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PinePhone Review

drewdevault.com

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Re: PinePhone Review

#201

Post by boomlinde »

hellotomyrars wrote: post #118

The phone he always wanted is a phone that basically doesn’t work at all? Like, not even as an equivalence to a typical smartphone, but even a dumb phone? I also yearn for a FOSS/Linux phone, and it feels like we’re getting closer, bit I feel like the author is fooling themself a bit.

> The phone he always wanted is a phone that basically doesn’t work at all?

I feel like it is intellectually dishonest to characterize the phone mainly as "not working" and question his decision on that basis. That's not the reason that he wants it. It's the prospect of helping build and eventually having a FOSS phone ecosystem that is the main draw.

> I also yearn for a FOSS/Linux phone, and it feels like we’re getting closer

Guess why. Is it because a) some driven developers buy this product long before it is generally useful to develop the software necessary to support a full-fledged FOSS phone, or b) because people like you are patiently waiting for that software to drop in your lap?

Re: PinePhone Review

#202

Post by [deleted] »

dqpb wrote: post #181
jcelerier wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I'm far from something special or unusual. from my experience, the "average" person (if not the majority) has trouble handling a TV remote

To be fair, TV remotes are terrible interfaces.

[deleted]

Re: PinePhone Review

#203

Post by jdillaaa »

rsync wrote: post #196

"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-tel…

Can you provide more info on this Twilio mini-telco? I’ve been working on something similar to work around the lack of well supported libraries for telephony

Re: PinePhone Review

#204

Post by swiley »

catchmeifyoucan wrote: post #49
swiley wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why at all bother when you can run normal GNU/Linux arm software?

Web might be the fastest and easiest way to build a gui without worrying about platform or codesharing (opinion). It also offers a massive community and easy customer acquisition when thinking about apps from a business perspective.

TK is definitely easier than the web. Also I thought you were talking from the perspective of the user, the web is absolutely not better for them for anything other than filling out forms (in which case you just need a web page and a normalized database, not an “app.”)

Re: PinePhone Review

#205

Post by thinkmassive »

ssivark wrote: post #29
monoideism wrote: post #15

"right now, there are very few people, perhaps only dozens, for whom this phone is the right phone, given the current level of software support." I think he greatly underestimates the number of people with the interest and ability to do this kind of work. If it's easily available, I'll probably get one and hack on it, and maybe contribute to some projects. And I'm far from something special or unusual.

The following sentence "I am not using it as my daily driver, and I won’t for some time." and "the right phone" make me think that the dozens refer to those who might use this as their singular phone device. I'm sure many more people can afford to splurge on such a device and either play with it, or even forget about it for that matter.

This is why I ordered the Brave Heart edition as soon as it was available. I'd rather get it in my hands quickly, customize the software to my liking, and if I have to buy a second device to resolve some hardware issues later this year then I'm still only out 1/4 the cost of a new iPhone, plus I have a backup device for development.

I prefer going into it with the expectation of it being a "developer experience" rather than a prepackaged end-to-end solution. This, and the cost, is why I opted to go with Pine Phone over Purism Librem 5.

Re: PinePhone Review

#206

Post by spurgu »

squarefoot wrote: post #184
spurgu wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! I am so sad to see that practically all mobile devices on the market right now are 5+ inches. I could even go with 5, which is considered "small" nowadays, but PinePhone and Librem5 are 5.95" and 5.7" respectively. Why did phablets become the norm, at least give us a choice... :(

Large screens are more usable, small screens are more portable. There's no way to have both unless we completely rethink the mobile platform itself moving away from the dream of having one big clunky jack of all trades, but rather as a group of devices, all interconnected (mesh PAN + shared storage) and equipped with the hardware they need for the task, so that one small screen device is used as a phone, a bigger one…

In my experience, having used smartphones since 2008 (Nokia N95, N900, then mostly Android since), I can confidently say that 4-5 inches is a sweet spot for usability/portability. Anything less than that becomes difficult to type on and larger than that obv improves readability but you can go up to 50 inches if you disregard portability and I haven't had a 5+ inch mobile that I haven't had problems with keeping put in my shorts pocket. And handling the phone with one hand gets increasingly more difficult when you go above 5. And I think I have slightly larger than average hands (good pianist fingers).

The idiocy is focusing on slim devices. Just make them a bit thicker if the chips/circuits don't fit otherwise (and increase battery life while at it).

