- receiving MMSes works, but you need to use a custom command line tool that you might have written yourself for that
- sending MMSes, I have not even tried. Probably possible, but impractical
- it's barely usable for GPS navigation
- it's a bit slow
- Web browsing is a bit clunky but is largely usable
- its overall usability is not very good
It's a prototype.
But it is a bet for the future. A future in which there are usable phones running OSes whose roadmap do not depend on corporations that close everything in a walled garden or who depend on massively tracking people. A future in which every single line of code running on the phone can be studied, improved and shared. A future in which updates are not at the mercy of the manufacturer.
Actually, you can already have one foot in this future thanks to this phone, and many things are being fixed at a remarkable pace. I hope we will see higher-end hardware for the OSes running on the PinePhone soon.
Mine is out for delivery today - I share your sentiments.
I don't expect it to be a great phone. I do think it's fairly incredibly that it exists at all, and I want to support both the manufacturers putting it out, as well as pick up some slack and add some of my spare time as development hours towards making the experience better.
This is one of the very, very few mobile devices on the market right now that places the user in the driver's seat, instead of treating them merely like a wallet to suck money from in any way possible.
> I hope we will see higher-end hardware for the OSes running on the Pinephone soon.
According to discussions on the Pine64 boards, it will probably take 4-5 years before we see an upgrade to the underpowered and obsolete A64 chip inside the PinePhone, and when that happens, even that new chip may already seem antiquated.
Yeah, this sucks a bit. Those phones need hardware that does not depend on proprietary blobs to work, and such hardware is not very common. Even the hardware in the PinePhone is not perfect in this regard: the modem runs a closed firmware (though people are getting mainline Linux to run on the modem so there's hope!), and the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip too (like in most regular laptops anyway…)
In the meantime though, I would be happy with an outdated SoC but a decent camera and good call quality for people you call. 5 GHz Wi-Fi would be wonderful. 3G of RAM is already comfortable. A better screen would be fantastic but the one on the PinePhone is more than usable.
Better battery life would be nice too, but it is coming to the PinePhone with a custom case that will also provide a keyboard, and you can always carry a power tank or a spare battery since the one in the PinePhone is removable!
I don't agree that 3G of RAM is comfortable. The problem with phones these days is that many people don't really use them for calling over the public telephone network, instead they are running chat apps like Signal. Launching Signal's desktop app (which is Electron-based) or trying to emulate Signal's Android app through Anbox already places big demands on RAM, and a person can reasonably expect from a phone that they can also use their browser and their map app at the same time.
The same is also true of map apps. There just isn't enough developer manpower to make vanilla-Linux mapping apps as featureful as OSMAnd or Maps.me's open-source fork, and therefore the best thing to do would be to emulate them using Anbox, but the Pinephone's hardware is just too underpowered to comfortably do this.
I agree with electron apps and Anbox being slow to the point of being unusable.
Anbox being slow is not a big surprise though: it literally runs a complete Android system on top of your OS.
We need native, lightweight apps for the phone and that requires a big amount of work for sure.
There's an Android port for the PinePhone that I want to try one of these days. Back to an OS whose roadmap depends on Google, but at least without the proprietary blobs. But I don't plan to settle on it. As someone said elsewhere in this thread, it's less and less hackable, and I hope that GNU/Linux-based OSes work out.
Either you haven't heard of or used Gnome Maps (which is wonderful, highly recommend), or it doesn't fit your criteria. Assuming the latter, what do you consider missing?
Gnome Maps is not even remotely competitive for offline use. It requires internet lookups for everything. Because OSMAnd maintains its own OSM database on your device, looking up opening hours for businesses can be done with no internet access.
OSMAnd is able to show all kinds of details about roads (such as the road surface – important for cyclists interested in asphalt/unpaved riding).
Gnome Maps also uses GraphHopper for routing. OSMAnd, on the other hand, allows you to extend its routing with plugins, so long-distance cyclists can install the Brouter routing engine that is superior for this kind of travel.
I never really got this... Surely just forking Android and replacing all the closed source Google apps with open source alternatives would be easier? Why build an entirely new operating system, when Android already uses the Linux kernel and is open source. A free software fork of Android could accomplish all the of the same goals as PinePhone while providing all the benefits of the existing support and ecosystem.
After a few years (3 if you are lucky), your phone will stop getting updates. I have a Nexus 5 with the last "official" update over 4 years ago. I have a Nexus 5x that stopped getting updates 2 years ago.
To compare, I have a laptop from 2008 (A Thinkpad x200) that runs mainline Debian no problems, and bit the thing will die before it stops getting mainline support. I want a phone where I can like that too.
In all but a select, very few devices, Android is not fully open source, nor will it ever be.
