“It's nowhere near ready to be your primary phone”

May I ask why? I was about to look into the project and potentially purchase one.

In addition to the issues like MMS not working, there are lots of papercuts that collectively add up to a really annoying experience. I kept having issues with the battery being recognized one minute and not the next. The touch detection needs some polishing, as does the keyboard. They are usable but have some metaphorical rough edges that need metaphorical sanding. Battery life isn't great yet either, I assume because it's not optimized yet.

That said, go ahead and get one. They're cheap enough that they are fun toys, and it's a way to vote with some dollars. Even tho it's not ready for daily driving, I think it will be in a few months, or sooner given how fast things are moving in the community now that there's real hardware people can buy. You can help with development by reporting bugs and such. Also you get to be a part of history!

Gotcha. Many thanks!

The hardware should be solid as of the CE release (Braveheart was essentially the Beta release), it's the software that's a work-in-progress since there really hasn't been a widely used (open) Linux handset until now.

It sounds like the most important issues (i.e. battery life/suspend, camera support etc.) is getting resolved fairly quickly while sanding down the rough edges on the UI will probably take time. So it's usable, just not rock solid or feature complete from a software standpoint.

I see. Many thanks.

It doesn't run Android apps (well ... yet!), native apps are "meh", the UI quality is questionable and the battery life miserable. That's my last state of knowledge. Does anybody know how the power management stuff is going? I'm planning to build a mobile device with the very related SOPINE and think that project might profit from some lessons on that front.

And oh yeah, I'm totally planning to buy a PinePhone because because it's cool as hell.

Suspend to ram is working these days with crust firmware. It consumes some 150mW in suspend I think. So that should get a ~70h suspend time. That's most probably without a modem.

I still have to measure it a bit and play with it more. I've made a fake battery recently to measure power consumption in suspend independently: https://megous.com/dl/tmp/IMG_0047.JPG

Cool stuff, thanks! Do you share more about this somewhere, say, on the fediverse (mastodon)?

I share some of my stuff on my website https://xnux.eu

Last I looked into that, most distros were able to run Crust on the embedded microcontroller, shutting down all cores and leaving it up to the uC to wake up the main CPU. This saves a substantial amount of power, and it seems that the device can now last around a full day.

So I'd say it can be used as a daily driver, unless you have strict requirements on app compatibility.

Speaking of which, I wonder how an emulated Android device (or even a real one) streaming video on my pinephone trough LTE would fare :)

> Speaking of which, I wonder how an emulated Android device (or even a real one) streaming video on my pinephone trough LTE would fare :)

Yeah, I keep meaning to glue together scrcpy+xvfb+x11vnc+guacamole when I get the time and motivation. Should be fun:)

Haven't looked up every project name you wrote, but that sounds like waypipe or xpra :)

Plainly put, none of the OSes do the basic features of a phone. Ubuntu Ports is the closest to being daily driver ready, and it cannot do MMS[0] (so group texts and picture texts are out). I cannot comment on the state of other OSes.

Even with that, most of them do not have a lot of basic features of what a vanilla smartphone would have either.

That isn't to say it will stay that way. I try out a few of the OSes about once a month or so, and the difference from when I first got it to now is astounding. I think (hope) that by the end of the year that I can use a Pinephone as my daily driver.

[0]https://gitlab.com/ubports/community-ports/pinephone

Thanks for the reply.

No verified boot.

If security (which is necessary for ensuring privacy) is of value to you, get a Pixel 3a, possibly with GrapheneOS.

Get both to support free software, the idea of free hardware, but don't compromise your phone security model just yet.

I worry more about apps and weird SDKs that ping foreign servers all the time, which seems to be the custom on Android and iOS.

A64 can do secure boot, I'm sure. So if anyone will have interest in implementing it and locking down their device, it's possible.

Personally, it seems like too much trouble, for little benefit at this point in time.

Please. Commercial phones "security model" is to protect themselves from the user, and that's about it. The baseband itself is the main backdoor.

The chips are built to mitigate this now.

And upon reboot, a proper verified boot, as well as Auditor &or Attestation, lets you know, with cryptographic proof, whether your phone's firmware has been compromised by such a piece of hardware.

...and yet they are choke full of spyware.

In the context of a proprietary phone, secure boot and all of that is the new tivoization.