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PinePhone Pro Announced

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Re: PinePhone Pro Announced

#311

Post by zozbot234 »

md8z wrote: post #285
josteink wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I looked into sxmo and I think it falls clearly into the "clever hack" category and not in the "actually usable" category. Agree to disagree? Also I think you’re being somewhat disingenuous or uncharitable here. sxmo has clearly had a unique vision for mobile Linux for power users and executed on just that. All core phone functionality is available through regular, composable shell-scripts. And all major events can…

I honestly do not see what is so remarkable about it. It just never seemed to me like a unique vision but instead an effort to adapt some existing X11 tools to a mobile workflow. Which is a fine thing to do if you like those tools, but that's different from having some grand new vision. To elaborate: The use of a tiling window manager with explicit workspaces doesn't really make sense to me on a phone since every app…

> I mean, come on, you have that big nice touchscreen and you're not going to use it?

The best case with a desktop-like environment like sxmo is to just reuse the touchscreen digitizer as a plain old touchpad, with some tweak for other gestures (e.g. tap for clicking, double tap for dragging). AIUI, this is how mobile clients for VNC and RDP work already, so enabling this on the mobile desktop itself would be quite straightforward.

Re: PinePhone Pro Announced

#312

Post by 3836293648 »

dylan604 wrote: post #246
no_time wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the complexity of our every day devices increase, less and less people are capable of contributing anything meaningful to an OS like Linux, let alone in their free time. It also doesn't help that the abundance of high level languages discourages learning about computer internals in younger generations. Or that we indeed became softies lol.

Those harder classes used to be referred to as weed out courses. Incoming class of 100+ students to Assembler. After 2 weeks, 60%+ drop the class.

I'm currently TA:ing my uni's Introductory Computer Engineering class (from logic gates to assembly). It's not as much of a weed out class as you'd think and yes, it's the first class they take, along side some introductory python. Most of them do seem to hate the assembly part though personally I found the part where you have to actually make an instruction to be much harder when I had to take this class

Re: PinePhone Pro Announced

#313

Post by md8z »

zozbot234 wrote: post #311
md8z wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly do not see what is so remarkable about it. It just never seemed to me like a unique vision but instead an effort to adapt some existing X11 tools to a mobile workflow. Which is a fine thing to do if you like those tools, but that's different from having some grand new vision. To elaborate: The use of a tiling window manager with explicit workspaces doesn't really make sense to me on a phone since every app…

> I mean, come on, you have that big nice touchscreen and you're not going to use it? The best case with a desktop-like environment like sxmo is to just reuse the touchscreen digitizer as a plain old touchpad, with some tweak for other gestures (e.g. tap for clicking, double tap for dragging). AIUI, this is how mobile clients for VNC and RDP work already, so enabling this on the mobile desktop itself would be quite s…

I don't know, that just seems to me to defeat the purpose of having a touchscreen. I've tried to use those mobile VNC clients and the experience is really bad. It's something I would use if I really had to access some important files on my desktop, but I wouldn't try to log in to my desktop with a mobile VNC client every day just to do work.

Re: PinePhone Pro Announced

#314

Post by blendergeek »

hutzlibu wrote: post #195
131012 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A basic but very important question: can it phone and send/receive text message reliably? Smartphones are so bloated with functionalities, it seems nobody ever talks about that. I don't see the answer on the website.

"A basic but very important question: can it phone and send/receive text message reliably" Half a year ago, when I looked into it, the answer was a clear: no. And there were not many things that did work reliable, without frequent freezes and crashes. I doubt that fundamentally changed, so if you are looking for stability and reliability right now, than better look somewhere else. This project is about to get to such…

> Half a year ago, when I looked into it, the answer was a clear: no. And there were not many things that did work reliable, without frequent freezes and crashes.

It's gotten much better since then. Now phone calls are reliable. If you install and configure the upcoming MMS support, messages work reliably.

Most of the freezes and crashes have also been ironed out.

Source: daily driving postmarketOS with Phosh

> I doubt that fundamentally changed, so if you are looking for stability and reliability right now, than better look somewhere else.

I agree that full stability is a work in progress. But so much progress has been made in the last year that it feels almost like a different OS.

I can't wait to receive my Pinephone Pro!

Re: PinePhone Pro Announced

#315

Post by seba_dos1 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #224
djent wrote: post #163

It is frustrating to me that despite the blunt verbiage about it being a beta device for software and hardware developers, people even here are griping about it being not ready for everyday use. If a free and open-source mobile operating system is missing software support for a feature you want, please contribute to its development.

