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PinePhone Review

drewdevault.com

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Re: PinePhone Review

#191

Post by rasvj »

thekyle wrote: post #124
dmitriid wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You greatly overestimate the number of users who care about how closed or how open an ecosystem is. If the user can't interact with their bank, whatchu YouTube, talk to their friends and parents over Snapchat or Skype, call Uber, play Spotify, etc etc etc, it doesn't matter in the least if your phone is 100% open source. Microsoft had sunk billions into trying to get the ecosystem off the ground. What makes you think…

> If the user can't interact with their bank, whatchu YouTube, talk to their friends and parents over Snapchat or Skype, call Uber, play Spotify, etc etc etc, it doesn't matter in the least if your phone is 100% open source. Most of this should be available on the PinePhone at launch (albeit not as nicely as on Android). Bank - should have a website (and if they don't have a website they most likely don't have an app…

No whatsapp = dead in the water in Europe.

Re: PinePhone Review

#192

Post by dzypa »

thekyle wrote: post #124
dmitriid wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You greatly overestimate the number of users who care about how closed or how open an ecosystem is. If the user can't interact with their bank, whatchu YouTube, talk to their friends and parents over Snapchat or Skype, call Uber, play Spotify, etc etc etc, it doesn't matter in the least if your phone is 100% open source. Microsoft had sunk billions into trying to get the ecosystem off the ground. What makes you think…

> If the user can't interact with their bank, whatchu YouTube, talk to their friends and parents over Snapchat or Skype, call Uber, play Spotify, etc etc etc, it doesn't matter in the least if your phone is 100% open source. Most of this should be available on the PinePhone at launch (albeit not as nicely as on Android). Bank - should have a website (and if they don't have a website they most likely don't have an app…

No whatsapp = dead in the water in Europe.

Re: PinePhone Review

#193

Post by dzypa »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #133
Mashimo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got one. Never really used it. It was not reliable.

Got one. Used it for a few years. It was amazing (though not without its quirks of course).

For most people "quirks" are unacceptable in their mobile phones. Normally one can't afford to lose a call or to have the maps application crash when you're trying to get around.

Re: PinePhone Review

#194

Post by valvar »

dmitriid wrote: post #140
valvar wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The target audience isn't people who need to use Skype, Snapchat, or Uber. But I'm sure it will be possible to run some of those android apps through anbox. Spotify has a Linux client, and for YouTube there's the FreeTube client, which actually protects users' integrity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21834172

What's your point? They are very aware that they are targeting a niche market.

Re: PinePhone Review

#195

Post by MrRadar »

ddevault wrote: post #162
neiman wrote: post #88

As long as I can run Firefox on it, and it got a micro-SIM, I'm good. There's a web alternative for most apps I use, where besides that I just need a tiny computer in my pocket with constant connection to the internet (hence, micro-SIM). I still wish FirefoxOS would have come to live..

I use Firefox (desktop) on mine and it works quite well, and has good performance. I wonder if it can be configured to be a bit more mobile-friendly OOTB, maybe with some about:config flags?

There's a meta-bug on Bugzilla for adding a mobile-style frontend to desktop Firefox for the Librem 5 and Pinephone: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1579348 Not a lot of work has been done since hardware has been scarce so it has not been a high priority.

Re: PinePhone Review

#196

Post by rsync »

"Of course, no one wants to place phone calls by typing a lengthy command into their terminal"

Are you kidding ? That is all I've ever wanted to do.

I have been asking, casually, for a "gnu-phoneutils" package for several years that would give us a small phone tooling suite ...

I have largely built this out myself with twilio and, in some ways, it is no longer necessary given that I have built my own little mini-telco inside of twilio, but still ...

Re: PinePhone Review

#197

Post by rsync »

rvense wrote: post #127
afandian wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do people without phones participate in society? I don't use a google account on my phone, so that means no App Store. I'm trying to one day get rid of my google account too. It doesn't cause me many issues in the UK though I can't use things like Uber, and that's no loss to me. How would I get on in Denmark?

There are a few things you cannot do. In some areas of Copenhagen you can't pay for parking without an app, I'm told (but I don't drive so I don't know for sure). The biggest mobile-only thing is an app called MobilePay which is used mostly for person-to-person transfers, and a lot of people don't use cash at all anymore. I am starting to see classified ads that specify "MobilePay only", although I guess you could us…

"There are a few things you cannot do. In some areas of Copenhagen you can't pay for parking without an app, I'm told (but I don't drive so I don't know for sure)."

What are the permissions granted to these apps ?

Do they, as I fear, "require" full access to all contacts, all photos, location data ... ?

Re: PinePhone Review

#198

Post by ColanR »

chc4 wrote: post #178
ColanR wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep thinking that we might take this opportunity of rebuilding an OS from the ground up to implement something like Plan 9. The usual adoption issue of drivers and apps seems irrelevant here. Fundamentally, its distributed nature would allow far greater integration between desktop and mobile hardware. Mobile + laptop + NAS would be so deeply integrated that they would better be considered a single computer with mu…

You might be interested in https://youtube.com/watch?v=LYPBAckCEQo

Yup, Inferno is one of the Plan 9 forks and that looks very close to what I'm imagining. Though it seems to be built on top of android.

Re: PinePhone Review

#199

Post by aidenn0 »

lunchables wrote: post #170
aidenn0 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on Tingb(mvno using the T-Mobile networj) and on the West coast. Both zoom and Skype are completely unusable for me.

LTE latency is more than adequate for VoIP, with RTT latency to the tower being around 25ms. Adding another 40, 60, whatever, internet latency for VoIP is still well within the realm of good call quality.

Fair enough. I must have a shitty network. I see 150-200ms pings through LTE with occasional spikes up to 500ms, and any VOIP is both poor quality and we end up talking over each other because of the latency.

Re: PinePhone Review

#200

Post by rsync »

scintill76 wrote: post #65
pabs3 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the baseband runs Linux (IIRC PinePhone uses a Quectel modem), it probably runs proprietary software for the full LTE/3G/2G stack. https://osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/

Is that really where the goalpost is though? I thought everyone accepted that the modem itself would always be proprietary, and that was OK as long as it had a killswitch and no ability to directly interfere with the main processor or RAM. (The mostly-userland stack to drive the modem to send SMS etc. would be open.) It seems right to me that the FCC et al shouldn't allow uncertified amateur radio firmwares.

"Is that really where the goalpost is though? I thought everyone accepted that the modem itself would always be proprietary, and that was OK as long as it had a killswitch and no ability to directly interfere with the main processor or RAM."

Most of the time when we speak about the baseband, we are talking about the telco network interface between your handset and the carrier ... and so it's tempting to think of the baseband as just some black-box modem that you can firewall yourself from.

However, the baseband processor also performs a number of real-time voice quality / noise cancelling / audio functions that really have nothing to do with the network interface, but are very important depending on how sensitive you are to call quality and things like echo, etc.

This is unfortunate because, like you, I would like to just wall of the baseband and use it as a modem and forget about it, but that perceptible difference in call-quality between "actual carrier" calls and VOIP calls is due to the baseband.

I believe that is all still true in the 2019 LTE era ...

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