On a Pixel 3a, if you follow the offical compiling guide, there is a HUGE (~400 MB) vendor.img file you are forced to install, and you have to integrate several other proprietary libraries to get the Pixel 3a to even boot.
On top of that, pure AOSP cripples the phone (and by that mean SMS breaks with LTE, you lose voLTE, Wi-Fi calling, etc.) A lot of Android ROMS have to scrape official images to get the binary bits (and it is nor a fun needle in a haystack excerise) to get basically phone functionality in Android.
Running Android without Play Services cripples your phone in a number of ways.
And anyway, Android, even the free software part, will always do what Google wants to do. One may fork Android, but maintaining an ever diverging fork would have an ever growing cost.
And there are aspects of newer Android versions that are less than ideal. For instance, one can see how Termux is struggling to keep working: it is not possible to run binaries that are not part of an Android package (APK) anymore. This is a security feature, but it's not always relevant depending on how you use and manage your OS.
Plus, developing for Android is a pain. You need to download, setup and use a bloated SDK with a non-free license. There's Android Rebuilds [1], but it's not complete.
I trust GNU/Linux distros like Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, Manjaro to evolve in a direction I like. postmarketOS probably too, but I'm not familiar with it as well.
Hasn't the ios equivalent moved to emulation at this point?
Kernel support is there waiting to compiled for user namespace isolated containers. It would just require an official way to launch them as a normal user.
The same reason Firefox and Safari don't use Google V8 & Blink. They (mostly Safari) are the only opposition to Google monopolistic control on the web.
You will always be under control of others if you don't take your independence and open-source means little when it is in practice controlled by only one entity.
If you build an OS on top of Android like /e/, replicant & Lineage & etc. , you are doomed to be living in Google' shadow . They'll shut you down anytime you do something they don't like. And even if it is open-source, if you disagree, you'll never have the financial means to maintain an up to date Android fork. Once/if they abandon Android for Fushia, it's going to be hard maintaining all abandoned Android legacy code alone.
Then, there are also technical reasons. We could ask "why create a new UI lib from scratch when we have QT ?". Yes for the end-user it's mostly the same (a bunch of text and buttons), yet people are developing custom UI lib (eg. Blender/Godot), Flutter, React, Svelte, Druid, Moxie, Makepad, etc. This is needed for innovation and/or to fit your own needs.
Real Linux has lots of potential : it can run Blender, Krita, Godot, VsCode, Steam games, any language, FreeCad, KiCad, Matlab, etc. (None of them have mobile UIs, but still are an asset for tablets & convergence). It is not governed by Google or Apple and it has already quite some drivers for several devices (I could just install Bitwig on a Linux tablet, plug a MIDI keyboard and make music).
So there are definitely reasons to take this path and personally I find this far more exciting than Lineage (although I use Lineage daily & I'm super grateful to that it exists)
Why would you run Android on an old underpowered SoC if you can buy a new Android phone with much better specs for the same price or cheaper locally, with much easier to attain warranty and better delivery times?
Pinephone is only interesting because it is getting a progressively better mainline Linux support every day, can run normal Linux distros, has fairly open hardware and a manufacturer that accepts feedback, and works on interesting stuff, like a kinda unique planned external keyboard+battery shell for it.
It's a real pocket computer with HW that I can control without restrictions, SW that I can trust, and don't have to run everything in a sandbox, just like on my workstation.
> Why would you run Android on an old underpowered SoC if you can buy a new Android phone with much better specs for the same price or cheaper locally, with much easier to attain warranty and better delivery times?
The absence of proprietary blobs running on the main CPU alone is already a great deal. This also means that the phone isn't stuck on an old version of Android because of some nasty blob.
...and completely uninteresting - at least for me. Having used GNU/Linux smartphones as my main phones exclusively since 2008 I'm really not interested in any kind of Android device.
- its camera is not good
- its battery life is not good
- its call quality is not good
- SMSes are not completely reliable
- receiving MMSes works, but you need to use a custom command line tool that you might have written yourself for that
- sending MMSes, I have not even tried. Probably possible, but impractical
- it's barely usable for GPS navigation
- it's a bit slow
- Web browsing is a bit clunky but is largely usable
- its overall usability is not very good
It's a prototype.
But it is a bet for the future. A future in which there are usable phones running OSes whose roadmap do not depend on corporations that close everything in a walled garden or who depend on massively tracking people. A future in which every single line of code running on the phone can be studied, improved and shared. A future in which updates are not at the mercy of the manufacturer.
Actually, you can already have one foot in this future thanks to this phone, and many things are being fixed at a remarkable pace. I hope we will see higher-end hardware for the OSes running on the PinePhone soon.