PinePhone Review • Hacker News Board

Re: PinePhone Review

#71

Post by Abishek_Muthian » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:16 AM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #69

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #66

IMO, Librem5 and PinePhone are the most exciting news of this decade w.r.t mobile ecosystem for hackers, tinkerers, enthusiasts. Librem5 stuck to its security, privacy first agenda and managed to build a phone with PC grade hardware. PinePhone stuck to its affordability first agenda, bringing a Linux capable smartphone hardware to the masses. My only wish is that these project become commercially sustainable and attr…

I think Windows Mobile gave up just prior to the best chance of breaking the duopoly: PWAs. Most app developers will never want to support a half a dozen phone OSes. The solution will inevitably, eventually, be the web.

I'm not sure how much effort went into supporting PWAs for Windows Phone, I used to develop for that ecosystem during 8.x and the browser was a mess; cordova apps for WP required specific hacks to basic elements such as header, footer etc.

Besides, they where making good progress with supporting android apps in WP with 'Project Astoria' and iOS apps with 'Project islandwood'; both of those were pulled off abruptly. There was even a rumour in the WP community at that point that Project Astoria became too good that MS brass worried that native WP development may go extinct.

Btw, recently german WP enthusiasts managed to get Project Astoria working on several WP phones[1].

[1]https://windowsunited.de/so-koennt-ihr-jede-beliebige-androi...

Re: PinePhone Review

#72

Post by ge96 » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:16 AM UTC

My concerns are: resting ram usage, could I decrease if I could run like a tiling manager(with some main buttons).

And can it run on virgin mobile/cheap networks like that

edit: holy crap this sway thing may be the i3 hmm, next question would be can you attach it to a big monitor + keyboard/mouse through the USB C

Re: PinePhone Review

#73

Post by curioussavage » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:18 AM UTC

ohiovr wrote: post #3

Can python be used to make an "app"?

I have a couple gtk apps in progress written in python for phones using purism's libhandy. gnome builder makes it pretty darn easy, though Gtk's docs could use some love.

Re: PinePhone Review

#74

Post by Conan_Kudo » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:19 AM UTC

kop316 wrote: post #8

livueta wrote: post #5

That's extremely exciting news! Working LTE? No blobs? "Holy shit!" is an understatement. Tangentially, what's an appropriate entry point for a reasonably capable C/C++/Unix systems programmer without prior mobile guts experience interested in working on software for this platform? I'm kind of assuming that'd be "grab a compatible device, clone postmarket, rtfm" but confirmation/pointers would be appreciated.

I hate to temper your excitement a little bit (I am excited too!), but I am not a bit surprised that LTE data works. Calling and SMS/MMS over LTE (for T-Mobile USA) are two things that at least that as of today, you need proprietary libraries to have it function on Android, and likely don't work on the Pinephone. I strongly suspect that other USA carriers will have the same issue (I say that because there are additio…

T-Mobile USA's system is bog-standard IMS with RCS extensions. There are a few open source client stacks that support this, notably Doubango's. The trick is writing a frontend that uses regular Linux GUI libraries. As far as I know, nobody has done that yet...

Re: PinePhone Review

#75

Post by ge96 » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:20 AM UTC

dahfizz wrote: post #46

grizzles wrote: post #44

Hey Drew: I have a suggestion for sway/mobile. How about a simple windowmanager that shows a webview on screen and that exports a simple js api for window operations like { min,max,restore,setxy } so that frontend guys could make their own window managers. I think we'd see so much innovation on both desktop & mobile.

I've never seen something more web-dev than asking someone else to do this much work for you so that you don't have to learn a new language. I don't want the "innovation" of having awful web ui on my desktop.

> I've never seen something more web-dev

ha oh man

Re: PinePhone Review

#76

Post by curioussavage » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:39 AM UTC

miohtama wrote: post #56

Maybe it could be called a 3G modem platform instead of a phone. To write UI software for a modern phone takes 150+ full time engineers in my experience. Only few organisations have this capability and this is why these things will never be phones people use.

150+ full time engineers!! no way...

purism already did it with a handful. Their new shell has a great design in my opinion and it runs ok. I'm not a fan of plasma mobile but it seems ok too. The hard part it seems to me is the layers below the actual UI, gpu support, energy consumption etc.

I'm confident these shells will get to the point where they are maybe better for the average phone user than desktop linux shells are for the average desktop user, mostly because reasonable phone UI patterns are more narrowly defined.

I'll bet apps support and camera quality will remain bigger deal killers after the shells mature some more.

Re: PinePhone Review

#77

Post by connorgutman » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:52 AM UTC

I pre-ordered a braveheart and cannot wait to start contributing code to make mobile Linux more usable! Of course it's not the right phone for many people yet, but what the Pinephone symbolizes is the first affordable and (hopefully) widely available Linux phone. What made me pull the trigger is that, unlike others such as Librem, Pine64 seems to be taking a similar approach to the Raspberry Pi. Instead of reinventing the wheel and forcing users into custom software like Librem has done with Phosh, Pine64 is building a launchpad for existing projects such as PostmarketOS, Plasma Mobile, Manjaro ARM, UBports, and others to grow their visions. If you build it, they will come (and hopefully submit pull requests)!

Re: PinePhone Review

#78

Post by aidenn0 » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:52 AM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #61

kop316 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to temper your excitement a little bit (I am excited too!), but I am not a bit surprised that LTE data works. Calling and SMS/MMS over LTE (for T-Mobile USA) are two things that at least that as of today, you need proprietary libraries to have it function on Android, and likely don't work on the Pinephone. I strongly suspect that other USA carriers will have the same issue (I say that because there are additio…

Could you just bypass that and use VOIP?

VOIP over 3g is terrible, and over LTE it's only slightly better. Latency and jitter are both very high, which makes it somewhat hostile to VOIP.

Re: PinePhone Review

#79

Post by smcleod » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 6:02 AM UTC

swiley wrote: post #34

kop316 wrote: post #6

Drew (Or sircmpwn? Sorry I don't know how you prefer to be called) since I know you're on here, if I may ask: - What provider are you using? - Is it VoLTE that is working, or does it drop down to 3g for calls? - Does SMS work in LTE mode or do you have to drop it down to 3g? I have a Librem 5 birch, and from my experience in rolling my own Android AOSP version, that to get T-mobile to work with VoLTE, SMS/MMS with LT…

Honestly I'd be happy with just 2g and no mms at this point.

2g was decommissioned quite some time ago in Australia and New Zealand, it was a right pain as it ate into the spectrum and slowed down LTE

Re: PinePhone Review

#80

Post by root_axis » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 6:07 AM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #78

cortesoft wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you just bypass that and use VOIP?

VOIP over 3g is terrible, and over LTE it's only slightly better. Latency and jitter are both very high, which makes it somewhat hostile to VOIP.

VOIP over LTE has been rock solid in my experience with T-Mobile on the east coast. I regularly get on (hands-free) VOIP Zoom calls during my 20 mile commute and almost never have any latency or packet loss issues.