PinePhone Pro Announced
pine64.org
pine64.org
I check in on it every l every 6 months or so, update my pinephone and give it a few days. So far, it doesn't meet reliability or usability for serious use.
It's a high caliber foot gun of a methodology - if they corralled all of the effort and enthusiasm currently scattered amongst a dozen (!) different os's and communities, they could establish a high quality functional baseline.
The hardware is great. The mission is great. The software is fragmented and scattered and missing the force multipliers that focused collaborative development could bring. There's not enough to riff on, toomuch goes wrong in complicated ways, and so the device is an exercise in frustration instead of a passion project.
Zero. What is needed is a few hundred developers writing actually code to make it useful. The enthusiasts are at best nice to haves. You can blur the line if you write good bug reports, but right now the pinephone doesn't need end users.
The above will change over time. Millions of users would be enough to force carriers to support activating it on their network, something that developers cannot do (at least not legally). Likewise large numbers of users would be enough to those banking apps written. However today millions of users wouldn't make any difference to the important parts of making it work (except in so far as users sometimes become developers)
I know your question was rhetorical, but when I think about this, it took close to 20 years of Linux maturing on the desktop before I felt comfortable handing a family member a laptop running Linux. As an enthusiast, I started running it much earlier, but everyday tasks like "printing" or "using Wi-Fi" prevented it from being a daily driver.
Personal computing, though, had a much deeper hacker culture, that encouraged pushing the hardware to its limits, and doing new and novel things with it. Progress stemmed from that (Windows including BSD sockets, for instance). I've never seen anything similar in the phone ecosystem - as soon as you play outside of the walled garden, you drop off into fringe territory. And the PinePhone, as much as I love it, is by definition outside of the walled garden.
I'm not sure, given the culture around phones, we might ever get to the point of it being viable.
For tracing, at least Sailfish OS has an app called Contrac [1]. I looked into porting it over to other PinePhone OS, but with the CRUST and deep sleep, it would not really be useful there anyway (as it would not be active most of the time).
Regarding QR certificates, there’s Vakzination [2].
On iOS PassBook would be the ideal place for this, not a separate app.
I do have mine on my phone but just in case.. Here we don't need the code unless we go to the disco, and I'm too old for that anyway.
Either way I'm vaccinated so code or not I've done the right thing :)
Why did you buy the phone? They pretty much shout that they are only targeting developers who can bring about your dream. They never promised what you're expecting of them.
> if they corralled all of the effort and enthusiasm currently scattered amongst a dozen (!) different OSes and communities, they could establish a high quality functional baseline.
If Apple and Microsoft combined efforts on Mac OS/Windows, they'd do amazing things too - but that's not going to happen either: once formed, organizations expend significant energy in self-perpertuating. Perhaps you could pick a promising project (or a couple of complementary ones), and support them technically or financially.
Then you would need to fill in some common services like push and such.
Hundreds of millions. That's how many you need for mainstream apps to be built.
Even Microsoft couldn't get past that hurdle and money is not a problem for them.
Android compatibility might help somewhat but it will undermine the usefulness of the open platform by introducing the very things it fights against. The OS is not the only problem. Apps can still datamine the Android layer then. You won't be much better off than with a privacy focused Android fork.
I just need a WhatsApp client. Enthusiasts once made one but WhatsApp started banning their users.
The problem really is getting the commercial software people want on the phone. But if you just want to use it as a phone (e.g. no special apps or mobile games), it does most of that in a pretty streamlined manner (albeit, rougher than the commercial options).
Edit// Especially since I've jumped on the ARM bandwagon and replaced my desktop with an M1 mac and my laptop with a Pinebook Pro.
Also join the developer channels on matrix: #plasmamobile:kde.org (not sure that the address for the GNOME one)
Is there an option to use a higher level language like Python and these QT libraries still? I don't have a ton of time to contribute, but this might be a way forward for me someday.
EDIT: Your 2nd link is literally what I was asking about, although it's using Gtk3. I'm not familiar with either in depth, so I'm not picky there. That's really useful. Thanks for this!
I guess I would ask: how do you want to contribute? Is there a specific niche you want to help fix? That's how I got involved, I wanted MMS (and later visual voicemail) for my Pinephone.. Or perhaps there's a specific project you like that needs help, or theres a particular bug that annoys you in a FOSS project. Those may be the best ways to get involved to help.
