I have both a PinePhone Braveheart and a Purism Librem 5. While it is very exciting to see how far both have come within the past few months, my one gripe with both of them is none of them have the complete feature set of a phone, i.e. none support MMS. This means group texts and picture messages are not supported. While I am willing to tolerate a lot to be able to use open source technology, the inability to use it as a basic phone makes it a complete non-starter as a replacement.
It makes it even more difficult as so many of the OS and vendors advertise SMS and voice call support (which they have), so I have had to play the guessing game on a lot of the OSes that advertise SMS as working to discover this.
That being said, it is really exciting to see how far both have come, and I do think they both will be an awesome replacement to an Android phone sooner than later. Even more exciting is that they both are close to and will have mainline (EDIT: Mainline Linux) support, so they will be supported for a long time and not depend on a vendors willingness to support it.
You're the first person I've heard from that has both the PinePhone and the Librem 5.
What is your opinion on the hardware and build quality between the two? The Librem 5 seems so expensive for the hardware it includes, but I also don't have a baseline for knowing what is reasonable (since comparing against Android device makers isn't fair).
Both have good build quality. I have a Librem 5 Birch (1st run), so while it has a prototype feel, it still has the build quality of a mid tier Android Device (~$300-400). It uses a lot more metal with a plastic backplate, so I like the weight of it.
My huge annoyance with my Librem 5 is that the Wifi Signal is terrible. I literally have to be within 5 ft of my Wifi AP to have even a useable signal. It won't work if there's any obstruction or if it's beyond 15 ft line of sight. I have tried all of the suggested fixes, but this is still a pervasive issue. I hope it's fixed in a later batch.
The Pinephone has much more of a plastic feel. I have a Google Pixel 3a, and half the time I have to do a double take to see which is which. But the build quality on that is very nice too.
If you have other questions, feel free to let me know!
I have left the Librem 5 on stock PureOS. It went from being barely usable to pretty well supported (aside from MMS and the WiFi issue I talked about).
On the Pinephone I tried a whole bunch at first, but i haven't done that in a while. So far the front runners for a useable phone seem to be Ubuntu Touch and PostmarketOS. I want to try Sailfish OS again, as that seems very tempting as well. But in either case, I like to see the diversity in the OSes for the Pinephone.
I used to use Google Voice as my main phone number, so MMS being broken is something I'm pretty used to.
I've got my PinePhone early mostly to play with and to support the company, but I feel like it'll probably be at least a year before I'm confident in carrying it around as a daily driver.
I probably need to spend a bit of time determining what apps in my must-haves have workable options on PinePhone yet. The last Ubuntu Touch build I played with was very sluggish, but I've heard really good things about more recent ones. OTA is a big deal, since re-flashing my phone to get software updates is not a workable solution for me.
Probably the toughest thing to lose will be my bank's app... I was used to not having it when I was on Windows Mobile, but mobile check desposit has been really nice to have since I've been on my little iPhone lifeboat.
Not gp, but I have a PinePhone Braveheart currently running Fedora. Battery life and lack of apps is what prevents me. I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks so the UX around those is really important to me. Other than that I could live full time in the PinePhone (and be really happy with terminal access).
Battery life will get there, as will apps I'm sure. The real killer feature will be when Android apps are runnable.
The main thing keeping me from using it as my daily driver is the battery, as others are reporting. Secondarily I'm working through an issue where I can receive calls but not place them which is also frustrating. I would also like to finish building apps for many of my IoT appliances so I can continue monitoring them on the go, like my smart thermostat.
You can get working MMS with a command-line interface using ofono and intel's MMSd, but I'm still working on upstreaming the patches that fix both with T-Mobile. I haven't put much online about this work yet, but if anyone wants to work on fixing the interface side of MMS I'd love some help.
The current interface options are all going through telepathy-ofono, which works with group MMS messaging and attachments, but can't really handle attachments the right way because the telepathy IM framework itself has no notion of media messages (as mentioned at e.g. https://github.com/TelepathyIM/telepathy-morse/issues/21#iss...). Ubuntu Touch replaces MMSd with a Go rewrite called `nuntium` but still relies on telepathy-ofono for plumbing: http://docs.ubports.com/es/latest/systemdev/mms-infrastructu...
