
PinePhone Review - Bl4ckb0ne
https://drewdevault.com/2019/12/18/PinePhone-review.html
======
monoideism
"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.

~~~
pjmlp
The countless commercial failures of such projects since OpenMoko proves
otherwise.

~~~
lern_too_spel
Openmoko sold 13000 phones, which is much more than "dozens." Commercial
failure does not necessarily mean you can fit all the customers in a room.

~~~
TylerE
13k is a rounding error. Apple sells that many iphones every 30 minutes. (I'm
not kidding... they sell 217M iPhones a year = 594k a day = 24.9k/hr)

~~~
bildung
This is about open source phones, of which Apple has sold exactly zero.

~~~
dmitriid
This makes open source phone cheaper to produce? Cheaper to ship?

13k phones won't cover even the costs of production, much less R&D

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

Seriously, once the software is ready, 30 seconds of any popular celebrity
showing one would make it sell hundreds thousands in a week. Problem is the
small manufacturers couldn't either pay for that level of advertising or
satisfy the demand without turning themselves into what they're fighting
against now (venture capital, investors etc. don't come free), so I welcome
numbers as small as 13k or even much less if that means the product isn't
polluted by the typical corporate mindset (close as much as possible to
protect intellectual property, make it obsolete sooner to sell newer models,
etc).

Oh and by having an unusual phone I can also play the elitist bastard with
friends:*)

~~~
dmitriid
Why didn't it work for Windows Phones then?

~~~
squarefoot
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 make it appealing to other userbases.

Having never used one, I can only speculate that MS wanted to change too much
too early by making an user interface very consistent with the one they
introduced on PCs but hard to digest just like that one, and this could have
brought users away both from the PC and mobile devices. I have always found in
the past very hard to migrate non technical users from Windows to Linux, but
the adoption of the new interfaces from Windows 8 onward made some people I
know so furious that it became really easy to convince them to try Linux; in
some cases it was them who asked me to install it. That would be unthinkable
before Windows 8. In the mobile world I guess it was even harder to grow an
userbase since the alternative was already mainstream.

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.

~~~
dmitriid
> 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?

~~~
squarefoot
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 various tasks to bring it on par with
other platforms. That day we'd have to find a benevolent dictator, sort of a
mobile version of Linus Torvalds, which would direct them various teams right
to the spot, since it's very likely that groups being working on say
accounting software (just to name the most boring thing to me if I was in
their shoes) would proceed at 1/4 speed compared to those working on say video
acceleration or networking tools.

It will start as a community toy, then one day, possibly after the 2nd or 3rd
model, normal phones users will start to notice that little thing that doesn't
get advertising, doesn't ask for DNA when installing apps, doesn't spy what
the user says, writes, buys or where he/she goes and when, consumes a fraction
of their metered data plan since great part of it (ads/junk/telemetry) has
been blocked or never requested/created by design, offers equivalent non
spying apps etc, all at the cost of avoiding the usual social media apps (I
assume FB/TW will never allow a port of their clients there, especially if
sandboxed). 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. If I had a date to be concerned about, it will be the day its
growing userbase size could raise a flag in some offices, so that the
following day the folks that made it possible will get a huge offer to sell
the entire operation. That eventuality would deem the project to become a copy
of any other platform out there. There's hardware production involved; forking
the blueprints wouldn't be enough.

~~~
dmitriid
> 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.

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

------
rsync
"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-telco inside of
twilio, but still ...

~~~
jdillaaa
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

~~~
rsync
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 ....

~~~
nexuist
Is this economical? As in, are you paying less in Twilio fees than you would
for a similar telco plan?

~~~
rsync
I have no idea ...

Certainly it costs some amount more because I pay for US Mobile (verizon MVNO)
and then the twilio fees, but I think my monthly Twilio bill is negligible ...