There generally isn't much in the way of formal organization in the open source world... just scratch an itch that you have. There are relatively few people working on things specific to Linux on mobile so even a modest contribution can have a big impact. For example, the developer of the Megapixels camera app, which is a vast improvement over what existed previously but still needs much work, just wanted a better camera app.
In regard to motivation to continue programming, that can be the most difficult. Overall if you are proud of your work and find it useful yourself, you will probably continue the habit of contributing and supporting your code.
documentation is definitely a candidate also automated tests
Now, you can just be modifying CSS and call yourself a programmer. You get one of these devices, and you're sorely disappointed!
Or that we indeed became softies lol.
C coding is the easiest thing. Hard part is figuring out what needs to be done and getting quite detailed understanding of how everything works on HW level, lots of trying and testing with various USB devices in various scenarios. There's also a lot of reverse engineering, because no HW vendor cooperates with random fucks from the internet and gives them free support. :)
I can't believe this is getting upvoted on HN. What kind of gatekeeping elitist bullshit is this?
Anyway, much of the work getting these phones ready as daily drivers is in getting apps that run on them mature. There are lots of languages adequate for apps.
I feel like it's unfair to disparage him as harshly as that.
I wouldn’t even call it a phone if it can’t act as a phone out of the box, let alone use the “pro” moniker.
Why is it not labeled as a development board with a touchscreen and cell modem?
I've not used this particular device, but I have used Quectel GNSS modules, and they've been a surprisingly helpful company to work with. I'm a nobody, and working with Sony, Trimble, or ublox has been an exercise in frustration; you have to convince a salesperson that you're a big company and you can sell thousands of devices in order to just read the datasheet. This one does have some of the documents locked behind an access request, but in my experience, they've been very generous with those grants.
The modem supports the following bands:
LTE-FDD: B1/B2/B3/B4/B5/B7/B8/B12/B13/B18/B19/B20/B25/B26/B28
LTE-TDD: B38/B39/B40/B41
WCDMA: B1/B2/B4/B5/B6/B8/B19
GSM: B2/B3/B5/B8
Unfortunately T-Mobile isn't a great option for this phone either, because the phone lacks band 71 (T-Mobile's only nationwide low-band). It may work well in some areas, but have no coverage in others. Verizon has a sort of pseudo-whitelist; you probably will have to activate a whitelisted phone and then swap the SIM, but it may work.
https://www.att.com/idpassets/images/support/wireless/Device...
Here in the US (and likely in other places), carriers use MFBI[0] to solve this issue - it lets them broadcast both AWS-1 (as B4 and B66) and AWS-3 (as B66 only).
This first came into use when AT&T wanted to use B17 (Lower 700MHz blocks B-C) for their LTE network, rather than B12 (Lower 700MHz A-C). This prevented users from bringing their phones to smaller carriers (T-Mobile and US Cellular), who had significant 700A holdings. The FCC eventually pushed ATT to use both B12 and B17.
> little-used ATT bands
This phone likely wouldn't work on AT&T anyway - despite California's SB822 [1] forbidding it, they whitelist only specific devices on their network, and can go as far as soft blocking your account if you have one that is incompatible. I've linked the compatible phone list[2] below.
SB822's net neutrality provision has already been upheld in court (AT&T subscribers lost "data-free TV" on AT&T owned platforms because of it), but it remains to be seen whether other provisions (bans on tethering restrictions or device whitelisting, for instance) will be upheld as well.
That said, one nitpick I'd have is that these bands aren't necessarily "little-used" - B14 is FirstNet spectrum, and AT&T is currently rolling it out to a point where it reaches 99% of the population indoors. That's a strong commitment, and the band's support for HPUE means it can support coverage further than others at a similar frequency. B30 is WCS, which AT&T uses for capacity in a lot of places - but at 2300MHz it's not particularly useful for coverage. B17 is irrelevant due to MFBI and B29 is supplemental downlink (only useful for capacity).
It's important to think about the carrier aggregation combos that this device supports too - for folks who live in cities, carrier aggregation means a significantly more usable experience when the networks are congested. I don't see a supported list for that modem online, but it would depend on which are enabled in firmware anyway.
> 600 MHz T-mobile band 71, which has a wide rollout but poor device support.
As for T-Mobile; Band 71 is necessary in a lot of places, because they've been spectrum constrained for a long time. Until the 2017 auction for this 600MHz spectrum (which was rebanded from Digital TV service), they had no nationwide low-band holdings (unlike AT&T, who held many 850MHz Cellular licenses from decades ago, and Verizon, who won nationwide licenses to the 700MHz Upper C block in 2008). In 2015, they picked up licenses in the the Lower 700MHz range, mostly exclusive to A block - but they acquired almost none in US Cellular markets (much of the midwest, and parts of the northeast/northwest).
