PinePhone Review

&quot;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.&quot;<p>I think he greatly underestimates the number of people with the interest and ability to do this kind of work. If it&#x27;s easily available, I&#x27;ll probably get one and hack on it, and maybe contribute to some projects. And I&#x27;m far from something special or unusual.

&quot;Of course, no one wants to place phone calls by typing a lengthy command into their terminal&quot;<p>Are you kidding ? That is <i>all I&#x27;ve ever wanted to do</i>.<p>I have been asking, casually, for a &quot;gnu-phoneutils&quot; package for several years that would give us a small phone tooling suite ...<p>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 ...

That&#x27;s extremely exciting news! Working LTE? No blobs? &quot;Holy shit!&quot; is an understatement.<p>Tangentially, what&#x27;s an appropriate entry point for a reasonably capable C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;Unix systems programmer without prior mobile guts experience interested in working on software for this platform? I&#x27;m kind of assuming that&#x27;d be &quot;grab a compatible device, clone postmarket, rtfm&quot; but confirmation&#x2F;pointers would be appreciated.

Drew (Or sircmpwn? Sorry I don&#x27;t know how you prefer to be called) since I know you&#x27;re on here, if I may ask:<p>- What provider are you using?<p>- Is it VoLTE that is working, or does it drop down to 3g for calls?<p>- Does SMS work in LTE mode or do you have to drop it down to 3g?<p>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&#x2F;MMS with LTE, or WiFi Calling, you have to install proprietary blobs.<p>EDIT: I should add the Librem 5 Birch has LTE data on T-mobile, but I have to drop to 3G to get SMS and phone call functionality, and MMS is additionally non-functional at all on T-Mobile. Meant to post that for the Librem 5.

It&#x27;s cool that he&#x27;s writing his own shell but I think that Ubuntu Touch as maintained by Ubports is worth a mention as it&#x27;s going to be one of the available options for the Pine Phone.<p>The UI is slick and well developed. The app ecosystem isn&#x27;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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open-store.io&#x2F;?sort=-updated_date&amp;type=app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open-store.io&#x2F;?sort=-updated_date&amp;type=app</a><p>HN readers might like to note that there is also an established developer community and resources like documentation.<p>Well worth a look if you&#x27;re thinking of getting a Pinephone, and &#x2F; or developing a anything for it.

IMO, Librem5 and PinePhone are the most exciting news of this decade w.r.t mobile ecosystem for hackers, tinkerers, enthusiasts.<p>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.<p>My only wish is that these project become commercially sustainable and attractive enough for the major smartphone brands to join open-source party to make a dent in the Appstore&#x2F;Playstore duopoly.<p>Edit: Monoploy-&gt;Duopoly.

I pre-ordered a braveheart and cannot wait to start contributing code to make mobile Linux more usable! Of course it&#x27;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)!

I&#x27;m very enthusiastic about this device and have ordered the Brave Heart addition. I really like the price point of $150. It makes it pretty easy for casual developers to pick one up and should aid with getting new software written for it.<p>I&#x27;m sure the Librem 5 is also very nice, but it&#x27;s higher price makes it much less accessible.

As long as I can run Firefox on it, and it got a micro-SIM, I&#x27;m good. There&#x27;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).<p>I still wish FirefoxOS would have come to live..

Maybe it could be called a 3G modem platform instead of a phone.<p>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.

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?<p>I also yearn for a FOSS&#x2F;Linux phone, and it feels like we’re getting closer, bit I feel like the author is fooling themself a bit.

God, I want to mess around with one of these so, so, sooo badly. But with a 14 month-old toddling around the house it would probably end up just sitting, untouched, for a indeterminate amount of time. But still...

Now if they’d create an iPhone SE sized one... I’d have enough passion to figure out how to run Linux on it ;)

Would be super cool to build a web based distribution like Firefox OS for this.

Looks pretty sweet, the review is encouraging. It is nice to see no blogs, very nice. I ordered the Braveheart edition, the moment they were available. I am pretty excited about the possibly keyboard accessory talked about in the latest blog post from pine64.

I want that touch-drag done yesterday!<p>Or at least the latency in half.<p>Which parts of the UI&#x2F;hardware stack are the culprits here?<p>I want some butts[1]!<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=AS9j_-mqSWc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=AS9j_-mqSWc</a>

Can python be used to make an &quot;app&quot;?

Why do these things (pine, librem) have so much trouble producing audio? It seems like that would have been one of the first things to have got working.

My concerns are: resting ram usage, could I decrease if I could run like a tiling manager(with some main buttons).<p>And can it run on virgin mobile&#x2F;cheap networks like that<p>edit: holy crap this sway thing may be the i3 hmm, next question would be can you attach it to a big monitor + keyboard&#x2F;mouse through the USB C

&gt; rumor has it that a call has successfully been placed<p>This has been my perception of Linux in general.

Can someone explain to me why Purism has so much trouble making the Librem 5 when the PinePhone exists?<p>Purism has had so many pre orders and the PinePhone only costs $149 but with that budget can&#x27;t make the Librem.<p>What is it that makes it so difficult?

I had a neo freerunner and the excitement behind this post is similar to how I felt back then. It&#x27;s just really depressing that it&#x27;s a decade later and the realities of making an open phone is still... difficult.

Could someone who knows say how this compares to the Sony Xperia running Jolla &#x2F; Sailfish? I guess that Jolla contains some binary blobs in the kernel still whereas this is fully free.

Hey Drew: I have a suggestion for sway&#x2F;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&#x27;d see so much innovation on both desktop &amp; mobile.

Good opportunity to use Flutter and build apps for that :)

I wish I could use that dream phone on Xfinity&#x2F;Comcast mobile, but even if they use Verizon tower, they block most phones that are Verizon-compatible... they only allow BYOD if you have an iPhone, Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel.<p>I have a phone that isn&#x27;t supposed to work with Comcast mobile, but 4g works for about 30 minutes if I reboot... I wonder if it would be the same with this phone.

Will this work with US carriers? I am not clear on whether there are limitations imposed by carriers to only allow &quot;certified&quot; phones.

I&#x27;m very impressed that they managed to ship at all.<p>Commercial enterprises with such small budgets flip very often.