------
livueta
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.

~~~
kop316
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 additionally several proprietary Verizon
and Sprint blobs that are resident in factory images that need to be put in
third party ROMs).

The Librem 5 has LTE mobile data as well, but it has those same issues (no
VoLTE, SMS only over 3g, no MMS for T-Mobile USA). I am hopeful that between
Purism and the Pinephone community that this is a solvable (but lengthy)
issue.

~~~
kick
Calling and SMS works without proprietary software already. The ubPorts people
already did it:

[https://twitter.com/thepine64/status/1202162774186582017](https://twitter.com/thepine64/status/1202162774186582017)

~~~
pabs3
While the baseband runs Linux (IIRC PinePhone uses a Quectel modem), it
probably runs proprietary software for the full LTE/3G/2G stack.

[https://osmocom.org/projects/quectel-
modems/](https://osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/)

~~~
scintill76
Is that really where the goalpost is though? I thought everyone accepted that
the modem itself would always be proprietary, and that was OK as long as it
had a killswitch and no ability to directly interfere with the main processor
or RAM. (The mostly-userland stack to drive the modem to send SMS etc. would
be open.)

It seems right to me that the FCC et al shouldn't allow uncertified amateur
radio firmwares.

~~~
pabs3
Depends on the human defining where the goalpost is, what their threat model
is and their philosophy etc. There are certainly folks who want open basebands
enough to work on them, for example there are folks working on porting the
Osmocom baseband codebase to Mediatek based phones.

[https://osmocom.org/projects/baseband](https://osmocom.org/projects/baseband)
[https://media.ccc.de/v/osmodevcon2019-109-osmocombb-
layer1-o...](https://media.ccc.de/v/osmodevcon2019-109-osmocombb-layer1-on-
mediatek-status-report)

~~~
lupire
Want and need are different. If you don't have a phone now, you might wait for
an open baseband. If you have a a closed phone now, it's silly to wait.

------
kop316
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 LTE, or WiFi
Calling, you have to install proprietary blobs.

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.

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

~~~
war1025
Verizon is turning off the 2g towers on Jan 1st, so the little old brick phone
I've had since 2011 is going to stop functioning in two weeks.

Finally broke down and ordered a Moto g7 on Black Friday.

Haven't had the heart to actually go in and get a sim card for it yet
though...

------
padraic7a
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](https://open-
store.io/?sort=-updated_date&type=app)

HN readers might like to note that there is also an established developer
community and resources like documentation.

Well worth a look if you're thinking of getting a Pinephone, and / or
developing a anything for it.

~~~
ColanR
I keep thinking that we might take this opportunity of rebuilding an OS from
the ground up to implement something like Plan 9. The usual adoption issue of
drivers and apps seems irrelevant here.

Fundamentally, its distributed nature would allow far greater integration
between desktop and mobile hardware. Mobile + laptop + NAS would be so deeply
integrated that they would better be considered a single computer with
multiple more-or-less accessible terminals - and if a mobile device was part
of that integration, it would represent a sea change in the utility of
smartphones. I'm personally a big fan of how a mobile device could
'automatically' use the processing power of a Plan 9 desktop whenever they're
both on the home network.

(just a plan 9 newbie that is enamoured of the system design)

Edit: BTW, pretty sure this is what Google's project fuschia is based on.

~~~
chc4
You might be interested in
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=LYPBAckCEQo](https://youtube.com/watch?v=LYPBAckCEQo)

~~~
ColanR
Yup, Inferno is one of the Plan 9 forks and that looks very close to what I'm
imagining. Though it seems to be built on top of android.

------
Abishek_Muthian
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
attractive enough for the major smartphone brands to join open-source party to
make a dent in the Appstore/Playstore duopoly.

Edit: Monoploy->Duopoly.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
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.

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
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...](https://windowsunited.de/so-koennt-ihr-jede-beliebige-android-app-
auf-eurem-windows-phone-nutzen/)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Proper support for PWAs in Windows 10 came the release _after_ the last
Windows Mobile release. It never supported them.

Also, I have an Astoria phone in a drawer somewhere. Worked fantastically.

------
connorgutman
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)!

------
thekyle
I'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.