It's difficult to build out a network on midband alone - cell sites must be spaced far closer, and in-building coverage is very poor. This was one of T-Mobile's main limiting factors for a long time, and they didn't truly resolve it until that 2017 auction.
T-Mobile had a reputation for a long time for dropping service as soon as you entered a large building - this is why. Physics mean that lower frequencies are useful to telcos because they travel further, while higher frequencies are useful because they can carry more data.
The post-auction DTV transition wasn't short - it happened over 9 or 10 phases, which extended from 2018 until early 2020 (and were then extended again, due to the pandemic). This is part of why phones seem to have poor support - the 600MHz band is not widely used for cellular outside of the US and Canada even today, so it's common on popular phones made for those markets[3], but not in more niche devices like the PinePhone.
[0] Multiple Frequency Band Indicator (https://www.phonescoop.com/glossary/term.php?gid=551) [1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml... [2] https://www.att.com/idpassets/images/support/wireless/Device... [3] https://www.tmoband71.com/
There are far too many out-of-the-box bugs and glitches to consider this a usable product. For example, the convergence dock will not display on a monitor. Firefox browser displays too wide for the phone screen, so unusable. A dozen other issues on first day.
Even a development board should work better than this, have documentation of the known problems, and have some support mechanism that works.
I don't think better/more expensive hardware is the problem. It's software, caused by lack of users, lack of investment, and too many "competing" distributions of Linux.
Lack of users, investment and too many competing distros were all given in the early days of desktop Linux as reasons why it was simply not worthwhile. The thing is, this phase of development, where some devices exist that only nerds play with for a while, is necessary for there to ever be a mature Linux mobile UX. When you buy one of these devices you're not buying a Linux phone, you're choosing to participate in the process by which a Linux phone becomes a reality. And that process is picking up steam, Ubuntu tried it, many people have run Linux on their android devices with unlocked bootloaders, but pine (and librem and others) have actually created a market environment where things are actually advancing, and in my opinion advancing much faster than desktop Linux did.
I may have mentioned it before, but default OS is just painful to use ( thankfully, there are other options ). And here is the part of the problem. I am motivated to use it. Right now it still feels so janky, most people won't even get past initial boot process.
That is very true, and I would add that some of this reality is already in front of us. How many Android or Apple devices can run full featured office suites, graphics and audio manipulation software, development systems etc. complete browsers, electronics simulation software, etc, and I mean the real ones, not cut down mobile versions, all for free? Probably none. The problem with the PinePhone is that it still lacks functionality in those two fields where 99.9% of normal non tech users would want it to excel, that is, calls and messaging. Non tech users want it for calls, SMS, MMS and Whatsapp, period, and they very much prefer a costly Android or Apple phone that addresses those needs although it would be way inferior in everything else, including privacy and security. I think the PinePhone developers are already addressing some of these requirements, so hopefully it's a matter of time, but for most people, being able to run the WhatsApp client at decent speed would be the killer feature. No matter if run sandboxed with Android libraries, under a VM or reverse engineered; WhatsApp compatibility is the #1 feature that could bring the most users on the PinePhone bandwagon.
I have some standards for my toys though. If it’s sold as a phone, it should actually work as a phone (even a shitty one).
If they were selling it as a mini linux computer with integrated screen I wouldn’t mind so much.
But that's not what you mean when you say "phone" is it? The word "phone" is synonymous at this point with "mini computer."
What if it were sold as a phone with a big caveat, loudly announced, that said "this thing is for tinkerers and developers and is not ready for causal daily use"? That's the thing, it is marketed that way. You bought something you didn't want, you want what it is going to be, and we are all very excited about it and a bit impatient, but we cannot blame the product for ourselves being impatient.
https://pine64.com/product-category/pinephone/?v=0446c16e2e6...
You go into beta when your shit works to work out the last bugs, not when you have a barely functional MVP.
> This is the Beta Edition of the PinePhone. The pre-installed Manjaro with Plasma Mobile OS, that ships with this edition of the PinePhone, is a beta software build. This effectively means that while core functionality of the PinePhone still an ongoing effort. Thus, the device cannot considered a consumer-ready product.