I think the right way to handle SMS+MMS, for now, would be to just write a dedicated GUI client for it that communicates with ofono MMSd via dbus. I'm thinking about doing it with Rust+GTK.
Right now I'm setting up a central place to collect all the scattered pieces of related software and their statuses, with info on what's been tested to work and what needs to be done next:
This is also the thing keeping me from using my PinePhone, and my OnePlus One running Ubuntu Touch. I used the latter as a daily driver for a while, but after missing some messages that people sent me (some of which were fairly important)... no, they're not in a usable state for me yet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm really excited about both projects! But in my area (east coast US), people tend to just assume that you can receive MMS/group texts, they'll send them to you without a second thought, and the idea that you might not receive them won't even be on their minds.
Yep, that's the same issues for me. My work, family, and friends all use group texts via MMS. I would switch to a pinephone or librem 5 instantly if they supported it, but this is a non-starter for me.
Qi charging is exciting, since between WinMo and iPhone I've been using nothing but for a couple years.
Sad to see the keyboard delayed, that's an ambitious piece of hardware to build and one I am super excited about.
The F(x)tec Pro is the modern phone I want from a hardware standpoint, but it ships with Android. Apparently there's a Sailfish image available, but I'd have to flash it myself and I don't like buying phones preloaded with Android.
Quad core ARM processor, 2GB of ram, and a 10in display with a keyboard for $120 is pretty sweet. I hope they eventually make a "PineTab Pro" like they did with the book and boost it's ram a bit. Even at 4GB, this would be a pretty exciting machine.
Yeah that 2GB is kind of sketch, kind of curious what usage percentage you'd have just being idle. I used to use a tiling manager back when I had crappy laptops just to save some ram.
I would be interested to see how this thing does with battery life/drawing with a stylus. I'm not an artist but I use sketching to prototype wireframe/mechanical stuff.
a chat program and a music program just started up, not doing anything but idling, nowadays use 500 MiB each. 2 GiB is not enough any more because everyone writes their apps in dom now, because it seems to be the only toolkit with vaguely viable, non-sucky state management libraries, and it just isn't efficient enough. this isn't intrinsic tho
(and then yesterday i just tried windows 7 for the first time in a vm with 2 GiB allocated, and it was far snappier than i could have imagined).
How are you guys on funding? I tried to find a donate button, but couldn't. I don't really want any more projects right now, so not trying to buy anything.
I mean, Pine is a company; their model certainly seems to be "sell stuff to make money". I might wish they ran some products with a higher profit margin so they could expand more, but they're not a nonprofit or anything.
Be careful. I originally wasn't going to buy anything either, but the more I browsed through their store the more ideas I got, and now I have several projects waiting for me :-)
What's the story with purchases via cryptocurrencies? It was in the orignal post as such:
'In other news, we recently ran a poll on Mastodon and Twitter asking whether you’d be interested in using cryptocurrency for PINE Store payments. On the whole, approximately a quarter of all respondents expressed interest in using such payment options. We’re now happy to announce that we’ll be accepting cryptocurrency payments (BTC, BCH, ETH and XRP) in the very near future. The payment infrastructure is currently being set up, and should be available as an option at checkout starting next month.'
Then an edit was added, like so:
'[edit] We no longer intend to support cryptocurrency payments at this time.'
Can you add more context here? A large minority of backers clearly want purchases via crypto, but I understand that implementations are where the rubber meets the road.
I'd love to hear more too, but I suspect the answer will be that they couldn't get the fees or transfers or etc that they needed to make it worth their time in the end. Which stinks but it's reasonable to drop the support because of it.
The story of the crypto support journey may illuminate pain points that could be solved by a clever integrator. It's worth knowing even if the answer remains the same.
> We saw the outcry regarding @BitPay and no longer intend to support it. In the coming weeks and months we'll keep exploring options that will work for us and will be convenient for our community.
