Is the Pinephone any good?

[Never Scored]

These phones are theoretically useable, but you might discover that some of the apps, you rely on, require Google services - your local ride hailing service, an app used for accessing services at some event etc.

You should work toward purging that shit from your life anyway. IMO. As time goes on these apps and the data collected will be used to do things like raise your insurance rates and I also think we're headed in the direction of government passing legislation that allows them to track your activity via apps that Apple and Google will preinstall on their phones using the pandemic as a Trojan horse to get the legislation passed, ala the September 11th Attacks. Once you come to rely on these apps, they have you by the balls. If you can hold out you should.

Might as well use a dumb phone.

I do now.

 

[DidYouJustSayThat]

You should work toward purging that shit from your life anyway. IMO. As time goes on these apps and the data collected will be used to do things like raise your insurance rates and I also think we're headed in the direction of government passing legislation that allows them to track your activity via apps that Apple and Google will preinstall on their phones using the pandemic as a Trojan horse to get the legislation passed, ala the September 11th Attacks. Once you come to rely on these apps, they have you by the balls. If you can hold out you should.




I do now.

Don't care, my convenience and hours saved each week top any down-the-line might-be concerns.

 

[Never Scored]

Don't care, my convenience and hours saved each week top any down-the-line might-be concerns.

How many hours do you estimate your smart phone actually saves you? I bet it's between 0 and 1.

 

[tehpope]

You should work toward purging that shit from your life anyway. IMO. As time goes on these apps and the data collected will be used to do things like raise your insurance rates and I also think we're headed in the direction of government passing legislation that allows them to track your activity via apps that Apple and Google will preinstall on their phones using the pandemic as a Trojan horse to get the legislation passed, ala the September 11th Attacks. Once you come to rely on these apps, they have you by the balls. If you can hold out you should.

There are open source replacements for GAPPS. And the app is none the wiser.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Doesn't Android have a thing where if you delete ALL the google apps (like Captive Portal Login) your phone just gets inherently worse to use? I hope that isn't a gross exaggeration.

 

[tehpope]

Doesn't Android have a thing where if you delete ALL the google apps (like Captive Portal Login) your phone just gets inherently worse to use? I hope that isn't a gross exaggeration.

I don't think you can do that stock. I think most of the GAPPS are built in to the rom of most versions of Android. 3rd Party ROMs from like XDA have to have them installed separately since the Licenses for GAPPS prevents people from distributing them or some shit.

 

[Troonos]

Does it have the same water resistance and durability as mainstream phones? Gorilla Glass? Metal/polycarbonate body?

 

[Never Scored]

There are open source replacements for GAPPS. And the app is none the wiser.

I've used Lineage OS and the apps from F-Droid before, but are you saying there's a way under stock Android to say, trick the Uber app into using Open Map from the F-Droid store?

Doesn't Android have a thing where if you delete ALL the google apps (like Captive Portal Login) your phone just gets inherently worse to use? I hope that isn't a gross exaggeration.

I have this small Android tablet I use around the house sometimes that's not supported by any custom kernels that I can find and as far as I can tell no exploit has been found to unlock the bootloader. I attempted to degoogle it. I've disabled all google apps and Lenovo apps including the play store and google play services. It still tried to phone home to Google anayltics on occasion so I blocked that at a network level. You can access the play store anonymously through an app called Aurora, but most apps require play services to be enabled and will not work. You can download shit like Newpipe from F-Droid anyway and they're better than the official apps.

The wider issue that Pinephone attempts to address is most phones have their bootloaders locked down like fort knox, so you can't buy a phone and put the software you want on it. I had a Pixel XL at one point that happened to have been originally purchased at Bell that I wanted to put Lineage OS on for example. It turned out the only way to unlock the bootloader was to factory reset the phone, not allow it to connect to any wifi or cellular network during setup, delete a file using an ADB serial connection, then root the phone, unlock the bootloader, install a custom recovery followed by your custom rom. Don't get me wrong, it worked great once I did all that and got Lineage on it, but it's just too much fucking around for the average user.

I think a project along the lines of Fairphone that ditches all the environmental virtue signaling bullshit in favour of a better price point would be a more productive project. Basically I think a $200-300 Android phone using more standard and thus widely supported hardware where the bootloader is unlocked by default that allows you to load custom kernels in the default recovery as you please just like a standard PC would be a better project. We'll see what becomes of Pinephone though. Maybe someone will build a Lineage OS port.

I'm very tempted to buy a Pinebook Pro and mess around with it, but I don't really need one so I find it hard the justify the $200. It's just kind of cool that they're attempting to make completely open source devices.

Look, at the end of the day these devices are made for a certain type of person and if you're the kind of person who uses a bunch of apps on your phone to navigate through life, it's probably not for you.

 

[din_far]

Look, at the end of the day these devices are made for a certain type of person and if you're the kind of person who uses a bunch of apps on your phone to navigate through life, it's probably not for you.