Just a linux computer with a cellular modem sounds amazing to me, tbh.
It is sold as Phone hardware with explicit remarks about software being a community effort and that you load it with whatever you like.
Does someone who sells you a PC (HW) promise you that the software you load on it later will be bug-free? Of course not. That’s not a hardware-matter.
Same here with Pine64 and the PinePhone. They’re selling you hardware. And that’s it.
No, but if someone was selling PCs with super buggy software that regularly crashes your OS or prevents everyday functionality from working, people would be returning those PCs en masse, even if the hardware maker wasn't responsible for the software at all.[0] Even if you only "sell" the hardware, customers expect the full package to work.
That's not to say I agree with all the complaints here, though; this case is different because Pine64 has numerous disclaimers and warnings on the website, and they are very up front and honest about the viability of the PinePhone as a daily driver.
[0]: Whenever I hear non-techy friends complain about system instability, they pretty consistently blame the computer itself, not Windows or whatever software is likely actually causing their frustration.
PinePhone is our only hope. It's still in Beta, months or years from being consumer ready. And that's just where it needs to be from a development standpoint. Don't rush.
That said, reading your comment I also wonder about having too many distros of Linux going after PinePhone. I had an SD card with I believe 14 distros. Doesn't that mean the core development is divided 14 times? It seems like combining together strengths would be beneficial.
I don’t think it’s quite that simple. A lot of these competing mobile distros are using and working on the same libraries and porting desktop applications to mobile in similar ways. The biggest differences are usually the desktop distro that they’ve made their base and their desktop environment of choice. It’s common to see enhancements to an application or even core functionality like battery utilization or suspend improvements land in one distro and then be quickly adopted by others. As someone who’s mostly a bystander, the outliers seem to be the people working on the distros that aren’t ports of desktop Linux, like Sailfish, Nemo, and Ubuntu Touch. Of the main desktop-Linux-ports cluster the biggest divide seems to exist between launcher/DE development. Developers are split between the Gnome-based Phosh interface and the Plasma mobile interface. But a similar dichotomy exists on desktop. I’ll also throw in an honorable mention of sxmo and its wayland port, which I consider the equivalent to the underdog tiling window managers on the desktop; which is to say its only option good enough to consider using.
It’s a funny thing indeed.
sxmo seems to be the only option not focusing on competing with Apple and Google on a “good enough for mainstream” ux.
I mean Phosh is nice and all. Having frameworks for contacts and calendars just like in Gnome is nice. Pulseaudio working just as on the desktop is great too. But the total experience still leaves the impression of a very subpar iOS/Android copy.
sxmo though, that has decided to not compete with Apple and Google on what they do best, but rather do their own thing and re-envision what a Linux smartphone should/could be.
And I like it. I like it a lot. It’s by far my favourite Linux smart-phone experience so far.
I just need a better phone to run it on, and the Pinephone Pro could be that phone.
New phone or not, I’d also appreciate if sxmo managed to rebase on/ship for Mobian too. The package selection for pmOS and Alpine is pretty weak in comparison.
Honestly I don't think personally that it hurts things as much as one might expect. There is a lot of work from each distro that benefits all of the others. For example the Mobian dev was one of the first to really tackle the issue of battery life and their work benefited all the other teams.
That being said it might be better to have a few larger dev teams, but as long as their works contribute back to the community there is always benefit to the whole.
Frankly, it makes me question anyone who says desktop Linux is divided because we have options - at this point, it's more like there's no large corporate backer with a vested interest in making the desktop experience mainstream.
You're right, lots of things don't fit the screen. Running
scale-to-fit firefox on [1]
[0] https://wiki.mobian-project.org/
[1] https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=tweaks&s[]=scale...
Their phones are clearly marked as "Beta" on their store[1]. Forgive me for being so blunt, but what did you expect?
[1]https://pine64.com/product-category/pinephone/?v=0446c16e2e6...
The PP I received was crashy and couldn't even update the OS because a file or library was broken. :-(
I had to start it up ten times, run a terminal with a mobile keyboard in a 4pt font to fix the updater before it crashed at the one minute mark.
I'd call it pre-alpha.
But I 100% agree - the device is just too slow for me. Would love the increased RAM and extra CPU power.
I recently watched a presentation [0] that focused on the pinephone state-of-affairs, and it did not leave me with the impression the dock couldn't display on a monitor.
Are you sure you're not just experiencing some pathological incompatibility problem? Or am I going senile and need to re-watch the video?
