/sxmo_pinephone_demos/.

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