Comparing the Librem 5 USA and PinePhone Beta | Hacker News Reader

Comparing the Librem 5 USA and PinePhone Beta

amosbbatto.wordpress.com

60 pointsunderscore_ku18 comments

I can’t see a compelling reason to spend $2000 on a phone that ships with broken audio.

$200 for a Pinephone is okay if you’re okay with the idea it will be hard to use.

you can get the non-USA librem 5 for $1200. To me the reason is pretty clear, and mentioned in the article. They employ 11 people to actively improve and upstream the software, so that money goes towards paying them to make this viable in the future. PinePhones rely entirely on the community.

That being said, $1200 is also outside of my toy budget, so I'll probably end up getting a pinephone next year.

I would expect them to send me a non-broken phone for 2 grand, if they’re serious

i guess you're a glass half empty kind of person

I’m just not sure how they’re shipping broken phones. They can’t be making many but there’s no QA?

It was just a joke. I mean if this person didn't just get really unlucky and something broke between QA and them getting the phone, they should obviously improve their QA. I was more trying to justify the high price tag in general

This is incredibly detailed, which is impressive. But in the first two minutes of reading it, the conclusion is basically, neither phone is ready to use as a daily driver.

I want a phone I can use with a single hand, that has a really good camera (within physical smartphone limits, of course), still has upper class hardware specs and doesn't place me on Apple's property.

If those are your only requirements, there are a ton of Android-based smartphones out there, based on your hand size. Google's Pixel, Samsung's galaxy, Sony's weirdly named series to name a few.

Maybe if you're Andre the giant. The last truly one-handable smart phone was the iPhone 5/SE.

As i said, depends on your hand size. For me, the Pixel 6 is uncomfortably small. If I'm not mistaken Sony's weirdly named series (1-1 and stuff like this) have small-sized models ( even if on the longer side).

Really? I found the Pixel 5 to be on the small side, but the Pixel 6 is pretty large and unwieldy (imo) by comparison.

Also, the Xperia 5 series is their "smaller size" flagship. It's larger than the Pixel 5, but a fait bit smaller than the Pixel 6. Still a bit large for my tastes.

iPhone mini is pretty good too

Also a long time iPhone 5/SE advocate. It was the last 0hone with flat edges(maybe not anymore). I am convinced they dedigned the following generations off a bar of soap, requiring another $30+ case, or an expensive screen replacement.

A long and detailed comparison, but if you are looking for a summary "which one is better" conclusion or even opinion, there isn't one (at least I didn't find it).

Very long and very detailed, and a lot of fun to read. Closest thing to a conclusion I found was the notion that the devices are quite different from one another. They seek to accomplish the same basic goal, but cater to different groups. This seems reasonable and I'm glad there's some freedom of choice.

Both projects are rather far along at this point, at least relative to other, past attempts. Personally I've had a lot of fun with the PinePhone which I opted for mainly because the Librem 5's price tag is out of my reach.

I'm excited for the PinePhone Pro to launch which I'll be purchasing as well. One thought that the author expressed, about buying into these projects not necessarily to receive an immediately functional product, but to participate and invest in improving the state of affairs as a whole, really resonated with me.

I think the Pro will really help tip the scales from "technically functional curiosity" to "viable daily driver" -- the current state of the device, while excellent in a relative sense, isn't _quite_ enough to replace Android for me.

It's hard to tell if it's just not ready, or if my expectations keep changing even as the device's capabilities improve. It feels like the "Year of the Linux desktop" problem, just with a phone this time. It's always technically ready, yet somehow also simultaneously not ready in a more practical sense. Maybe I just need to be more involved?

Perhaps it's even more sinister than that. Maybe the current duopoly (Apple/Google) continues to develop their ecosystems partly out of self-defense. The faster they "innovate" and add useless features (like the author's list of anti-features), the further "behind" independent projects like Pine64/Purism appear to be.

Thankfully the trained eye can discern that these devices are in a class by themselves. Hopefully they don't get compared to Android/iOS too often, like I just did. Only with the best of intentions, I promise!

It's not the features Apple and Google add to their systems. It's that I need something to run the banking apps I need to log into my bank accounts with 2FA. It's closer to needing a Windows PC because that program (filing taxes?) runs only there or only with IE6. The solution used to be a VM, maybe I'll be able to reliably virtualize any Android app on a Linux phone. Then I'll buy one.

> maybe I'll be able to reliably virtualize any Android app on a Linux phone.

You almost can, check out https://anbox.io/

For what it's worth, I can log into my bank just fine with 2FA using a web browser. The mobile app they provide (for Android at least) is also one of the most consistently low-quality apps I have the displeasure of using on a regular basis. As of the most recent update, it's decided to reliably crash on startup every single time I try to launch it, rendering it useless.

So, the old back-and-forth: if you are keeping a Windows VM around _solely_ to log into that one thing using IE6, you probably don't need it as much as you think you do. Or it would be less cumulative effort to find a workaround so you can dump such a cumbersome access method.

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