I'll implement a SW workaround eventually, but I'm still recuperating a bit from the work on the Pinephopne keyboard. Once it's released, donations will hopefully increase a bit again, and I'll be able to do more development other than a kernel maintenance.
Now there's also Pinephone Pro and Quartz64 based router sitting on my table which I'm mostly playing with these days, so I'm a bit torn on where to focus my energy next. :)
Smartphones are so bloated with functionalities, it seems nobody ever talks about that. I don't see the answer on the website.
Half a year ago, when I looked into it, the answer was a clear: no. And there were not many things that did work reliable, without frequent freezes and crashes.
I doubt that fundamentally changed, so if you are looking for stability and reliability right now, than better look somewhere else. This project is about to get to such a state.
A linux phone might have the same problems, but at least its far more closer to the Open Source side of things.
Until there's somebody who is willing to be embarrassed by the state of this software, and able to do something about it, there is no hope here. It does not get better.
I disagree with your assessment. There are plenty of competent programmers who are working on pushing forward this software, and even following from the outside I've watched massive improvements over time.
We needed (more) open hardware before the software could get properly started, and that's what Pine provided.
To be fair, they're clearly marked as "Beta" on their store.
https://pine64.com/product-category/pinephone/?v=0446c16e2e6...
Yikes. I appreciate they are up front about it, but that eliminates literally everyone I know.
But for every Youtube video that I watch on my phone, I watch many more on my computer. I use my phone for browsing HN and Twitter, taking pictures, checking my email, and of course getting texts. I have a banking app installed, but that's not the reason that I have a phone.
I would have to post to Instagram from my computer, but other than that, I could use a PinePhone. Unfortunately, it looks like the only positive of the PinePhone right now is "free software." But my point is that it's possible for PinePhone to convince me by adding brand new features—they don't necessarily have to support every iPhone app to win users over.
Using the Instagram PWA may be a viable way of using Instagram on mobile Linux. Still can't seem to post stories on the PWA, though.
I wonder what the minimum modern requirements would be for a viable "mainstream" phone.
Common messaging apps (SMS, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Slack). Social media apps (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok). email (Though an average stock email app is probably sufficient). Google Apps (gmail, google maps, etc..). Navigation (google maps is sufficient for most) Probably some set of games.
I suspect the real viable option is being able to run Android apps natively without any special configuration.
I wasn't necessarily referring to iMessage. But, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Slack.
To be fair, I've also failed to find a list of supported apps. The best I found was: https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/okjeuk/apps...
I'd rather use the web app, it gives them less information about me
I guess you mean "donation" to Pine64 to encourage them to do more fun HW development? :)
https://www.pine64.org/2021/10/15/october-update-introducing...
I hoped they chose components for the PinePhone Pro that work out of the box in terms of firmware and having no downstream Linux patches in the near future, but it seems quite similar to the current PinePhone, only slight improvements. The camera OV5640 is the same (hopefully someone came up with better v4l2 integration since the second camera is different?), the modem EG25-G is the same, no info on the used USB-C chip, but at least there is a better WiFi chip.
> We’re not in the business of selling empty promises – a much faster mainline Linux smartphone won’t make the existing operating systems more refined, nor will it magically spawn software replacements for your iOS or Android applications. There is a long road ahead of us, all of us, and it will require time and effort for the software to reach a degree of maturity that would satisfy mainstream users.
I don't think this complaint is fair. Only major thing that's the same is the modem, but that would be quite annoying thing to change, because it would void the hard work of people working on the FOSS Linux stack for EG25-G modem.
Yes, it's sane to keep the EG25-G modem only because there is one guy doing an enormous work with https://github.com/Biktorgj/pinephone_modem_sdk
It will improve once these big apps switch to libcamera, like Chrome is doing.
I own a PinebookPro. The only way I get video output through the typec port is through some hacky patchset that will not be accepted upstream, and which occasionally breaks on new kernel releases. Some people report that it does not work whatsoever. I actually have to flip the typec plug to get it to work -- the video output is not reversible for some reason.
They also mention that the Pinephone Pro will support a suspend mode, which is something I have never been able to get working on my PinebookPro. The best that device can do is 1.7W while idle.
I'm glad to see this announcement, because I hope that these new rk3399-ish devices will improve software support for my PBP, but I implore anyone who is concerned about the above two features to wait and see. I certainly won't be buying another rk3399 device anytime soon, even though it is one of the best supported high performance offerings for mainline TF-A, U-Boot, and Linux.
