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Sadly my PinePhone experiment has - after several months of running one as a daily driver - come to an end for now and I'm back on my Pixel 2.
Screenshot of LineageOS 19 lockscreen
As much as I love the PinePhone (and I really do; I've really developed quite an emotional bias towards it), I've chosen to swap back to my Pixel 2 for a few key reasons:
Even running on the latest Manjaro build, as of September 2019, the phone is just ... crashy. Like, the UI goes away (black screen instead of a lock screen), then a while later the phone reboots. This happens several times a day.
In addition, it'll crash while taking or making calls. I'm not quite sure what's happening here but when it does, the usual effect is that the caller can't hear my audio, and then the phone reboots after the call.
The most recent failure here was a combination of things.
Firstly, the phone wasn't charging properly (or picking up the existence of the external keyboard) because, I think, one or more of the GPIO pins weren't making contact properly. If I flexed the phone in the keyboard case, it detected the keyboard momentarily and started charging.
Secondly, because it wasn't charging (when I thought it was), it shut down spontaneously just when I needed it (in the immediate aftermath of a minor vehicle accident). I opened my phone to take down the other driver's details ... and it powered off. Argh!
Thirdly, and not for the first time, the shutdown left the filesystem in a bad state. Nothing I couldn't fix by popping the microSD card, inserting it into my ThinkPad, and running fsck on it. But ... not great when I'm stuck by the side of the road needing a working phone.
If it were just me, fine - I could deal with all of that. But it's not just me, I need a phone that actually works so I'm reachable when I'm on the support roster at work, and when I need to call the school from the side of the road after an accident.
I tried carrying a Canon SX610HS point and shoot with me as a substitute for the PinePhone camera, and the Canon is *better*, but ... it's still nowhere near as good as even an obsolete smartphone camera like that in the Pixel 2. I'd be okay with this, but it turns out I'm really missing being able to take easy high-quality snapshots of the kids.
A photo of our rescue greyhound, Fyfe, using the PinePhone.
A photo of Fyfe, taken almost at the same time, using the Pixel 2.
Note that this only works as well as it does because Fyfe is, according to greyhound custom, largely immobile. (For athletic dogs they're astoundingly idle - they nap through the day more like cats than dogs). The PinePhone camera is almost completely incapable of dealing with low light or motion, the latter of which is an exceptionally common situation when photographing young children.
Also, there's no video recording capability at all.
(As an aside, it's remarkable to me how much better the Pixel 2's 12 megapixel camera is than the 20 megapixel Canon SX610HS. Subjectively I find the photos from the Pixel 2 clearer and more detailed, and the actual experience of using the camera is far better with the smartphone. Software has, indeed, eaten the world.)
Other than those two issues, though, the PinePhone *is* a usable daily driver! If I didn't need a highly reliable phone and have kids I wanted to remember when I'm old and senile, I'd still be running it.
The basics work as you'd expect:
But also, some of the things you *wouldn't* expect to work now do! These include:
In the short term I've switched back to my time-worn Pixel 2, running LineageOS:
LineageOS Android Distribution
This will give me a few more years out of my Pixel 2 (and the kids' Pixel 2s, which I'm upgrading to LineageOS on the weekend).
The next step is to replace the PinePhone with a PinePhone Pro :)
In addition to being much faster than the PinePhone, the Pro has a much better camera sensor, the Sony IMX258, which offers a similar resolution to the Pixel 2. The Pro is also GPIO pin compatible with the regular PinePhone so will work with my existing physical keyboard.
In principle the IMX258 sensor is capable of very nice images indeed. In practice, it's *very* hard to get this kind of quality out of a Linux smartphone; megi is making some astounding progress towards it, however.
Example video shot using the IMX258 sensor
Pinephone Pro camera improvements
So hopefully in another six months or so, I'll be ready to try switching to a Linux smartphone again as a daily driver 🤞
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