Pinephone Keyboard Update

Very promising. Psion-killer?

I was considering getting one of these keyboards when they are available. I was actually looking forward to it. It would make typing texts way easier and the big battery compensating the weak one in the Pinephone would be great. It would probably be the main selling point for me. It would also make a nice protection for the phone.

However, I read someone today rightly pointing out that:

- the screen (and the notification led) would be hidden when the keyboard is closed, which won't help noticing new notifications.

- it might not be always convenient to use the phone on the go, holding the phone with one hand

- it would render making calls quite awkward

So now, I'm not sure anymore. It's probably fine to use as a PDA, not quite as a phone, and that's what I use the Pinephone for.

I think what I really need is a better battery and a case. A physical keyboard would be really good too, but not if it makes using the Pinephone as a phone harder than it is already. I gess I should buy a spare battery (since the Pinephone has a removable battery!) or a power tank, and a case.

Do you know if phones in general, and the Pinephone in particular, recognize that they are on battery and enable their energy-saving features while connected to a power tank? I would not expect them too, and this is a main reason I avoid them. That, and the fact that it seems incredibly inefficient that they charge their own batteries from the power tank, when we know that a battery gives back at best 50% of the power used to charge them.

At least I guess I could ask the Pinephone not to charge itself and to enable its power saving features by running a script, which would probably be good enough. I'd expect that to be hard to do on Android by the way.

6,000 MaH

With a Bluetooth headset i think it would be okay for calls, and infact the keyboard might make it much nicer for texting.

As for notifications: You can't see notifications from apps on the PinePhone anyways unless you disable suspend, as the crust suspend firmware only detects wakeup events from signals sent by the hardware. So while the modem can send a signal to wakeup the device when there's a call or text, and the RTC (Real Time Clock) can wakeup the Phone when there's a alarm going off, there's currently no solution for waking it up when say you have a new Telegram or Matrix message while in sleep. More than likely people will figure out a way to solve that in the future with custom wifi chip and modem firmware that can handle push server wakeup events.

With that said though, the 6,000 MaH battery this keyboard addon will have should make up for that. You could disable suspend and have all the apps constantly watching for new messages and sending notifications, and probably wont have to worry about battery life even still. This is exactly what i will be doing personally.

The only problem i forsee is how big and bulky this is, meaning it will probably not be feasible to use one handed, and it also will be heavy in a pocket.

As I understand it, the keyboard is a bottom half and a top case, which means that the seam (https://i.imgur.com/3uedtMo.jpg) is entirely in the control of the keyboard. If that is the case, why the the corner radii differ? It seems somewhat sloppy to have the edges meet at different places like that.