The new imx rear camera also already has a driver in mainline that can be built on. The majority of the work will be getting the rk3399 side of the cameras to work
Strangely, it sports Bluetooth 4.1, while 5.1 is from December 2019.
> The decision to maintain the original PinePhone’s screen resolution of 1440×720 was made early on; higher resolution panels consume more power and increase SoC’s load, resulting in shorter battery life and higher average thermals. A few extra pixels aren’t worth it.[1]
While I understand the point they are making, the PinePhone's screen is almost 6" and pixel density is probably the first thing that I notice on a new smartphone. It just seems very low?
For context I am fully aware of the project, its goals and that it's not trying to take over the global smartphone market, but for some reason 1080p feels like the baseline in 2021.
[1] https://pine64.org/2021/10/15/october-update-introducing-the...
MVP = Linux on a smartphone
That said, I haven't read the announcement closely but wonder why they used the "Pro" moniker. Just say it's the new version of the PinePhone? What problem does naming it "Pro" solve?
I think they wanted to avoid (unsuccessfully, it seems) people thinking it's the "new" Pinephone. Rather, as I understand it both will be sold at the same time, and one is just more powerful than the other.
"Both will be sold at the same time" -- ah now I see what they're going for. Does this mean further fragmentation of their limited dev resources?
I want more devices to use sane resolutions so I'm not burning through battery for little benefit. One of the reasons that my laptop is a MacBook Pro 16" is because I think 1080p is too low at that size and 4K is too high. Apple is one of the few companies that uses a screen resolution in between those.
With convergence, its HDMI out.
The lower end Android market is still dominated by 720p(ish) phones. Especially the sub $150 market. Having used a few of them I don't think its an issue. Especially when you get a phone with a 720 screen, a modern low end efficient octo-core SoC, and a 4000mAh battery. The 3-4 days of battery life feel like you've gone back in time 15 years to cellphones lasting most of the week again.
Steam Deck only supports 1280 x 800, and that's gonna be OK for handheld gaming. I rather have 120 Hz and OLED but it ain't gonna happen for now.
I really doubt you get 3-4 days on a Pinephone once you start using sync services (for photo's, e-mail, IM, etc). Or use the screen extensively (browsing, video, etc). Of course the device lasts long if you don't use it for much.
While a Pinephone would be good for watching video's, it isn't because no Widevine, and that's what people need. Without Android emulation, it ain't gonna be popular. Microsoft knows this. Its why they're going for rolling out WSLg's successor on Windows 11, targeting Android GUI apps.
The Pinephone doesn't meet the needs of the smart phone market at this time, and probably not ever. In my opinion that market will never be friendly to Linux phones because of how much of it is based in proprietary control of the ecosystem. It feels wildly more toxic towards FOSS ideology than even the desktop ecosystem in 2021.
As someone who hasn't fully bought into any ecosystem yet it would be easier for me to transition to using a Pinephone. It will be inconvenient all the time, but at least I'm in control.
It works fine and SoC is fast enough to drive it. Even A64 will drive 1080p external monitor just fine (if you turn off the GPU and use older software made for it, like Xorg, and i3wm).
I believe the power efficiency argument, though. Pinephone pro needs every bit of power savings it can get, because RK3399 is not exactly a phone SoC.
I don't think it is as big an issue. I have an old 1st Gen Nexus 7, it has 720p resolution on a 7" screen, it is perfectly readable and a generally nice screen to use (I would still be using the device frequently if it wasn't painfully slow due to degrading flash). The difference to a super-high resolution modern device is obvious on a side by side comparison, but not on its own. When I'm just using the device I don't even notice the lower resolution.
Not without reading glasses, at least.
The screen outclasses the rest of the hardware.
I have a Pinebook that I got as a toy machine and was very impressed with the execution. And unlike Purism, Pine64 has good customer/developer communication and isn’t making impossible-to-keep promises about deliverability or even capabilities.
So not for me, but I’m glad this sort of project exists.
So it’s cool they contribute to upstream. Still strikes me as a very poorly run business.
I'm ever grateful for their work.
Right off the store page. Why are people in the comments expecting to daily drive this? You buy this for the excitement and sense of accomplishment of actually managing to run things.
Fairphone 3(+)/4 don't have killswitches though.
Early development or not, the rk3399 is a 5 year old SoC.
The comments here seem to say that PinePhone and friends are not ready to be daily drivers or even occasional drivers. I think that's fine.
