You "I want a reliable phone that meets my daily needs" types like to think you have a monopoly on the term "great". Some of us like to take the scenic route to reading our messages.

To hopefully reading most of our messages.

He was just being polite. Standard unwritten rule : start with a single supportive positive line on a thing and then follow it by a whole page of criticism.

The classical “shit sandwich”.

open face shit sandwich

What do you think his defintion of great is?

Don't forget about the price: $200 doesn't get you flagship experience.

Depends on which year's. Pine64's SoC, Allwinner A64 is 4x 1,2 GHz Cortex-A53 chip, giving you about the same level of raw performance as a 2013 flagship phone.

And it will run smoothly, if you choose simple software: https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/.

Though from a few videos it's got an incredibly primitive UI that mainly uses the side buttons instead of the big touchscreen. The interface seems much more apt for a feature phone than a smartphone. (Though I realize there can be some niche demand for a non-touchscreen Linux phone with a hardware keyboard... Maybe that's what might be more achievable in the FOSS Linux hobbyist scene than something like the Pinephone or the Librem 5.)

Lately I have been trying out $200 range phones (with Android): the galaxy A31 for instance: it is the experience of a flagship phone from a few years ago. If the pinephone was that, I think everyone would be happy and yes, this is possible for $200. At least if you are Samsung?

So yeah, not flagship but close enough for a lot of people (side by side, the a32 vs s21, for me is not worth the 4x+ pricetag, as in the difference between flagship and not flagship is shrinking fast, ymmv), however...

The pinephone is worse hardware though (In almost all respects but the dipswitches) and the software, at this point, is really alpha quality mostly. But we know this: the promise it will run Linux smoothly on a phone is enough to buy one. It will take time but I would buy any phone that allows me to freely run multiple OSs new out of the box with all hardware supported.

For me, the killer feature is that pinephone runs mainline kernel.

According to https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices - that's a rather uncommon thing to have, and pretty much unobtainable for a recent device (other than pine64/librem5).

Yes, agree. That is why it is OK that it is not the best at this point: there is not much competition.

OTOH about $200 gives you much more from some other ... err ... proprietary vendors, lets say Xiaomi/Poco M3 Pro, with the possibility of alternative firmware.

Windows has all of those characteristics and people still think it's great.

I would disagree with the “No ads, no bullshit” part though…

True. Unfortunately, the next person will ask about if this phone will have the same apps and games as they do on their iOS/Android device. They'll just say, does it have WhatsApp?, Netflix?, Instagram?, Snapchat?, TikTok?, Chrome?, 1Password?, etc, etc.

The fact that it has been admitted that 'it's slow, buggy, and flat out unreliable if you need to be able to receive / answer calls and texts for anything important' tells me that it is even worse than that 'Freedom Phone' since not only the PinePhone can't run the same apps as that, but it runs more sluggish than that.

I'd also write all of them off as garbage 'for now', since none of them can be recommended to the average Joe or Jane.

It has already been admitted that both the PinePhone and the Librem 5 cannot run these apps well enough to justify switching or even recommending them.

What use is a smartphone that claims to run apps (Native apps, Android apps or Web Apps) but runs them much worse than the user's previous device (or can't run them at all)? To the users hoping to make the switch, it feels more like a downgrade; especially PWAs.

For example, in the FAQ, Librem mentions:

> Unlike most mobile apps on Android and iOS, these applications were not written to monetize users' personal data or extract fees from users, and their code is free/open source, so it can be verified that they aren't spyware or contain code that acts against the best interest of their users.

Well it seems that Signal is a known and a widely recommended messaging app which generally doesn't do all the things claimed by Librem, yet many users that use Signal cannot even run it on their Librem 5 or PinePhone. So they will see no point in considering buying any of these phones anyway.

Therefore, these devices are still not ready yet to be considered serious alternatives to Android users or in general. They're going in the right direction, but it will take years of waiting for improvements in the current state of open source smart phones.

Signal apps are an issue, for sure. Signal desktop can run, but it's not fun, because it's not responsive at all. Currently, the best alternative available imho is Axolotl, which is what I use.[0]

[0] https://github.com/nanu-c/axolotl

> yet many users that use Signal cannot even run it on their Librem 5 or PinePhone

This is really a fault of Signal, because they forbid forks and do not provide a good app for GNU/Linux phones. It's like a walled garden. I do not use Signal for this reason.

So that means I can only wait for Signal to at least work and run fast enough and reliably on Anbox before recommending it to Android users who use Signal to make the switch to either of these phones.

Until then, these users are going to have to be waiting for years of improvements first before jumping onboard a product that they will see as 'unfinished' or 'sluggish' than their previous phone.