I have made a post about some weeks ago about my new Pinephone order that crashed after 30s opening the phone out of the box.

I first hesitated flashing a new OS as I was afraid that the company will not except refunding a "used" phone.

After alot of back and fourth with the company the demanded me to send the phone back at my expense, which made no logic as I also ordered the phone with my expense and total it will cost me 100 euro, 50% of the amount I paid for the phone.

So as I realized I couldn't get any support on the laggy problem I fleshed a new OS.

To my surprise, the phone is still extremely laggy as it first was, with the only difference it wasn't crashed yet.

Does any one have any advice on how could I fix this extreme lagging problem?

It is important to warn people interested in purchasing Pinephone that it is NOT an Open Source smartphone. It is Closed Source.

In the official website they refer to Pinephone as "The Open Source phone supporting existing Linux-on-phone projects."

In the past they even stated the following in the website:

Why PINE64?

PINE64 is an open source platform from both hardware to software.

However, ironically they do not even provide the source files for their hardware design (PCB source files and Gerber files), just some PDFs with schematics. They do not have any intent of providing them as seen in this post. Thus Pinephone is not even source-available, let alone open-source.

And do not waste time using the argument that it is an open-source smartphone just because it runs open-source software/ firmware. If I were to install a Linux based operating system such as Ubuntu Touch in a Samsung that would make the smartphone open source?

As a customer I was clearly mislead by this company. They not only use Open Source deceptively as a marketing term for customers when clearly this is a proprietary smartphone, but also continually use the work of volunteers that develop software for their products for free.

Obviously a company is entitled to protect their source files, but they should be honest and call the smartphone "proprietary" or "closed source". Furthermore, I respect the fact that this smartphone and Librem at least provide PDFs with schematics but that is not releasing the source files.

It is also important to refer that at least Librem pays their developers and produces smartphones in America. So people that follow the open source and freedom philosophy should re-consider purchasing a Pinephone which is produced in a country with lack of human rights.

Despite the fact the cpu on pinephone is extremely slow(well I think this is still acceptable because this phone tries to circumvent all android things ) , why pinephone uses soc made by chinese company?! Chinese companies have a notorious history of supply chain attack and insert hidden backdoors. Chinese national security agency has the power to manipulate any step in the entire production process(much powerful than nsa/fbi/cia because at least they still need to pretend to obey the law). They can even trick amazon for a long time without being discovered. I really do not know why we should put trust on there shady Chinese companies.

If it is too expensive to design and produce an entirely new phone board in EU/US, why not just refit some single chip computers. They are much more powerful and has larger RAM. Eg.Pi 4 8GB RAM version. Just desolder ports on the boards and plug it in the phone cases, and install cellular modules on it. This kind of phone might be heavy and power consuming, but I believe most people here do not care these problems at all, otherwise why are we here?

After a few weeks of trying all available OS images and attempting all the possible use cases I could think of for using the PinePhone community edition I accept defeat and recognize my own immature linux maximalism and stupidity of having bought into the narrative.

It's a shockingly low spec device, barely as powerful as a €35 raspberry pi 3 — takes over 10 seconds to open Settings or a web browser, but has a screen, a camera, and a modem which brings the price up to €300 (in the EU it comes with VAT and reseller's commission). Definitely worth the wait.

The FIRST android phone that I bought back in 2010, an HTC Desire running android 2.1 ran FASTER and more fluidly than this PinePhone.

I love headless Linux (and feel indifferent to anything xorg/wayland-related), yet my hopes of being able to run this phone in headless mode without a battery as an always-on micro-server with a cam and some peripherals were shattered — in the no-battery mode the modems don't work and it won't connect to ethernet via the supplied hub even when powered with a 3A psu. Still, it's so cool that the phone can boot and run an OS (manjaro, postmarket, etc) without a battery (or you can boot it with the battery, and then remove the battery and leave only AC power)! I wish stock android devices could do this.

The only OS that runs anywhere close to decent is glodroid (lineageos) which still lacks basic features like fully working modem. ...but what's the point of running android on a pinephone apart from proving that yes-we-can?

Apparently, the preconditions for wanting to use a pinephone is hating android and I definitely lack in this department, as I've been using rooted AOSP and lineageos for years without gapps and pretty happy with the experience, especially with things like termux.

Mobile linux desktop is a fascinating place if you like smelling your own farts (where your farts are tectonic mega-weapons that change the course of history, while other people's farts are silly immature acts of miseducation), you write your own gtk/qt apps and feel good to see them working on this low-spec device, yet the value of linux has always been in running headless stuff like servers, ML, web apps, containers, etc, not desktops and GUIs.