I'm sure the Librem 5 is also very nice, but it's higher price makes it much
less accessible.

------
neiman
As long as I can run Firefox on it, and it got a micro-SIM, I'm good. There'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).

I still wish FirefoxOS would have come to live..

~~~
pusheenomics
I would love Firefox OS to resurrect...

~~~
pabs3
The Boot 2 Gecko OS was the community-developed successor of FirefoxOS and
KaiOS is the commercial proprietary fork of B2G but unfortunately B2G is no
longer maintained:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B2G_OS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B2G_OS)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS)

~~~
pusheenomics
At least KaiOS is very successful but it’s weird that it’s proprietary.

------
miohtama
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.

~~~
curioussavage
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.

------
hellotomyrars
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.

~~~
boomlinde
_> 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?

------
mttyng
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...

~~~
spurgu
Toddlers like smartphones!

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

~~~
spurgu
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... :(

~~~
squarefoot
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 to navigate, read bigger documents,
watch movies etc, one even smaller one to shoot photos and videos, one to
listen to music, record it etc.

~~~
spurgu
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" vs >4" to 0/100\. I would be fine to even have
20/80.

/rant

~~~
dTal
My favorite Android phone ever was the Xperia Mini Pro sk17i - a 3-inch screen
slider N900-alike. Despite its tiny portability, it was not difficult to type
on at all, due to its hardware keyboard - in fact the keyboard is about 30%
bigger than the onscreen keyboard in a portrait Galaxy S3. It was not the
thinnest, but it was palm sized and palm shaped so the ergonomics were
_excellent_. I miss it badly.

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

~~~
kick
Why? Not even Mozilla had faith in Firefox OS, and on a phone like this, it's
barely powerful enough to. I'm not trying to attack you, I'm just genuinely
confused at this viewpoint.

~~~
Multicomp
None of my below rants are directed at you personally!

FF OS lives on today as KaiOS and is extremely popular in the devloping world
where even an Android Go device requires far too much hardware specs for the
price a given set of locals want or can afford to pay.

If you look at some of the devices that run it like the JioPhone, you can see
that it sits quite comfortably in the space formerly occupied by the BREW
systems of the world, but has little touches like email sending, Google
Assistant, etc.

Edit: just to give some scale to the Android Go bloat (let alone plain old
Android), the HTC Desire Z
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z))
has 512 MB of RAM and a paltry processor, not powerful even for its day.

That device ran the current set of Android OSes at the time, and if modded
today, can even be made to run Android KitKat, where official support stopped
at Android Gingerbread. Today, that device is barely considered Android Go
compatible, mostly due to its CPU and storage limitations.

In 2010, we took pictures, checked emails, played games, browsed the mobile
web, performed calls, texts, IMs, watched videos, streamed music, and
drove/bussed/walked with navigation.

Today...we do much the same things, but in a 'once more, with ~~feeling~~ AI`
manner. There are very few totally new things compared to 2010, we just let
mobile apps bloat up to web development-level bloat.

In my cynical moments, I look at the processing power eaten on my OS, wasted
on wakelocks and ads and think to myself that somewhere, Ralphie is in the
~~Magic School Bus~~ cell phone factory and spinning dials saying 'more RAM,
more CPU, more network speed, I don't know what to do, the software is all
slow!' because every time he ups a spec, the bloat absorbs it without reducing
user latency one bit.

~~~
zozbot234
512MB is not even enough (on its own) to run a user-friendly Linux desktop
these days - you'll need to setup some swap to make it workable. And that's
without even launching a web browser, just light native apps. ISTM that the
bloat is impacting way more than just mobile.

------
OrgNet
I wish I could use that dream phone on Xfinity/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.

I have a phone that isn'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.

------
ntw1103
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.

------
jancsika
I want that touch-drag done yesterday!

Or at least the latency in half.

Which parts of the UI/hardware stack are the culprits here?

I want some butts[1]!

1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS9j_-
mqSWc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS9j_-mqSWc)

------
ohiovr
Can python be used to make an "app"?