However, I do want to support these people and their work. I also need an ARM machine to do tests on (for portability of software and such), so I'm thinking of buying this Pro version. Yes, I'll spend a lot more than I need to, but I really want to support them.
So question: are the PinePhone and friends good enough to do development on? And not even normal development; just downloading, building, and testing?
The only reason to buy a phone vs something else from them is the phone donates a bit of money to some other project. But you can directly donate to KDE or whatever and get the same result.
I have hopes for getting cross-compilation working, but no luck so far...
I have more questions if you don't mind.
Is the experience alright? Are there any gotchas that I would need to know?
I find it hard to believe a ARM CPU would need significantly more cycles to perform the same operations.
Also the main bottleneck is really the slow RAM and not the CPU.
That said the pine phone looks really cool and I hope they succeed. Mobile Linux is going to be such a large uphill battle without huge investments. But with Google/Apple having compensation packages amounting in the 300k-500k+ per year you'd think there would be room for a competitor in there somewhere.
The landscape of dumb/features phones is worse now than it was 10 years ago, which is a pity. For example, jut imagine that it is hard these days to get one which does predictive typing right... or that the cameras are worse than 10 years ago.
But why leave that comment on this particular submission? The PinePhone is not meant to be a phone you use day-to-day, it's meant for curious developers to hack around on. They are being very upfront about this as well. Maybe in the future this will change.
Sorry if I sounded negative. I agree, efforts like these should be lauded.
P.S. As a pinephone owner I don't consider it to be a good options for a backup device. I can only hope that one day the ecosystem gets there.
Or you could make better choices when it comes to how you organise your life so that you do not get in situations where losing your phone completely screws you over.
Seriously I don't get why people wilfully get into situations where important things in their life rest on the reliability of their phone.
It takes a minimal amount of awareness. And there's no excuse for it. My life is not massively negatively impacted by just refusing to be get chained to a phone.
I'd LOVE an open, Linux-based phone. But I also need a phone that does video calls, has a working browser, messenger etc. One that works with at least a good bunch of most common apps.
Is that likely to ever happen? Or is this a very interesting project, but really aimed at tinkerers, or people who don't use WhatsApp etc.
[0] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
Even with some linux support (which I haven't checked lately) it was a hard pass to support the slide.
We also don't even have this with desktops or laptops today. CPUs are still proprietary and running closed-source software. On mobile it's even more locked down, where I can almost guarantee you will never have open software running on baseband controller or SIM card on any public network like Verizon.
Depending on what you mean by 'native', you might find Waydroid[0] interesting. It only does containerization, not emulation.
And also: While yes, Linux on the desktop isn't too successful, it is at a state that you can daily drive with it for all tasks. Maybe you won't get the MS Office suite running, but there are alternatives.
I think the Linux mobile niche will go into the same direction. It won't be successful, if measured by raw numbers, but it will be successful in that it will provide a functional alternative for those willing to do it. It won't ever run WhatsApp, but it will run usable alternatives.
> Depending on what you mean by 'native', you might find Waydroid[0] interesting. It only does containerization, not emulation.
The big difference is that at that time desktop machines had pretty standard hardware, and hardware was largely interoperable, whereas with mobile these guys basically have to develop hardware, set the standard, and software developers have to develop the software specifically for the hardware. It's a lot harder, but if you look at the pace of things since librem and pine started, the development of this is moving at a faster pace than desktop Linux did.
The current Pinephone has almost all of that right now (desktop firefox run very well, messaging works - MMS too -, video calls works in the browser).
> One that works with at least a good bunch of most common apps.
That's on the "most common apps" devs to do the work, and they are very unlikely to do so.
You could use something like Waydroid on the Pinephone to run some Android apps in a stable-ish way (SailfishOS has a similar feature).
Last I tried zoom with 4 people on my PBP, it was stutter city.
Probably rewarding work, too.
Maybe that's not such a priority when you're fully aware the thing isn't actually usable as a daily driver one might be regularly toggling cell/wifi/camera on.
I wish all product websites were like this.
I wonder. Firefox has Android version with mobile-optimized look and feel. I beleive it shares a lot of code with desktop version. How hard will it be to build that version for Linux graphics desktop?
Except for the engine, it does not. It's a very Android-specific app. It used to be platform-agnostic (early mobile Firefox ran even on Nokia N900), but that has changed many years ago already.