The BitPay outcry is totally warranted. If the PineTab folks are reading this, I highly recommend taking a look at OpenNode. It's an api much like BitPay (but without all of their issues). They charge a small fee, and give you USD.
They designed their own payment protocol that only works with their wallet. Their original intention was to make the payment processor better (a laudable goal), but no one has adopted it at this point.
This means the vast majority of users see a bitpay invoice, and can't figure out how to pay it with their bitcoin wallets.
OpenNode is better than BitPay, but the Pine64 folks are very technically competent and could easily handle running their own BtcPayServer instance. I hope they go that route, although I’ll understand if they start with a managed service until the demand for accepting Bitcoin is proven.
"Small numbers (1-3) of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect."
Absolutely true, but in the last 10 years I've never met a single device with defective pixel, at least to a level I could spot directly. This discourages me a bit although I know the eventuality of defective pixels is flimsy.
I deeply hate defective pixels however, so my request to Pine64 is to consider adding a level of checking for the display, then charge for it. I would happily pay €25 to ge that guarantee; it can be done with a pattern generation software paired with a camera in front of the screen which according to an algorithm fills a field in a db with the machine/screen serial number and damage severity.
For example, 5 black pixels along the screen border wouldn't be much of a hassle, while even only one in the center of the screen and stuck at $FFFFFF would be a nightmare.
I would assume labor, not simply the cost of returns, is a huge factor for them. Considering that, a packaged a solution that works out-of-the-box with minimal setup might be a prerequisite for adopting your suggestion. For example, you could build your suggested solution in a manner that works with the Pinebook Pro's built-in camera and create a Debian package that can be installed alongside and easily invoked from whatever burn-in pipeline they use. Then they can just point the laptop at a mirror during burn-in.
I think that statement is pretty much to set expectations.
The people who "require perfection" are weeded out because they might have to live with something imperfect.
I've known some people like that. The sort who will drive over somewhere and complain because their $7 thing isn't what they expected.
That said, I think the pinephone being only $199 is selling themselves short. Having an open-source phone is really a special thing and they could charge $399 because they don't have any competition.
I think they're in it for other reasons than profit. good for them.
52 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 88.1 ms ] threadIt makes it even more difficult as so many of the OS and vendors advertise SMS and voice call support (which they have), so I have had to play the guessing game on a lot of the OSes that advertise SMS as working to discover this.
That being said, it is really exciting to see how far both have come, and I do think they both will be an awesome replacement to an Android phone sooner than later. Even more exciting is that they both are close to and will have mainline (EDIT: Mainline Linux) support, so they will be supported for a long time and not depend on a vendors willingness to support it.
What is your opinion on the hardware and build quality between the two? The Librem 5 seems so expensive for the hardware it includes, but I also don't have a baseline for knowing what is reasonable (since comparing against Android device makers isn't fair).
My huge annoyance with my Librem 5 is that the Wifi Signal is terrible. I literally have to be within 5 ft of my Wifi AP to have even a useable signal. It won't work if there's any obstruction or if it's beyond 15 ft line of sight. I have tried all of the suggested fixes, but this is still a pervasive issue. I hope it's fixed in a later batch.
The Pinephone has much more of a plastic feel. I have a Google Pixel 3a, and half the time I have to do a double take to see which is which. But the build quality on that is very nice too.
If you have other questions, feel free to let me know!
Have you tried a variety of distributions on each phone? Is there one that runs better/worse on each? Is there one that works good on both?
It seems like there's a very friendly but intense arms race to get stuff working (which I think is awesome) :-)
On the Pinephone I tried a whole bunch at first, but i haven't done that in a while. So far the front runners for a useable phone seem to be Ubuntu Touch and PostmarketOS. I want to try Sailfish OS again, as that seems very tempting as well. But in either case, I like to see the diversity in the OSes for the Pinephone.
I've got my PinePhone early mostly to play with and to support the company, but I feel like it'll probably be at least a year before I'm confident in carrying it around as a daily driver.