~~~
jamii
It's running straight-up linux. You can write apps in python with gtk or qt,
or anything else that works on a linux desktop.

~~~
xur17
I might have to get one... I really miss this from my n900.

------
ncmncm
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.

~~~
gsich
Shady modem manufacturers.

~~~
ncmncm
I don't think the modem is involved in driving the speaker or microphone.

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

~~~
kick
Drew lives in Philadelphia, and he notes that it works, so yes.

Here's a tip, though, if you ever get concerned about whether or not a phone
will work with your carrier. Check what modem it has. In the PinePhone's case,
it's the EG25-G.

[http://files.pine64.org/doc/datasheet/project_anakin/LTE_mod...](http://files.pine64.org/doc/datasheet/project_anakin/LTE_module/Quectel_EG25-G_LTE_Specification_V1.1_Preliminary_20180522%20\(002\).pdf)

So now that we know the name, let's look and see if your carrier mentions it
as one it approves. For the sake of brevity, I'll assume you're on AT&T.

[https://www.att.com/modules](https://www.att.com/modules)

Google's cache nicely and conveniently converts spreadsheets into web
documents, so let's view it on that:

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G7My6z...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G7My6zSEmpAJ:https://www.att.com/modules)

The EG25-G is #51, and is fully supported.

------
ge96
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

~~~
mouldysammich
I think hdmi out is supposed to work, according to a blog post from a few
months ago anyway.

[https://www.pine64.org/2019/06/06/june-2019-news-
pinephone-p...](https://www.pine64.org/2019/06/06/june-2019-news-pinephone-
pinebook-pro-and-pinetab/)

~~~
ge96
that's good to know, I think possibly if it was more powerful would be down to
use it as a "single all around device" granted I'm not doing like hardcore
video processing/gaming generally just software stuff.

------
baybal2
I'm very impressed that they managed to ship at all.

Commercial enterprises with such small budgets flip very often.

~~~
lunchables
It is amazing that they consistently produce these products, I'm continually
impressed by them. They are doing exactly the right thing, at exactly the
right price points to kick start some of these things (linux phone, arm
laptops).

------
SirHound
> rumor has it that a call has successfully been placed

This has been my perception of Linux in general.

~~~
smichel17
If you're referring to desktop Linux, it's very much not this way, for the
last 5 or so years.

Installation Just Works unless you're dual booting, in which case it Just
Works until Windows updates and overwrites boot files because it assumes it's
the only OS installed. Drivers Just Work as long as you're not using some
obscure hardware. Installing apps Just Works. Anything web (and let's face it,
that's a lot of things nowadays) Just Works.

The only times when "rumor has it someone made it work" happens, that I've
come across, is running a subset of Windows games in wine. Specifically, games
that use invasive client-side anticheat (eg, EAC, which loads a kernel driver
to do its snooping).

------
NilsIRL
Can someone explain to me why Purism has so much trouble making the Librem 5
when the PinePhone exists?

Purism has had so many pre orders and the PinePhone only costs $149 but with
that budget can't make the Librem.

What is it that makes it so difficult?

------
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.

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

~~~
m4rtink
Sailfish OS uses Android driver blobs via libhybris on the Xperia. I guess on
the PinePhone either open drivers or native compiled blobs are in use.

But from the user perspective likely the main change from the Xperia would be
the missing Android emulation layer. This is only available on officially
supported devices, which the xperias (X, XA2, 10). On community ports, which
Sailfish OS for the PinePhone is at the moment, the Android emulation layer is
not available. I guess that could change if there is enough demand to roll it
in to the Sailfish X program, like the Gemini PDA.

BTW, other than the Android emulator a and two more things (MS Exchange,
typing prediction) the community ports are pretty much identical to the
officially supported devices, all native apps will work, etc.

------
grizzles
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.

~~~
dahfizz
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.

~~~
grizzles
It's an idea to provoke discussion. If you read the blog post he's got a whole
list of app-y type stuff planned. This might be a way for him to save time on
all that.

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

