251–260 of 268 posts
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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 i…
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> 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 YouTu…
Because the number of potential developers on this platform is at least an order of magnitude bigger than all Windows Mobile developers on this planet. Probably more. Developers also that happen to be the first users as well, an aspect very different from the one Windows Mobile had to struggle into. If ths thing turns out as interesting as it promises there would be hundreds thousands of people willing to work on var…
Why? Where do these potential devs suddenly come from? Just fro the fact it's a FOSS phone? Looking at how Linux has struggled for years (and is still struggling) to get decent software, your premise seems broken.
> If ths thing turns out as interesting as it promises there would be hundreds thousands of people willing to work on various tasks to bring it on par with other platforms.
Why would they? Why would there be hundreds of thousands of such people? Especially considering that the vast majority of software is commercial software that needs users.
Users do not flock to something just because developers do.
> It will start as a community toy, then one day, possibly after the 2nd or 3rd model
And then you list dozens of things each of which has a very low probability of happening. And then those improbabilities compound.
> For some people losing FB/TW or GMaps could be too much, but others wouldn't care. It will slowly but steadily gain a good mostly technical userbase.
You underestimate the numbers in this "mostly technical userbase". It's not the first phone to cater to a "mostly technical userbase". None of these phones survived past a first iteration. Somehow, no thought is given to why these projects failed. But the new one will surely become popular, will have multiple iterations and a good user base.
Yeah, sure.
The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results
"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…
There's a program called "cli-framework" for commandline interaction; it opens a Python terminal with a library that wraps the DBus API. I've not used the commandline for calls, but I have used it to read and delete SMS (when I'm too lazy to go and pick up the handset, so I SSH into it instead ;) ).
One project I've not gotten round to yet is an answering machine, so calls are immediately answered and audible (via headset), and I can choose whether or not to "pick up". This looks like it would be easy enough with the freesmartphone.org API, some Python and GTK+.
From what I can tell, this isn't possible on Android due to the API not allowing access to calls. Symbian allowed it, and it seems to have a few answering machine apps.
It's cool that he's writing his own shell but I think that Ubuntu Touch as maintained by Ubports is worth a mention as it's going to be one of the available options for the Pine Phone. The UI is slick and well developed. The app ecosystem isn't amazing but you get a browser, choice of Telegram clients, Signal client etc. You can get an idea of the range of apps here https://open-store.io/?sort=-updated_date&type=app…
Except that the browser on UBT is bare-bones, allows no extension and has virtually no useful option. Ubuntu Touch could be almost be a usable system if it has a good enough browser, a good enough email client and a good enough chat application. It has none of them.
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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" rath…
I am now considering purchasing a Pine Phone and the cost is definitely motivating. I only wish that the PinePhone had hardware kill switches like the Librem 5 has.
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That's my assumption as well, I was just curious. Their latest post indicates that they are wokring on VoLTE: https://www.pine64.org/2019/12/05/december-update-thank-you-...
Maybe they want to support it so that carriers could support it?
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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" rath…
> This, and the cost, is why I opted to go with Pine Phone over Purism Librem 5 I am now considering purchasing a Pine Phone and the cost is definitely motivating. I only wish that the PinePhone had hardware kill switches like the Librem 5 has.
PP: modem, WiFi, microphones, rear camera, front camera
L5: modem, WiFi, cameras+audio
Check out this comparison by Martijn Braam, a developer of postmarketOS: https://tuxphones.com/yet-another-librem-5-and-pinephone-lin...
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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…