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Comment by nynx | Hacker News Reader

I love the ideas behind pinephone, but I think it's just not powerful enough. I'm not sure if there's enough access to more powerful mobile phone processors though.

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The new Pro model has a significantly better processor. They're using a binned and underclocked 28nm Rockchip RK3399S 64bit SoC – 2x A72 and 4x A53 CPU cores @ 1.5GHz. The They used an A64 in the base model which was a 40nm Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A53.

I bought the pinebook pro and ya it just doesnt quite have the power I want it to, but on flipside the lack of power gives the giant battery tons of runtime.

But for the pinephone. I really want >= 32mp camera. Whereas 5MP is ridiculous and 2MP selfie? You're right it's slow, it's not quite figured out entirely.

Pinephone pro coming soon and also doesn't quite hit the wants for me. It does look fast though in specs.

A beefy camera would be very interesting to work with. As of now, our phones do a ton of proprietary processing which makes open source/external solutions... suck. I'd love to have a decent open source camera app with the capacities of something like GCam.

>A beefy camera would be very interesting to work with. As of now, our phones do a ton of proprietary processing which makes open source/external solutions... suck. I'd love to have a decent open source camera app with the capacities of something like GCam.

I'm a big fan of open source, literally have open source projects with many stars on github. However, I'm not one of those 'no proprietary blobs' folks.

Sony has a camera chip that's awesome, available, but comes with a blob? Fine with me.

Me neither, though if there's a decent and open source solution available, you know that's going on my devices ;)

PostmarkerOS currently support some Snapdragon 845 and Snapdragon 821 devices, so you're not limited by pinephone.

But AFAIK in this case, you're limited by the proprietary firmware tied to old Linux kernels.

No, 845 runs on mainline, my OnePlus 6 is on an 5.16 release candidate at the moment.

How does it work without free drivers? Will it run on all future kernels?

How's the experience so far? Does everything work?

Powerful enough for what? Get rid of regressive virtual machines and surveillance framework bloat and there's much less computation to be done. I'd love for the Free software mobile ecosystem the coalesce around lower power processors and resource-respecting languages.

The first iPhone had a slower SoC, yet it felt way faster. I think there is room for improvement on the software side to make things faster.

Librem 5 is significantly more powerful, despite the CPU is the same. Much faster RAM, GPU etc.

The Pinephone Pro coming soon is probably a way better deal than the Librem 5. Pine64 is also way more trustworthy than Purism, who is constantly lying about their products.

The Librem 5 is currently $1200 after multiple price hikes and looks to be significantly slower than the $400 PinePhone Pro.

Of course PinePhone is cheaper: Pine64 develops no software for it, the software developed by Purism is used by more than half of the PinePhone users.

> who is constantly lying about their products

This is a bold claim. They have a history of delays, but lying is not what they do.

Just look at the latest post on r/Purism on how people have a really hard time to get some refunds.

* https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/r1n6a9/this_is_a_pu...

* https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/qyhc04/i_will_avoid...

* https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/quz8t4/a_year_and_a...

They've been having a hard time with the funds, so they probably have to delay refunds in order not to go bankrupt. Recently they got some inestments, so it should get better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27949435. This is not exactly "constantly lying about their products".

They’ve been seeking investments from anyone on their mailing list for years. And if they can’t refund people for six months or more (contradicting the terms of their already insane return policies), how can anyone expect them to be in business long enough to ship out phones or laptops or anything else?

If you order something from Purism today, it'll probably be 6-12 months at the earliest before you get your product. Lead times on phones are over a year and there are plenty of reports from people who ordered more expensive Librem 5 USA models who still don’t have them after six months or more. Librem 14 laptops seem to be on a six month delay.

And yes, they do constantly lie about their products. They lied about FCC clearance. They lied about when the camera would work. They’ve lied/refused to address the reality that the cellular modem doesn't support VoLTE and likely never will (which is a problem because of how many US 3G towers are getting shut off and what that does to phones that can’t do VoLTE). They’ve lied about how many units they can ship. They’ve lied about the state of their software.

At least Pine64 knows how to ship a product to people and be honest about their device capabilities.

> it'll probably be 6-12 months at the earliest before you get your product.

Yes, they have a history of delays. By the way, did you heard about global supply chain problems?

> lied about FCC clearance.

I was following them for years. There was a delay in obtaining the clearance. But where did they lie about it?

> They lied about when the camera would work.

First, this is called “a delay”. Second, if you would follow what exactly happened, they had to reverse engineer the camera due to extremely poor documentation. And all efforts were in the open. Unprecedented transparency.

> They’ve lied/refused to address the reality that the cellular modem doesn't support VoLTE and likely never wil

They never lied about it. Any proofs? They have been working on it for a long time indeed for the same reason as above (documentation). The hardware is capable of 4G, so I’m sure it will work. Why do you think otherwise?

> They’ve lied about how many units they can ship.

They never disclosed how many units they shipped.

> They’ve lied about the state of their software.

This is the only smartphone company I know who develops all software in public. You are lying here.

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