Librem 5 Evergreen vs. PinePhone (Part 2)

I'm not sure whether everything is right there regarding that Librem 5 unit - 40% of the battery eaten in 3 hours with screen off is way faster than what I see here on my phones (disclaimer: I work for Purism). None of my phones also get as hot as described, so that may be related. I'd be interested in seeing power consumption data (`tail -n+0 /sys/class/power_supply/*/uevent`) and thermal data (`gthcli`) in various idle states from that unit. I haven't done any exact battery tests recently, but from my experience I can easily reach screen off time of more than 10-15 hours and screen on time of 5-6 hours depending on what stays on, and the phone usually stays cool unless I leave it in bed under a blanket at which point it can get pretty hot after a few hours (but still not burning to touch).

Meta: with JavaScript disabled (or if it fails to load), your &lt;code&gt; elements are very badly styled because of the highlighter-rouge class on them, which per monokai.css makes them `display: block` (and other related styles designed only for blocks of code, not inline code). When the JavaScript runs, the rouge highlighting is <i>undone</i> by <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thatgeoguy.ca&#x2F;js&#x2F;prettifyCode.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thatgeoguy.ca&#x2F;js&#x2F;prettifyCode.js</a>, which clobbers the class attribute, seemingly by accident (the comment says it’s adding, but it’s replacing instead) or incomplete modification… thereby apparently inadvertently fixing the problem!<p>The ideal solution is probably either removing the rouge highlighter from inline code elements, or shuffling the only-for-blocks .highlighter-rouge styles in monokai.css to a new rule div.highlighter-rouge, since they’re not suitable for inline code elements.<p>(I’m mentioning this here because the author is actively involved in the thread and thus there’s a reasonable chance of it being fixed.)

&gt; I’m not testing voice, SMS, or MMS here. As far as I’ve heard from other sources, calls and SMS seem to be in working order. MMSd has (from what I’ve gathered, at least) been a large focus for many projects in the last six months. I try my best not to use MMS whenever possible, so I’m certainly a poor source of information if that’s a blocker for you to adopt one of these two devices.<p>In case anyone is curious about the state of Calls&#x2F;MMS&#x2F;SMS on the Pinephone&#x2F;Librem 5 (keep in mind this is very Phosh&#x2F;SXMO centric, so YMMV for KDE&#x2F;Ubuntu Touch):<p>- Calls work fine, but (on the Phosh stack) there is no way to get a notification about getting a voicemail. There is some work on getting Visual Voicemail to work (T-Mobile USA isn&#x27;t a problem, but other&#x27;s may require some tinkering with to figure out).<p>- SMS works fine on the Phosh stack (and most distros to my knowledge)<p>- MMS is supported from a backend perspective (through mmsd-tng, which I assume the author is referring to), but, to my knowledge, no chat application (i.e. Chatty on Phosh, KDE, SXMO, etc) supports it. There has been work to get the Phosh stack (i.e. Chatty) to support MMS, and I am hoping that can be completed sooner than later (the remaining work for chatty is UI integration). I think there is work to also get front end support for MMS into SXMO (at least the person who is working on it has bugged me a few times to ask how to integrate with mmsd-tng), and to my knowledge, there is no work on it in KDE.

&gt; ... this is all somewhat biased since if this was 2009 both of these phones would seem as if they’re the future. On the other hand it isn’t 2009 anymore, and these phones are here today.<p>This is interesting and something I hadn&#x27;t thought about. I have a PinePhone that I&#x27;ve been hacking around on for the past few months. If I had this phone a decade ago I would have been over the moon. I&#x27;d really like to make it my daily driver, but I simply can&#x27;t because of the experience I&#x27;m now accustomed to on modern smartphones. My future of being a happy hacker with a fully open-source Linux smartphone in my pocket still seems a few years away, but the future is bright.

I&#x27;m looking forward to someday trying a Librem 5 but it&#x27;s been 4 years since I backed the campaign and now I&#x27;ve been told that it will be at least October before mine ships. If anyone else is interested in the state of the art of Linux phones it looks like PinePhone is your only choice right now.

From the conclusion of this article:<p>&gt; In fact, while I’ve been generally impressed with the pace of improvements from all over I think that there are still some critical areas where the phones fall short. For the Librem 5, the battery life and thermals are definitely this device’s Achilles heel. For the Pinephone, I think the weakness of some of the hardware is problematic and isn’t something that most people would want to put up with.<p>It seems like hardware is the big gap here. It must be tough to innovate on hardware with low-volume niche devices, creating a chicken and egg dilemma for adoption. Are there any realistic options for these two phones to have more regular&#x2F;modern iterations of their hardware? Perhaps a partnership with some existing manufacturer that is struggling for relevance in the phone space like LG or Motorola?

Unless what&#x27;s discussed in the Anbox section of the article (how to run apps that people came to depend on, such as WhatsApp&#x2F;Telegram&#x2F;Signal) is properly addressed, most people wouldn&#x27;t even consider one of those phones.<p>We should remember that the late Blackberry phones did have Android app compatibility and still failed. Librem and PinePhone are not even at the starting point yet, which is unfortunate.

I find it unsettling that people make purchase recommendations solely based on the merit of the phones given purism contributed more patches to the Linux phone ecosystem.

This post inspired me to finally unbox the PinePhone Beta Edition I&#x27;ve had sitting on my desk for a couple months, thanks! Now just waiting for a microSD card to arrive, I didn&#x27;t have any laying around sadly.

The article says: &quot;As for encryption on the Pinephone, the only OS that currently makes it easy to enable is PostmarketOS&quot;. And this is false, as there is also an easy-to-use installer for Arch Linux ARM with full disk encryption: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dreemurrs-embedded&#x2F;archarm-mobile-fde-installer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dreemurrs-embedded&#x2F;archarm-mobile-fde-ins...</a>

What I really really want is a Linux phone with a physical keyboard like the the Nokia N900. Is this too niche?

Tangential question for HN: what is the absolute lowest-level access one can reasonably expect to get to an old Android phone?<p>I ask because I&#x27;m not clear on the architecture of smartphones, which makes it hard to spot opportunities for creatively hacking them. As I understand it, there are at least two OS-like layers: a &quot;baseband&quot; that IIUC is responsible for controlling the radio hardware, and an OS that sits atop to provide applications&#x2F;display&#x2F;touchscreen-controls&#x2F;etc.<p>I&#x27;m aware of projects like PostmarketOS, but these seem to be a replacement for the OS. Is there any equivalent for the baseband? I have an old OnePlus One and would love to have access to some sort of low-level radio API that would let me generate&#x2F;modulate&#x2F;transmit&#x2F;receive&#x2F;etc radio signals.

Regarding the articles complaint about not being able to use Flatpak on Manjaro Plasma Mobile: You totally can, it works with Discover, it&#x27;s just not enabled by default.

&gt; I don’t care much for a keyboard case with the Pinephone, but I am very excited to see how the wireless charging case performs.<p>I quit reading the article then and there! Bah!

GTK and QT on the smartphone is just reseting history. Please don&#x27;t use software that wad conceived for desktops with 2010 era mobile support. Developers aren&#x27;t using GUI toolkits anymore like it&#x27;s the 90&#x27;s. Flutter, Electron, React Native, embedded layout engines that ease portability abd productivity. That&#x27;s where things are at right now.