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The version of the Pinephone that I am reviewing is the postmarketOS
Community Edition (CE).
My first impression of the Pinephone after I unboxed the device was
very good. I enjoyed the feeling of the weight of the Pinephone in my
hand, and the overall build quality of the system still impresses
me. It is my opinion that the PINE64 hardware development and
manufacturing process is very solid. For what I paid, which was about
AUD$200 all up, I believe I have received hardware that is superior
than a phone that I could have bought from a retail store in my city
for the same price.
The screen is glossy, and the capacitive touch screen (this is a
question fellow smolnet citizen Shufei wanted answered in some detail)
responds well.
I was, however, disappointed with the stock postmarketOS software that
came flashed on the eMMC. The Software Centre was a particular
disappointment. It, by default, only showed the currently installed
software, and it was not possible to browse any other software which
was not already installed.
Also, the camera application that came installed by default, 'Cheese',
did not allow the camera to function.
I attempted to install Plasma Mobile using the command line, following
these instructions:
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Plasma_Mobile
But it ended up completely wrecking the function of the
phone. Installing the package that the wiki article recommended did
not update LightDM, and I ended up soft-bricking the phone while
fiddling with the LightDM configuration in order to stop the phone
from (still) booting into phosh, and not Plasma Mobile.
It also disabled cell data functionality, and ended up messing with a
lot of the guts of the Linux installation. So I do not recommend
attempting to switch to Plasma Mobile on the Pinephone from inside an
already-existing postmarketOS installation. I recommend getting a
Plasma Mobile system image, and flashing that from the start if you
wish to experiment with different user interfaces.
There is a great many Linux distributions available for the
Pinephone. The following link to the PINE64 wiki contains a
more-or-less exhaustive list of each of them:
https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone_Software_Releases
The Linux distributions that I tested out are:
I enjoyed this system image because it came with a wizard for
NetworkManager which enabled me to make sure cell data worked most
consistently. However, the power consumption of this image was
prohibitively high, and it caused the phone to run very hot. When the
battery was at 10% charge, rebooting the phone would cause the last of
this precious charge to be used up, and the phone would run completely
out of power.
This image was basically a desktop UI, and did not have many, if any
mobile UI configurations present. It was rather fun to see the
Pinephone boot into a full GNOME desktop environment. I imagine if you
had a bigger screen connected to the Pinephone, you would be quite
impressed with what this phone could pull off.
Slow and buggy, really.
This distribution has a major problem at the moment: the unlock/power
button is not properly debounced, and it makes it virtually impossible
sometimes to unlock the phone. Otherwise, this distribution is very,
very impressive, and I would actually like to switch to it, because
cell data works best for Optus on Ubuntu Touch.
This distribution could indeed be a daily driver for someone if they
could sort out the button debouncing problem.
This is a Linux-based operating system that uses a closed-source
UI. It was so glossy and locked-down in terms of configurability that
I was turned off using it. It has a great tutorial for teaching you
the gestures you need to learn in order to use the touch screen.
I did like the fact that it organised all your contacts and messages
into interesting metaphors, and it ran reasonably quickly, but there
is no way of configuring the UI beyond what how it arrives to you.
This image was fairly slow to run on the Pinephone, but in my opinion
it is the absolute best demonstration of KDE Plasma Mobile. It was
very visually impressive, and the menus were full-featured and
informative. It did not, however, support phone calls or SMS.
This is my current choice of Linux distribution for the phone. It has
a software centre full of different and interesting programs,
including Transmission (torrent client) and GIMP (!!! I have yet to
install this to see how or if it works well, but the fact that it is
possible to at least _run_ GIMP in some capacity on the Pinephone
would like like running Adobe Photoshop on a Samsung Galaxy).
This is merely anecdotal, and I have not performed any scientific
tests to work out if this is true, but the latest September 2020
stable release of this image seems to have the best power settings of
any of the other distributions for this phone.
I hesitate to give an estimate of exactly how long this phone will
last on a single charge, given normal use. But, I finished charging
this phone at 0700HRS this morning, and, with no other charge, it is now
on 50% charge, and the current time is 1230HRS. I think I have put the
phone through a little heavier use than I do normally, this morning,
however.
Virtually all of the functions of the phone are enabled without any
configuration in Mobian.
I highly recommend flashing the following system image to an SD card
so you can try out all the major Linux distributions for your phone:
It contains 13 different distributions, and it is trivial to switch
between each of them through the main boot menu.
I have rung a few people on the phone, and, assuming you have a
distribution flashed on the phone that supports phonecalls (like the
one I am currently using, Mobian), there should be absolutely no issue
using this fundamental feature of the Pinephone.
For the most part, the cell data modem in the Pinephone works well for
me. There is a fairly large problem with my use of the Pinephone with
its cell data, however.
