Anyone have any insight into what the app development experience is like on this?
It's easy to get started, we started to write some documentation for Kirigami/Plasma Mobile: https://develop.kde.org/docs/kirigami/
PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder
181–190 of 308 posts
Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
> plus an experience that is more attuned to the needs of users than iOS or Android can accomplish that. Why would this project be more effective at doing this than iOS or Android? I don’t see why people other than ideological technologists would want to use this phone. To be clear, I think it’d be great if they did, but I think you’re massively understating the difficulty of challenging iOS and Android. Many compani…
> Why would this project be more effective at doing this than iOS or Android? This is an excellent question. The basic answer is that the incentive structures are different. Apple’s platforms are primarily designed to efficiently deliver commercial software. The app-store, the apis and everything else about their OS ecosystem is designed around the idea that packaged Apps, immutable to the user and remotely maintaine…
>You are right that just competing with it directly would fail. Even Android is failing at that.
...What? Citation needed. Android by far accounts for the majority (85%) of smartphones not just worldwide but even in nearly all wealthy countries other than the US, Canada and Japan.
https://www.mobileapps.com/blog/android-vs-ios-market-share#...
Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
If all you need is more power, Librem 5 should be the perfect choice. Don't you expect powerful hardware to cost more? There is no information when Pinephone 2 arrives and how much it will cost. > Cool if the PinePhone didn't exist, but against it it doesn't look that good, I would say. Yes, it does: https://social.librem.one/@ozmik/105939468751642844
I've read conflicting reports on how much more powerful it is in practice. I've seen only one direct review that said the Librem is clearly much faster, but I've also seen a few comparisons that show little to no difference in daily use tasks. The problem might be that we don't have a quality comparison yet (or I haven't found it), but I wonder if there is a performance bottle neck in the hardware. Maybe the software…
In term of CPU, the hardware is similarly shitty. For the GPU, the Librem 5 has a better GPU. In plasma mobile, the current bottleneck is on the GPU side, so maybe the Librem 5 can offer better performance but I'm not sure the improvements are worth $600 more.
Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder
#184I'm disappointed that they don't support LTE Band 48.
Band 48 (CBRS) provides a relatively easy way to run your own LTE network for testing or whatever.
Commercial eNBs are sub $1k, and you can spin up an open source EPC in an evening, config your own SIM cards, etc.
Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder
#185I personally think that the effort to create open source phones is the single most important technology project going on out there. We have open source browsers, we have open source social apps, but we definitely do not have open source phones. Phones that can be truly owned and controlled by users will reshape the privacy discourse, from one of complaining and legal coercion, to one of choices and markets.
Last month they even managed to fully open parts of the modem, and do calls without the closed blob for the firmware! https://twitter.com/biktorgj/status/1357217053745250304 (edit: caveat: they might not be able to actually ship the firmware since laws on this are very strict basically everywhere) The app store(s) is a bit of a problem, but in time it might be solved. Not a big problem for me.... But I'd also like to…
To clarify, 4G modem modules (like the one in PinePhone) are usually based on stripped down smartphone SoCs, running Linux on ARM + a huge multi-milion lines FW blobs running on some DSP, that's actually implementing most of the functionality you expect from the modem.
So what this means is that PinePhone is basically a smartphone withing smartphone, and what's opensourced is the Linux kernel running on the modem's SoC. It's very nice, and allows you some more control (now you get two Linux capable SoCs in one phone that you can fully use for whatever you want, which is quite interesting!), but the actual modem part is as blobby and impenetrable as ever.
Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
It appears that this version has 32GB eMMC storage vs 16GB and has 3GB SDRAM vs 2GB.
That's only if you get the Convergence package, which comes with a $25 docking station but is $50 more expensive.
Right, so $25 for the docking station and $25 for doubling the EMMC size and adding 1 GB of RAM. Not the worst deal I've heard of.
Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
The benefits go both ways: the community also reaches out to the developers. A lot of software is added to repos without any input from the devs. The plain truth of the matter is that commercial app stores are malware distributors, and community repositories are not. The commercial app store model does not work, at least not for the user. Also: not all software is commercial, and not everyone wants their phones comme…
> not everyone wants their phones commercialized. While your statement is technically correct, the number of users falling into that category, and would go the extra effort to ensure a non-commercialized day to day phone is usable, is infinitesimally small. Most users embrace the convenience associated with the commercial solution. This will be a tiny niche phone
>This will be a tiny niche phone
Yes. So what?
Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not quite sure what the destination is with this phone. This particular model seems to be for hobbiests who will use it as a second device for development, or purists who value privacy over all else. I would prefer to pay double or triple for a phone that has all the opensource and privacy goals but also competes in performance and build so it can be my daily driver. I realize that we also want open standards and…
Well, it works fine as a phone. With Mobian it is stable enough for me to be a daily driver. When I need performance I usually turn to real computers or specialized gadgets.
I guess with the current state of even simple static website/apps we seem to often need performance. I hadn't even thought about compatibility of the web browser. Might any WebKit based browser (with user-agent overrides) be close enough?
Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder
#189I personally think that the effort to create open source phones is the single most important technology project going on out there. We have open source browsers, we have open source social apps, but we definitely do not have open source phones. Phones that can be truly owned and controlled by users will reshape the privacy discourse, from one of complaining and legal coercion, to one of choices and markets.
Hm, I'd say the mRNA COVID vaccines are probably a more important technology project at the moment. Realistically, most people don't actually care about the ideological purity of their phone, and the ones who do certainly don't have the time to personally audit the source of every dependency they install. So it's not exactly solving any practical problems, even more so since any internet connected device is at the mercy of our shared BGP systems and to a lesser extent DNS. Like it or not, you're part of a community and you can't solve every social problem with technology (or markets, for that matter)!
Re: PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder
#190I ordered one and then realized the GPU is from 2008, doesn't even support OpenGL ES 3!!! Trying to cancel the order, even if supporting the initiative would be nice, my 3D MMO needs OpenGL ES 3!
This one supports OpenGL ES 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 .
Not yet with the open driver though. But yeah, its GPU is much more performant and capable of GLES 3, which the etnaviv driver aims to support at some point.