61–70 of 139 posts
I have og and Pro. One thing I wonder about is can the popular apps be made legally in an open source way, do you have to get the companies to make a Linux app for PP/PPP. This is with regard to get mass adoption.
My wife recently bought me a Pinephone Pro as a present. I liked the idea, but in practice I still haven't managed to use it because I'm stuck with basic problems. E.g., the battery wouldn't charge in the phone. I bought an external charger, and this seems fine, but ideally I'd like a backup battery so that I can charge one while I use the other. But pine64 batteries have been out of stock for ages. Their wiki says "…
Humans are very adaptable just like animals. Put us to live with pigs and in less than a week we would be fine. Give us a PinePhone and we would be ok in a week or two. It would become "the new normal". In the end, you can take photos, run apps, develop shit, make calls, send text messages. It's just like switching between Android and iPhone and back again. Something that many of us have done at least once. Am I down…
Having no WhatsApp, no Spotify, no banking app, no Apple Pay or NFC payments, no Widevine so no Netflix and so on is making using Linux on the phone very difficult for both Android and iOS users unless they REALLY want to
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Possibly the general audience isn't interested in the benefits of an open phone. I remember a HN comment where a phone manufacturer said making relationships with suppliers was almost impossible without a decent sized market segment.
So catch-22. No market, no manufacturing, and no manufacturing because no market. Ouch.
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I agree with your summary. I enjoy PinePhone and Mobile Linux a lot, but if someone hates tinkering (or has no time for it) and wants a seamless experience, they should just get a different device. That said, it does not have to be a lot of work for basic functionality these days in my experience - e.g. postmarketOS 22.06 is a solid base.
Thanks for the reply and for the work you put into Mobile Linux! I enjoy (a moderate amount of) tinkering and use Linux on both my work and home PCs, but my requirements for a phone are a bit more demanding - a phone has to be a device which I can depend on to work e.g. when I get a call, if I forget to charge it overnight, when I need to quickly scan a QR code to access some website on the go etc. So I'm afraid I'm…
Can you use whatsapp on a pinephone? I know there's web whatsapp but you need to sign into that with a native app. Honestly the browser, google maps (which works in the browser), whatsapp, SMS, phone calls, alarm, stop watch, camera... that's really about all I use on a phone. If I can find a linux device to switch that does that, I'll switch in a heartbeat. Phones are the least pleasant part of my "digital life" bec…
From what I've read online the SoC is quite slow compared to most modern smart phones so your mileage may vary. Sadly, the mobile phone market is as closed down as ever, making it very challenging to get any kind of open source system to get calls or texts. There's a reason they shoved an external chip in there!
If you want an open, somewhat limited but usable smartphone experience, check out Sailfish. They've been in the mobile phone market for years and their original base in Android makes the OS compatible with quite a few devices with decent SoCs.
Personally, I'm waiting for the day you can hack PostmarketOS onto a phone and just use it as a phone, but that's not going to happen any time soon on closed hardware.
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I suspect this is due to incoming messages waking up the cellular modem, but the host being unable to recognize them. Either spurious, or dropped.
It's a subtle problem of tradeoffs. How do you keep the system aware of incoming messages when you'd like to save as much battery life as possible?
One problematic issue I can see the Pinephone have in regards to this is that there's no unified push service that works for all apps. Google has forced everyone on Android to use their push service and it's terribly restrictive for application development but over the years this has also solved a lot of battery life issues. Apps holding open connections of their own just to see if there are any notifications is fine on desktops but it's a challenge open platforms will need to solve somehow.
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It's a subtle problem of tradeoffs. How do you keep the system aware of incoming messages when you'd like to save as much battery life as possible?
This is a problem Android, which is also Linux-based, has already solved. You can wake up a process (on a power efficient core, if available) without waking up the screen. One problematic issue I can see the Pinephone have in regards to this is that there's no unified push service that works for all apps. Google has forced everyone on Android to use their push service and it's terribly restrictive for application dev…
I don't think that's the problem. It would not be that hard to have system-wide settings to control which applications can apply for background updates.
My (limited) understanding is that the difficulty resides in hardware support for sleep/low-power and the many different implementations from every hardware vendor. Note that it's also a problem on desktops/laptops (with S3 and related techs) even on Windows using official firmware/drivers.
If you have more detailed reads, please share :)
Humans are very adaptable just like animals. Put us to live with pigs and in less than a week we would be fine. Give us a PinePhone and we would be ok in a week or two. It would become "the new normal". In the end, you can take photos, run apps, develop shit, make calls, send text messages. It's just like switching between Android and iPhone and back again. Something that many of us have done at least once. Am I down…
For many people, having to switch from iMessage is keeping them on iOS and would not even consider Android. Having no WhatsApp, no Spotify, no banking app, no Apple Pay or NFC payments, no Widevine so no Netflix and so on is making using Linux on the phone very difficult for both Android and iOS users unless they REALLY want to
So until things improve and there are more alternatives to what you mentioned, this won't be a mainstream device. And that's fine. We should celebrate where we are today compared to a few years ago.
"I don't use it as a daily driver" (from the article)