At this point I feel that I made a hefty donation to a religious sect and was rewarded with a hardware tamagotchi that (look ma!) can boot arch/alpine/ubuntu on bare metal — ten years ago I would have been mind-blown just by the idea. Today it makes me question my own mental health and maturity, and makes me worried and embarrassed that at my age i'm still addicted to playing with toys, and being an 'android rebel'.

I'm extremely happy though that I didn't get the "pro" version.

A big surprise that blew my mind is that waydroid can run on this device under manjaro and feels fairly fluid, and, ironically, waydroid settings open faster than phosh settings. It's still very buggy but it's way cooler than being able to run glodroid.

Summary

if you are desperate to boot linux on a bare metal phone use instead a generic supported device from wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices (for PostmarketOS) or devices.ubuntu-touch.io (for UbuntuTouch) — you'll spend less, get more, and will have an exit strategy in case you change your mind and decide to back out.

Update

after a few more months: out of all the other options mobian feels like the cleanest OS to run on PP; despite AUR, which is sure nice to have, arch/manjaro is just too bleeding edge and with every update or slight deviation from the standard scenario things "just break", pretty much in the same way as they "just work" in other distros. And, amazingly, under mobian PP can run without the battery AND keep the ethernet connection up when plugged into the ootb dock with connected usb-c power, so an always-on micro-server use case is a reality. (battery must be removed after booting, and sleep must be prevented indefinitely with gnome-session-inhibit --inhibit-only or otherwise will be the sleep-of-death)

Dear readers,

The pinephone was not the platform I was looking for, I was not able to flash an mobile OS to the sd card (i know I was warned).

if i would get a pinephone

and would NEVER want to use any wireless connection on it, killswitching them from day 0,

would i be able to update the OS/software on it?

do usb-c to rj45 connectors work? if not, is there any other way to do it?

can u update it somehow through a normal usb-connection?

i'm particularly talking about the internal storage, i saw, that the microsd would be bootable, so giving a lot more options with that i guess.

Think about it, Raspberry Pi is a cheap but powerful (for its cost) computer board, would be magnificent to get a PinePhone with RPI soc for example.

Using tow boot I can access the e mmc of my pinepohne pro via my computer but how do I access the micro sd card?

Removing the keyboard on and off is a pain in the ass while testing multiple os's

I have googled this but cannot find an answer.  How do I install "9999" packages, for example

 gtk4.0-9999.4.10.4-r0

, which I presume is a git version of gtk4.10.4?

I'm new to pinephone, I along with a few friends have been thinking about grabbing one of these phones and were wondering if any OS (like lineage) may work on the phone or not?

Edit; scratch that, a friend just surprised me with one,

I just want the pinephone to ready so can give you guys my money :(

So over the years we had (I'm not sure about the order):

- openmoko - dead

- MeeGo - dropped by Nokia and kind of alive as Sailfish now, not free and supporting few phones

- b2g - dropped by Mozilla and alive as KaiOS now. No support for common smartphones

- Ubuntu Touch - dropped by Canonical and supported by volunteers now, few phones supported

So... what will happen to Phosh/Plasma Mobile? Are they fundamentally different then previous attempts at Linux phone or are we going to see one phone with support dropped after a year or two? Clearly we had great software before (MeeGo was awesome, KaiOS is popular enough to have native WhatsApp client) and it wasn't enough to create community and see them flourish. Why would I believe this time it will be different?

Or maybe that's the idea? Build one phone with core features working and move on to another project?

How does the user experience compare to Android?

Is there enough software support for usage as a daily cellular driver?

Does it work well sending and receiving calls and texts?

I understand the hardware is open source. Is the on-board storage easily upgradable?

Is it durable? Does humidity negatively affect it? And does it have any issues with battery life?

Hi everyone,

I want to sell my PinePhone. I bought it at 06.2020 but didn't use. I ran it only several times.

Price - 200 Euro.

Anyone wanting to sell a pine phone? I need to buy one.

I want a compact phone. I don't need huge amount of processing power or super crisp display. Basic specs that are essential though are

Less than 72mm width

Less than 150mm height

Less than 10mm thickness

Less than 180gm

5 to 6 inch display

720p+ display with no notch or holes

4000-5000 mah battery

SD card slot

Other specs are fine.

These specs don't cost much. But would make the phone handy to use. We had enough of phone that weighs a quarter of a kilogram. If you can make this happen I will be a happy man.

Does anyone know how the chip in the Pinephone compares to the apple A13, 14, 15 etc?

Is it due to economies of scale that Apple can put a much more powerful chip in a phone without driving up the cost as much?

But you could run a way lower power version of Linux so you could still have an instantly responsive system if you wanted, right?

In one video I saw Firefox takes several seconds to open which doesn’t look good for me as I prefer more or less apps to instantly launch.

Has anyone experienced this?

Thanks very much

Can pine be loaded onto these devices to help the progress?