Probably the toughest thing to lose will be my bank's app... I was used to not having it when I was on Windows Mobile, but mobile check desposit has been really nice to have since I've been on my little iPhone lifeboat.
Battery life will get there, as will apps I'm sure. The real killer feature will be when Android apps are runnable.
Do you mean support in the mainline Linux kernel?
The current interface options are all going through telepathy-ofono, which works with group MMS messaging and attachments, but can't really handle attachments the right way because the telepathy IM framework itself has no notion of media messages (as mentioned at e.g. https://github.com/TelepathyIM/telepathy-morse/issues/21#iss...). Ubuntu Touch replaces MMSd with a Go rewrite called `nuntium` but still relies on telepathy-ofono for plumbing: http://docs.ubports.com/es/latest/systemdev/mms-infrastructu...
I think the right way to handle SMS+MMS, for now, would be to just write a dedicated GUI client for it that communicates with ofono MMSd via dbus. I'm thinking about doing it with Rust+GTK.
What do you need help with?
https://sr.ht/~anteater/mms-stack/
If a user complains that 'this commonly used feature no longer works,' it is never a solution to tell them they shouldn't use that feature.
Don't get me wrong, I'm really excited about both projects! But in my area (east coast US), people tend to just assume that you can receive MMS/group texts, they'll send them to you without a second thought, and the idea that you might not receive them won't even be on their minds.
Sad to see the keyboard delayed, that's an ambitious piece of hardware to build and one I am super excited about.
The F(x)tec Pro is the modern phone I want from a hardware standpoint, but it ships with Android. Apparently there's a Sailfish image available, but I'd have to flash it myself and I don't like buying phones preloaded with Android.
I would be interested to see how this thing does with battery life/drawing with a stylus. I'm not an artist but I use sketching to prototype wireframe/mechanical stuff.
I have used the Original Pinebook for about a year as my main private laptop and can say it was an enjoyable experience.
Of course it depends on what you want to do, it’s not high end but definitely usable and fun.
(and then yesterday i just tried windows 7 for the first time in a vm with 2 GiB allocated, and it was far snappier than i could have imagined).
I'm genuinely excited about the NAS tho.
'In other news, we recently ran a poll on Mastodon and Twitter asking whether you’d be interested in using cryptocurrency for PINE Store payments. On the whole, approximately a quarter of all respondents expressed interest in using such payment options. We’re now happy to announce that we’ll be accepting cryptocurrency payments (BTC, BCH, ETH and XRP) in the very near future. The payment infrastructure is currently being set up, and should be available as an option at checkout starting next month.'
Then an edit was added, like so:
'[edit] We no longer intend to support cryptocurrency payments at this time.'
Can you add more context here? A large minority of backers clearly want purchases via crypto, but I understand that implementations are where the rubber meets the road.
https://twitter.com/thepine64/status/1261360519266676737
I seem to be OOTL. What happened with BitPay?
This means the vast majority of users see a bitpay invoice, and can't figure out how to pay it with their bitcoin wallets.
"Small numbers (1-3) of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect."
Absolutely true, but in the last 10 years I've never met a single device with defective pixel, at least to a level I could spot directly. This discourages me a bit although I know the eventuality of defective pixels is flimsy. I deeply hate defective pixels however, so my request to Pine64 is to consider adding a level of checking for the display, then charge for it. I would happily pay €25 to ge that guarantee; it can be done with a pattern generation software paired with a camera in front of the screen which according to an algorithm fills a field in a db with the machine/screen serial number and damage severity. For example, 5 black pixels along the screen border wouldn't be much of a hassle, while even only one in the center of the screen and stuck at $FFFFFF would be a nightmare.
The people who "require perfection" are weeded out because they might have to live with something imperfect.
I've known some people like that. The sort who will drive over somewhere and complain because their $7 thing isn't what they expected.
That said, I think the pinephone being only $199 is selling themselves short. Having an open-source phone is really a special thing and they could charge $399 because they don't have any competition.
I think they're in it for other reasons than profit. good for them.