Unfortunately I'm fully booked, and would gladly pay an extra hundred or two for someone else to do it. Not clear on who that is yet.

I happen to work for a company that employs a team of people to do just that, which allows me and others to work on mobile GNU/Linux ecosystem full-time. It's called Purism, and the product that pays for it is called Librem 5.

Re: PinePhone Pro Announced

#316

Post by ziml77 »

belval wrote: post #7

I curious about the opinion of HN on the absence of 1080p (it's still 720p). Specially this part of the blog post: > The decision to maintain the original PinePhone’s screen resolution of 1440×720 was made early on; higher resolution panels consume more power and increase SoC’s load, resulting in shorter battery life and higher average thermals. A few extra pixels aren’t worth it.[1] While I understand the point they…

I think modern phones have gotten absurd with their resolutions and that 1440x720 is plenty for a 6 inch screen. That's 268ppi, which is denser than most non-phone screens.

I want more devices to use sane resolutions so I'm not burning through battery for little benefit. One of the reasons that my laptop is a MacBook Pro 16" is because I think 1080p is too low at that size and 4K is too high. Apple is one of the few companies that uses a screen resolution in between those.

Re: PinePhone Pro Announced

#317

Post by username190 »

zeta0134 wrote: post #252
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #119

It has a Quectel EG25-G modem. I've not used this particular device, but I have used Quectel GNSS modules, and they've been a surprisingly helpful company to work with. I'm a nobody, and working with Sony, Trimble, or ublox has been an exercise in frustration; you have to convince a salesperson that you're a big company and you can sell thousands of devices in order to just read the datasheet. This one does have some…

My biggest question is, if I buy this phone today, with AT&T allow it on their network? My gut says no, they've been brandishing an ugly whitelist around for their big LTE push in February...

Nope, even before February they won't let you use the device, unfortunately. They're shutting down "incompatible" (non-whitelisted) devices and shipping out anything from $50 to used flagship replacements (pre-activated, so as soon as you receive the new one, your existing one will be shut off).

Unfortunately T-Mobile isn't a great option for this phone either, because the phone lacks band 71 (T-Mobile's only nationwide low-band). It may work well in some areas, but have no coverage in others. Verizon has a sort of pseudo-whitelist; you probably will have to activate a whitelisted phone and then swap the SIM, but it may work.

https://www.att.com/idpassets/images/support/wireless/Device...

Re: PinePhone Pro Announced

#318

Post by seba_dos1 »

ghoward wrote: post #178

Mini Ask HN: The comments here seem to say that PinePhone and friends are not ready to be daily drivers or even occasional drivers. I think that's fine. However, I do want to support these people and their work. I also need an ARM machine to do tests on (for portability of software and such), so I'm thinking of buying this Pro version. Yes, I'll spend a lot more than I need to, but I really want to support them. So q…

I wouldn't compile things on the PinePhone because of its performance, but I do it just fine on the Librem 5, so I imagine PinePhone Pro should be fine too as long as it doesn't excessively thermal throttle (it may be tricky to achieve that though).

Re: PinePhone Pro Announced

#319

Post by sieabah »

loser777 wrote: post #262
djent wrote: post #163

It is frustrating to me that despite the blunt verbiage about it being a beta device for software and hardware developers, people even here are griping about it being not ready for everyday use. If a free and open-source mobile operating system is missing software support for a feature you want, please contribute to its development.

I bought a "beta edition" regular PinePhone and it seemed anything but "beta." Random crashes after boot every 30 seconds, even with "workarounds" such as patching the memory frequency (really?). This may have been a hardware defect but one of the nice things about calling everything a "beta" as an excuse for the flakiness I'll never know. It was essentially a paperweight, not something that would enable me to become…

Sounds like a beta to me. Perhaps you're thinking of a release candidate?

Re: PinePhone Pro Announced

#320

Post by wott »

nightski wrote: post #126

Nokia is re-releasing their 6310 phone this year and honestly I'm more tempted to go down that path at this point. Just a regular, reliable phone. The most painful thing for me at this point will probably be authenticator apps. That said the pine phone looks really cool and I hope they succeed. Mobile Linux is going to be such a large uphill battle without huge investments. But with Google/Apple having compensation p…

Unfortunately Nokia is just a brand now, in the hands of a Chinese company which sells rather quickly and cheaply developed products. The phones which are sold under this brand are often buggy and never updated. Some run Series 30+, some run KaiOS, some run Android derivatives.

The landscape of dumb/features phones is worse now than it was 10 years ago, which is a pity. For example, jut imagine that it is hard these days to get one which does predictive typing right... or that the cameras are worse than 10 years ago.

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