What about finding 1 million nerds like me that would like to donate 100 to a crowdfunding campaign just to the software side of the phone?.
Looks like the RK3399 was used in some chromebooks so hopefully that means it has great upstream Linux support. We can hope it doesn't require any device overlays or weird kernel patches.
I've played around with a chromebook on the same chip and while ChromeOS is of course much more polished the Pinebook Pro is very usable.
If android is open source, it's not google-dependent. I think there's something that I don't understand, but I bet that the core of android can still be used by any phone manufacturer, so I don't really see why pinephone is making their own OS.
Does that mean that android, despite being open source, is hardly usable/customizable by developers, or too complex/bloated?
- licensing: some people, myself included, think a FOSS/Libre license such as LGPL/GPL3 is better for people and society. Android is mostly apache, which means it's not resistant at all to a company "stealing" it without giving back to the community.
- dependency on google: like it or not, key components of android are completely maintained by google. That means that the future of an open platform is at the whims of one organization. Sure, you could fork, but android is a massive project and a small team could hardly keep up.
- "the core of android can still be used by any phone manufacturer": android, and the related IPs, is pretty firmly in the control of the US government. A lot of funding for non-android mobile OSes comes from other governments interested in a platform and support that is unencumbered from five eyes states
My personal opinion? Having more platforms is good, as are more compatibility layers. Android is more than just an OS or a platform, it's a set of ABIs for running apps that's used by over a billion people.
The progress they are making is great but still far from daily driving for me personally. I'm just glad the community exists. Even with the bugs and flaws the products may have it is better than nothing.
It seems fine for a general productivity device, but not for things like video conferencing, or media consumption, which I guess aligns with their inability to support DRM.
They go into it there:
"The decision to maintain the original PinePhone’s screen resolution of 1440×720 was made early on; higher resolution panels consume more power and increase SoC’s load, resulting in shorter battery life and higher average thermals. A few extra pixels aren’t worth it."
The performance of those apps on the original pinephone is just hideous.
Also, is it just me, or was the original already pretty chunky, and now they’ve added 2mm making it 11mm thick.
I'd hate to buy this phone to support a project and then never have access to what I wished the product was.
Would it really have been that bad to at least offer a 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB Memory upgrade.
Just feels like a huge let down. I get it the price of electronics(i.e. memory) is more expensive, but this makes it look like a joke in comparison with other "phones".
And if it were marketed as a mini computer 4GB of ram isn't saying much. Hexacore processor, 128GB Emmc storage awesome but then I read 4GB of ram and it's like a smack in the face. If this is to be a "flagship" for years to come, I'm really disappointed they went with limited memory.
Would I pay $699 instead of $399 for more memory... yeah I would
If you are based in Europe, you may be interested in the Fairphone 4, which has 6 or 8 GB of RAM.
As for not waiting for a newer Rockchip part, it sounds like they are making it clear this is not a second generation PinePhone, just a more powerful version of what we already had. There will likely be a proper second generation with more major changes later on.
Or you can use a USB-c adapter to use any USB keyboard today.
Edit: meant ubuntu edge phone not Mozilla.
Just emailed them to see if they can make this work, and upgrade appropriate for the difference.
Hopefully, I'll be included on the early batch, and can contribute to helping make the overall GUI experience better.
[0]: https://sxmo.org/
And now it's obsolete?
Not happy at all. :(
Suspect you can sell your one on to someone if you want.
Why are projects like this starting from scratch and not forking from the abandoned Ubuntu phone OS?
Ubuntu Touch mounts stuff read-only, pushes you into using webapps, discourages using normal shell stuff like you would on a desktop GNU/Linux system, and has some poorly-working container system for if you wanna use shell stuff. It honestly felt worse than using Termux on an Android phone.
With pmOS you can install nvim, firefox, mpv, minetest... Things just work how you'd expect. It's like a single board computer (raspberry pi, etc.) that comes with a screen and other things already attached. You can ssh into it and update your packages all at once. It's really nice.
I think it's a stretch to say they're starting from scratch, but if you just mean the UI, Manjaro supports Lomiri (the UI from Ubuntu Touch) while also giving you a more normal OS experience. I'm glad to have some diversity in the desktop environment. Phosh is one of the more polished options, but has the issue of being GNOME-flavored and having all the issues you'd see with regular GNOME. Plasma Mobile feels more Android-like and familiar, but is still rough around the edges. Eventually it will hopefully be as good as Phosh and people can choose whatever they like the look and feel of more.
sigh