> If you want a smartphone, don't get a non-googled android smartphone

It was a similar situation when Android first came out. I remember my friends talking about all the customizing they did on their Droids and me deliberately avoiding that endless time sink by having an iPhone.

But I still pine for a secure and useful phone that is not attached to Apple or Google.

 

[Never Scored]

> If you want a smartphone, don't get a non-googled android smartphone

It was a similar situation when Android first came out. I remember my friends talking about all the customizing they did on their Droids and me deliberately avoiding that endless time sink by having an iPhone.

But I still pine for a secure and useful phone that is not attached to Apple or Google.

What would you define as a useful phone? What does it have to do?

 

[XYZpdq]

Does it have the same water resistance and durability as mainstream phones? Gorilla Glass? Metal/polycarbonate body?

it probably has as good an ability to stick it in a ziplock bag for water resistance

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Developing a Linux phone seems like a stiff challenge. They have to get both sound and wireless to work at the same time.

 

[Sage In All Fields]

I have one. It's super easy to distrohop, just flash an SD card and that's it. Mobian is awesome on it but everything's still super buggy and slow and applications will randomly crash, headphones work fine, Firefox desktop is quite choppy but works, Telegram desktop is pretty good but often doesn't play video and folders mess up the UI.
UBports is very stable but is very lacking apps and features, to the point where plugging headphones in still doesn't switch the audio to headphones. It has a basic Telegram client but it's extraordinarily slow, crashes alot and is missing alot of features.
Back camera is working on both but even basic stuff like focus and simple pre-processing isn't there yet. I do quite like the design and although it's bigger than I'd prefer it still feels decent in my hand. It does get extremely hot if you're doing anything like streaming video. I think there's alot of graphics stuff missing so you can't really watch YouTube at higher than 480p without extreme choppiness.

Does it have the same water resistance and durability as mainstream phones? Gorilla Glass? Metal/polycarbonate body?

It's most definitely not waterproof. Body is some kind of plastic and it comes with a screen protector, but it gets scratched very easily so I don't think it's Gorilla Glass.

 

[Never Scored]

I have one. It's super easy to distrohop, just flash an SD card and that's it. Mobian is awesome on it but everything's still super buggy and slow and applications will randomly crash, headphones work fine, Firefox desktop is quite choppy but works, Telegram desktop is pretty good but often doesn't play video and folders mess up the UI.
UBports is very stable but is very lacking apps and features, to the point where plugging headphones in still doesn't switch the audio to headphones. It has a basic Telegram client but it's extraordinarily slow, crashes alot and is missing alot of features.
Back camera is working on both but even basic stuff like focus and simple pre-processing isn't there yet. I do quite like the design and although it's bigger than I'd prefer it still feels decent in my hand. It does get extremely hot if you're doing anything like streaming video. I think there's alot of graphics stuff missing so you can't really watch YouTube at higher than 480p without extreme choppiness.
View attachment 1553879


It's most definitely not waterproof. Body is some kind of plastic and it comes with a screen protector, but it gets scratched very easily so I don't think it's Gorilla Glass.

I'm very interested in it. Can you rely on it to call/text? I don't care if apps are buggy and crash, but I'd like to reliably get my calls and texts.

 

[Sage In All Fields]

I'm very interested in it. Can you rely on it to call/text? I don't care if apps are buggy and crash, but I'd like to reliably get my calls and texts.

Generally calls are workable. It did once crash when someone tried to call me and on another occasion I had the volume turned down while it was locked so when someone called me I couldn't hear them without switching to speakerphone. DTMF also doesn't work at all.
SMS is totally fine but MMS doesn't work.

 

[Liber Pater]

it gets scratched very easily so I don't think it's Gorilla Glass.

What kind of 3rd-party cases (if any) would fit the PinePhone?

 

[Sage In All Fields]

What kind of 3rd-party cases (if any) would fit the PinePhone?

Pine64 sells cases on their site:

https://store.pine64.org/product/pinephone-hard-protective-case/

PINEPHONE SOFT TPU PROTECTIVE CASE – “REDUCE DIGITAL GAP” DONATION PROGRAM – PINE STORE

You might be able to get one of the big iPhone cases to sort of fit but I don't have one to try.

 

[bippu_as_fuck_ls400]

Generally calls are workable.

How is the cell modem performance?

Does it handle switching cells seamlessly, while driving for example?

 

[Sage In All Fields]

How is the cell modem performance?

Does it handle switching cells seamlessly, while driving for example?

The performance is decent, it does have trouble switching between networks if you're moving fast but even then it's still usable.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Developing a Linux phone seems like a stiff challenge. They have to get both sound and wireless to work at the same time.

Look, Linux works fine with sound as long as you never switch sound devices and with wireless as long as you only use wpa_supplicant to connect to a single wireless network.