The Pinephone experience

[kelvinhall05]

Hi guys. As some of you may know, my Pinephone came in today (as of writing this thread). I purchased the Manjaro edition with the dock which cost me (after being screwed over with shipping and taxes/import fees) about 370 CAD, or about 277 USD. Keep in mind that the base phone excluding any extra accessories or costs is only 150 USD.

 

Day one was fairly uneventful. Unboxing was fun, the box had a nice design on it, and everything felt quite good and premium for a budget phone.

Spoiler

 

The phone came with the dock I ordered, which is pretty damn nice with a metal case and decent selection of IO (USB C passthrough, likely just for power, 2x USB-A, ethernet, and HDMI), as well as a fairly average USB-C cable. It came with a preinstalled screen protector, which I will leave on as I'm worried about the texture of the glass and how smooth it will be (I've heard conflicting reports on how nice it is to touch).

 

Taking the back off (to remove the plastic covering the battery contacts) we find the bank of dipswitches for toggling the following:

 

1. Modem

2. Wifi/Bluetooth

3. Microphone

4. Rear camera (and flash, surprisingly)

5. Front camera

6. Headphone jack (I believe this is because it can be used as a serial interface, but don't quote me on that)

 

There are also some pogo pins that can be used for expansion or accessories, as well as the stacked SIM and SD card slots. The battery is removeable, and is compatible with some Samsung batteries (I forget which).

Spoiler

Powering up the device, we get a Manjaro logo (as expected, since this is the Manjaro edition) and what look suspiciously like a Windows loading circle.

Spoiler

 

While it is nice to have a preinstalled OS, man, it really chugs hard. I pretty much immediately switched to my SD card preloaded with a mashup of several different OSes to choose from. It was fun messing around with these too, but I also found them to be quite slow and unusable.

 

I eventually switched to a pre-built Arch image which feels exponentially faster and snappier than any of the previous OSes I tried. I have already run into some minor problems with x86 stuff not running on arm (as expected), but I'll figure that out later.

 

 

So yeah. That's where I'm at now. I'll slowly get this Arch install up and running, and/or reinstall completely fresh to the internal eMMC. Either way, I'll update this thread as I do various things with this phone. Looking forward to documenting my journey, thanks!

[Fnige]

what the hell is that keyboard

[dizmo]

I was going to say that's not a bad price for something to play around with.
Then I saw the spec....and honestly it looks more like something that will be e-waste in a year or two.

It's also not something I could ever use personally, so. I don't really see its purpose.

 

The screen likely doesn't have any oleo phobic coating on it, so it'll feel like complete garbage. Keep the protector on.

 

Appreciate the extensive pictures though

[kelvinhall05]

8 hours ago, dizmo said:

I was going to say that's not a bad price for something to play around with.
Then I saw the spec....and honestly it looks more like something that will be e-waste in a year or two.

It's also not something I could ever use personally, so. I don't really see its purpose.

To be fair, it's designed to be a development device for Linux on a phone, so it's not meant to be a daily driver, much less a flagship. I'm not sure why they went exactly with the specs they did, though I'd assume it has something to do with getting those chips in relatively small batches for cheap prices.

8 hours ago, dizmo said:

The screen likely doesn't have any oleo phobic coating on it, so it'll feel like complete garbage. Keep the protector on.

Yeah, that's what I'm scared of. Not a big deal, I should likely keep the protector on regardless.

8 hours ago, dizmo said:

Appreciate the extensive pictures though

You can see them? Interesting, some others were having trouble with that.

 

@colonel_mortis

[WaggishOhio383]

Obviously you haven't had much use with the phone yet, but from what you've done with it so far, how usable does it seem as a daily driver? Is it capable of running apps like Discord or Spotify? Or is it more limited to things like texts/calls and basic web browsing as of right now? Back when I was interested in getting a Pine Phone, most of the videos out there focused on the hardware of the device, with very little attention given to what the OS looks like and what you can run on it.

 

Also none of the pictures on this thread will load for me either.

[kelvinhall05]

11 minutes ago, WaggishOhio383 said:

how usable does it seem as a daily driver?

Hard to say as I haven't even decided on an OS yet. Messing with Android and Ubuntu Touch today.

12 minutes ago, WaggishOhio383 said:

Is it capable of running apps like Discord or Spotify?

Discord no, because it's not arm compatible. Spotify I'm not sure, I haven't tested it. I would assume the browser versions of both would work.

13 minutes ago, WaggishOhio383 said:

is it more limited to things like texts/calls and basic web browsing as of right now?

I haven't tried swapping my sim in yet, and I haven't really done any web browsing either lol. I did try playing back a 720p YouTube video and that worked fine.

14 minutes ago, WaggishOhio383 said:

Back when I was interested in getting a Pine Phone, most of the videos out there focused on the hardware of the device, with very little attention given to what the OS looks like and what you can run on it.

That's mostly because this device is intended for developing and testing Linux on phones. The software is very early in development.

14 minutes ago, WaggishOhio383 said:

Also none of the pictures on this thread will load for me either.

Seems to be a forum problem, hopefully Mortis gets on it soon.

[Drama Lama]

13 hours ago, kelvinhall05 said:

snip 

I can’t see the pictures 

 

[kelvinhall05]

Just now, Drama Lama said:

I can’t see the pictures 

 

Forum problem, nothing I can do. 

[Drama Lama]

Just now, kelvinhall05 said:

Forum problem, nothing I can do. 

I know. What about uploading them directly?

[kelvinhall05]

Just now, Drama Lama said:

I know. What about uploading them directly?

Too lazy. Maybe for future updates, idk.

[Drama Lama]

Just now, kelvinhall05 said:

Too lazy. Maybe for future updates, idk.

 

 

I‘d be too lazy too.

[colonel_mortis]

9 hours ago, kelvinhall05 said:

To be fair, it's designed to be a development device for Linux on a phone, so it's not meant to be a daily driver, much less a flagship. I'm not sure why they went exactly with the specs they did, though I'd assume it has something to do with getting those chips in relatively small batches for cheap prices.

Yeah, that's what I'm scared of. Not a big deal, I should likely keep the protector on regardless.

You can see them? Interesting, some others were having trouble with that.

 

@colonel_mortis

The images are on your Google drive, and we don't have permission to view your Google Drive. You need to actually upload them to the forum.

[kelvinhall05]

1 minute ago, colonel_mortis said:

The images are on your Google drive, and we don't have permission to view your Google Drive. You need to actually upload them to the forum.

That wouldn't explain why:

1. Some people can view them or

2. Why the same method (copy-paste from Google Photos) worked before the update

[colonel_mortis]

7 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

That wouldn't explain why:

1. Some people can view them or

not sure about that one, possibly something to do with geo-caching somewhere in Google's architecture

7 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

2. Why the same method (copy-paste from Google Photos) worked before the update

Before the update, the forum cached external images, but that feature has been removed now.

[kelvinhall05]

Quick little day two update:

 

Android kinda works but the preinstalled apps and default config is really shit. I'll have to figure out how to get completely stock Android or LineageOS or something on it (I'm using GloDroid).

 

Arch still going good. I tried Ubuntu Touch and while it had by far the best DE and user experience...it's Ubuntu. I'd really rather not use Ubuntu.

[kelvinhall05]

Hi, just typing a little update from the Pinephone itself. Figured out how to set global scale-to-fit so I can actually use stuff in portrait mode now. 

 

Fuck, typing this out really makes me appreciate gboard because this on-screen phosh keyboard is not very good lol