Comment by seba_dos1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seba_dos1 | Hacker News Reader

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And yet I've been using these devices for 17 years now (first Neo Freerunner, then Nokia N900, now Librem 5) and they've been good enough for day-to-day use. With some compromises, sometimes effort, maybe not for everyone, but they sure were usable by a determined person who cares.

I do have a replaceable battery, headphone jack, SD card slot and screws. I do some Web browsing, reliable calls/SMS, playing music for hours. It's starting to get a bit slow and old over the years, but I still see no reason to switch to any less user-respectful device.

What I worry about is whether there will be an upgrade path within the next decade. So far there was the Liberux campaign, and it failed. I already had to use an Android device as a secondary phone for 2-3 years before I got my Librem 5 because the N900 eventually aged too much to be usable for the Web and there was nothing on the market that could properly replace it. I don't want to need to do that again.

PinePhone is a low-end device with no support other than what you get from the community. It was a good option for those who couldn't afford anything else and wanted to invest their time and skills instead of money, but there are no miracles. The community of people who did actually care turned out to be small enough that you can still find some low-hanging fruits to work on today - and that's the thing I wanted to point out. I see lots of people who talk about how much they want Linux phones, but it's a tiny subset that actually acts like it. They won't fall from the sky - not when the sales of existing devices can't finance developing their successors.

Which software stack were you using on the Neo Freerunner that was usable as a phone and had working power management?

I tried to use a Freerunner as a phone for well over 2 years before I gave up and just bought another nokia. As far as I'm aware, it was never really usable as a phone, partly due to the power management never really working properly (there was a point where we finally got power management and a battery life of >4hrs, but the phone often wouldn't wake to ring when somebody called). When using several of the available distros I was frequently mocked by my friends for using the "echophone", due to their own voice being echoed back at them, making it extremely disconcerting to talk to.

I tried a bunch of different distros. And I spent hours and hours and hours trying to tweak settings and test to eliminate the echo. qtmoko was the best distro IIRC, but it had its own issues.

To say that "they sure were usable by a determined person" severely overstates the usability of the freerunner IMO - I'll be extremely curious to hear about the software stack that you characterise as "usable", particularly with regard to the ability to make and receive calls and the ability to have the phone on standby for more than about 4 hours away from a charger.

I used SHR (initially Om2007.2, but switched after a few months as it wasn't maintained anymore). Echo could be eliminated by configuring Calypso modem's DSP and IIRC FSO distros did it by default at some point. Buzz and not waking up to ring (the infamous bug #1024) were hardware issues on early units and could be fixed pretty easily by anyone who knows how to use a soldering iron (I didn't back then, so a friend did it for me). There was a software workaround as well, though at a cost of elevated power usage in suspend. I don't remember exactly how long it lasted on battery, but it sure did last a day at school. A quick search through my e-mail archives shows people on mailing lists talking about 100 hours in suspend with modem deep sleep fixed and about 70 hours with it disabled (though I can see someone complaining in one mail that they couldn't reach more than 50 hours), but of course it could quickly burn through the battery when under active use - especially with Wi-Fi on, as I remember its power saving mode to be quite flaky.

Freerunner was the roughest of these devices, but that was more than 15 years ago. Things have changed meanwhile ;)

I tried SHR too. That original 2007.2 distro that it shipped with was almost usable as a phone before OM released the much worse one.

Interesting to hear, I never managed to get anything like that many hours out of mine - as I say I never managed a full day because it wouldn't wake from sleep to ring. And I spent a LOT of time trying to eliminate the echo but never quite managed it (though I think it might have been gone in qtmoko, it's been a long time so hard to remember exactly).

Still I'm glad to hear that it was usable for someone, I guess.

> Things have changed meanwhile ;)

I wish. But my experience with the pinephone was somehow even worse.

Yeah, Om2008 was a disaster. I liked Om2007.2 as a user, but as a developer I can see why it was abandoned. Eventually it was FSO what made the phone actually solid and with proper foundations. If your device shipped with 2007.2 still, it must have been one of the earliest ones, so you've got the whole set of hardware bugs that were fixed in later batches (but so did I).

Still, Freerunner, while usable, required plenty of patience. My current experiences with Librem 5 are so much better - but whenever I play with a PinePhone it does somewhat remind me of my old Freerunner (which still works, BTW!).

Yeah I was part of a group that was involved with a bulk shipment of one of the very first batches, we got all the warts.

Another thing that's worth mentioning was that at first, openmoko were very much over-selling the capabilities and readiness of the device: The Freerunner was initially supposed to be a "consumer-grade" device, with the neo1973 being the prototype / developer version. When I first contacted openmoko I was told that it would be totally usable as a phone out of the box with all the phone functionality you expect. They walked back on those claims and updated their website/wiki pretty quickly after the device actually came out. But not before a bunch of us had handed over our cash.

I'm glad to hear that the stack did get to a somewhat usable state. And I'm even more glad to hear that the librem is better. The experience I had with the Freerunner put me off foss phones for a long time, and the pinephone....didn't help. Maybe I'll take another look at the librem.

  (which still works, BTW!)

Yeah my freerunner still mostly powered up the last time I tried, a year or two ago. I think maybe nand had corrupted and I might have had to re-flash it, or something like that. It wasn't in a healthy state but seemed to be mostly OK with a bit of tinkering.

It does deserve some credit as a cool little portable linux device - once I gave up on using it as a phone, I hacked it into a pretty useful GPS and music player device. I was still using it to record GPS tracks for trips in 2016, and I was running it as a second display attached to my workstation for some time after that. It did last quite well, I do have to give it that... But what I bought was supposed to be a phone.

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