I live in Australia, and the mobile phone carrier that I use is
Optus. The setup(s) that work for me with my Pinephone, running
Mobian, is:
Name: 1
APN: yesinternet
Name: Optus Yes Internet
APN: yesinternet
After about 3 or 4 hours after I boot up the phone, the cell data
stops working, and the Network Mode in the 'Mobile' submenu of
Settings changes from
2G, 3G, 4G (Preferred)
to just
2G, 3G, 4G
This issue is fixed for another 3 or 4 hours by rebooting the phone,
which does not actually take that long (about 10 to 15 seconds), but
it is a hassle to be cut off from mobile data if you forget about your
phone.
These two links help shed light on exactly what is happening with the
Pinephone when it tries to remain connected to the Optus network:
https://forum.gl-inet.com/t/using-rooter-on-the-gl-x750/8983/4
(A forum post. Someone using a similar, if not identical mobile data
modem as the Pinephone in Australia, with the Optus network)
https://gist.github.com/Juul/e42c5b6ec71ce11923526b36d3f1cb2c
(A Github post which familiarises the reader with the concepts and
command line tools involved in using Linux with 4G LTE modems on
Debian and Ubuntu)
The issue with the Pinephone is explained the forum thread (the first
link). The issue is that there are at least two modes for the Quectel
EG25 modem that the Pinephone uses, only one of which seems to be
supported by Optus. The two modes are QMI and MBIM. Optus, I assume,
only supoprts MBIM:
https://forum.gl-inet.com/t/using-rooter-on-the-gl-x750/8983/8 Forum post
The relevant sentence from the above forum post is:
Also, MBIM is buggy for Quectel modems even in OpenWRT 19.07
(snapshot), mostly sometimes modem “freezes” and I need to restart.
The issue that the original poster was having with this modem is
explained in the same post:
The reason is exactly this: user.notice Create Connection:
WDA-GET-DATA-FORMAT is “raw-ip”
When you use a modem over QMI and the data-format is “raw-ip” the
system needs to know that modem is on “raw-ip”, without that,
interface doesn’t get an IP address.
When I was using the postmarketOS version of phosh, the NetworkManager
program started a wizard which contained a lot more options about how
to configure the Pinephone's Quectel LTE modem. One activity I would
like to carry out is learning how to start this wizard from within
Mobian. I wish to keep Mobian as the primary operating system for the
Pinephone just because its Software Centre has such an amazing
quantity and quality of different programs, and the postmarketOS
Centre requires you to manually search for the programs you want, in
order for them to show up at all inside the Centre.
The GPS seems to function perfectly fine inside the default Mobian
maps program. It can show you, with reasonable accuracy (although not
to the same accuracy as, say, a proprietary maps application) exactly
where you are. I think the accuracy of the GPS on the Pinephone is
somewhere in the region of 10 square metres.
The main issue with the GPS, however, is that it does not currently
link in with the Perth public transport system. I cannot use this
program to plan public transport journeys. But I believe I should be
able to take care of this problem by either (a) adding data to
OpenStreetMap, or (b) using a web browser, where I should be able to
access the Transperth public transport trip planner webpage.
This is a feature that works without a hitch in Mobian. I was
surprised to see myself receiving SMS messages unexpectedly from
friends as I left the phone in my pocket and forgot about it.
The camera application in Mobian works. However it has a refresh rate
of around 1 FPS. The quality is passable. This is not an issue for me
because, philosophically, phone cameras should not replace the
function of proper dedicated photographic devices. Will this camera
take reasonable photos? Yes. What is the comparison of the quality of
the photos? I would venture a guess that it is about as good as a
cheap action camera, like a GoPro knock-off.
Compared to the arduous process that one has to go through in order to
change operating systems on an Android phone, the Pinephone is very
easy to flash. You can flash data onto both an SD card, or the phone's
internal eMMC.
For flashing an SD card, the process is as simple as using the very
familiar UNIX command 'dd'. As root:
~# dd if=IMAGE-FILE.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M status=progress
The steps that are required for flashing an operating system image
onto the phone's internal eMMC are a little more involved, but still
far simpler than trying to succeed at flashing an Android phone. The
process involves using a Pinephone system image that exposes the eMMC
drive to the USB port that your Free Software operating system (like
Linux) can mount:
https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Jumpdrive/releases
Make sure the eMMC is not mounted (I found this had best results), and
make sure you flash the OS to the eMMC DEVICE, and not one of its
already existing disk partitions. So you should be flashing to, say:
/dev/sdb
and not:
/dev/sdb2
This phone is going to become my daily driver. It is going to take
some weeks and months for software development to catch up to make the
phone properly impressive in a software sense, but I think the
Pinephone is ready to use on a daily basis, even if it does not have
functionality that is as good as a proprietary phone at this time.