And yeah this was more of a ramble, not directed at your post. But I agree. I already have an Amazfit Bip (~€60) with a 3-4 week battery life that I use solely to get notifications on my wrist instead of having to pick up my phone. A watch is completely usable for anything else than a passive reading device though (at least until speech-to-text or (some kind of) gestures makes leaps forward). If as you say the devices were more interconnected (Chromecast is a step in this direction, connecting screens/TV's) the form factor of one specific becomes less important.

But, since we don't have this now, why not give the consumer a choice? My main gripe is that everything is in the 5-6 range whereas a little while back (2-3 years?) you could find a broad range of smartphones between 4-6 inches. It's gone from 100/0 in 4" to 0/100. I would be fine to even have 20/80.

/rant

Re: PinePhone Review

#207

Post by dmitriid »

squarefoot wrote: post #174
dmitriid wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't it work for Windows Phones then?

Interesting point. I have seen some friends happily using Windows phones but most of them were/are either Microsoft employees or working mostly with Windows software, so I guess they needed the deepest integration with the Windows ecosystem, which is understandable. As for other users, it is possible that Windows phones had either some limitation compared to other platforms or they lacked the killer app that would ma…

> They probably should have copied or mocked a mainstream mobile interface, that is, offer something an user from either Android or iOS would not find alien to use, then offer something more, say free Office apps, then after the userbase had grown start to build the rest.

Why would the user base grow? The main problem Windows Phone had was the dearth of apps that users actually wanted. MS had to build their own YouTube client (and IIRC got into trouble with Google).

They've sunk billions into it: enticing developers, outright paying for the development of apps, creating apps on their own, spending huge amounts of money on advertisement (I remember at one point when half of popular TV shows featured Windows Phones). The result?

It did sell ~100 million phones in about 5 years and then discontinued the entire enterprise.

So, back to the original claim:

> Give FOSS phones the same media coverage of the iPhone, possibly including its ad induced reality distortion field, and they will sell like candies.

Why would it work for a FOSS phone when it didn't for MS?

Re: PinePhone Review

#208

Post by throw7 »

I had a neo freerunner and the excitement behind this post is similar to how I felt back then. It's just really depressing that it's a decade later and the realities of making an open phone is still... difficult.

Re: PinePhone Review

#209

Post by rsync »

jdillaaa wrote: post #203
rsync wrote: post #196

"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-tel…

Can you provide more info on this Twilio mini-telco? I’ve been working on something similar to work around the lack of well supported libraries for telephony

My phone uses a sim card from a verizon MVNO. I don't even know the phone number.

"My" phone number was provisioned, and has always lived, in Twilio.

I set up a simple call forward and SMS forward to my SIM number. When I land in a foreign country, I get a new sim card and just point the forwards to the new number. Easy.

I wrote a shell script that allows me to SMS from the command line from my phone number. So I can SMS people from an airplane even though my handset is off. If I lost my handset I could still SMS you.

It's also nice to have a proper date/time stamped SMS log that lives in /var/mail/sms ... I use this a lot.

My favorite thing about all of this is that I have finally removed voicemail from my life. Hint: you need to tell your carrier, with star-71, to forward to a "black hole" number at the end of your call sequence, otherwise verizon will jump in and say "the wireless blah blah voicemail box that is not set up blah blah ...". So my twilio number rings for X seconds (whatever I set the timeout to) but then the call progresses to verizon, but verizon has been instructed with star-71 command to forward calls to a second number I set up in twilio that does nothing but hang up. That's my "black hole" number and you can insert that into the end of a lot of workflows like this.

Calling has to be done with a voip app on your phone because, of course, you cannot call from your twilio number directly from your phone. Well, you could, if perhaps you called yourself and then set up some logic where you type in the phone number you really want and then twilio forwards you there, but I think it's easier to use a nice VOIP app ... I use groundwire, but whatever works.

I might try to formalize all of this and present it at Signal next year ... there are a lot of other neat things you can do ....

Re: PinePhone Review

#210

Post by dmitriid »

bluGill wrote: post #183
dmitriid wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't it work for Windows Phones then?

It was working, but Microsoft didn't have the patience to wait, and wasn't willing to be number 3 for a long time. If Microsoft had continued the project they could have continued to be a distant third place making enough money to keep the lights on in that division - but it would never be insanely profitable and they were not willing to settle for that. I don't know if they were right or not.

The market had already spoken by the time MS discontinued the project. Windows Phone reached a peak of about 3.5% of users and then started declining, quite rapidly.

Given that ~100% of money was going to the iOS and Android ecosystem, MS had no chance to retain even a few percent of the market: developers would not be interested in developing software for an obscure system that brings in no money, users would not be interested in a phone with little to no software.

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