There is a lot of dated information on this forum and elsewhere. The information below is current as of this posting.

I bought a Pinephone beta edition within the past few weeks and had multiple hurdles before i had a working phone. The included version of Manjaro OS is dated so upgrading the OS is mandatory. Found that the JumpDrive tool can be useful to erase and prepare the internal eMMC storage from a laptop. I was able to use a MacBook Pro with macOS to make boot microSDs and manage things, did not need Linux. Current versions of Mobium, PostMarketOS, and Manjaro do not need a boot manager installed such as Tow-Boot, they will install on their own and boot. Mobium and PostMarketOS have Tow-Boot functionality at boot with the correct button combination which exposes the eMMC storage as a USB device. It would be good workflow if this functionality can be extended to the external microSD so one can perform complex file management from a laptop. Be careful inserting and removing SIM cards, the slot is delicate. Expect to do a lot of microsSD and SIM card inserting until you find out how to make things work.

The swapping of an activated SIM card from another phone does not work with Tracfone anymore, calls are blocked although one can receive text messages. When attempting to make a call you will get a pre-recorded message saying something like the phone device does not match the activated SIM. With any further calls nothing happens. Tracfone support looked up the phone IMEI and said the carrier that permits the Pinephone is T-Mobile. Tracfone said that in order to use Tracfone service one must use a T-Mobile SIM and they will accommodate the SIM. They said that Tracfone still uses T-Mobile as one of their service carriers until sometime next year ( probably until contracts run out and then Verizon only). Verizon acquired Tracfone a few years ago, so Verizon is not permitting the Pinephone on their network.

At a local T-Mobile store, the rep used a test SIM to see if the phone could connect to the T-Mobile network. It took around 10 minutes for the phone to finally connect. During troubleshooting i rebooted the phone, rep checked settings, rep explained that data must be turned on in order to get everything working. The phone has current version of Mobian with Phosh. I will note that PostMarketOS with Phosh is also good. Manjaro with Plasma had some show-stopper bugs athough the UI has some good design ideas that should be migrated to Phosh, such as showing apps as a single list, hiding the search app box, closing apps with a close button, and more. After that i paid for a service plan, inserted the T-mobil SIM card and.... phone does not recognize the SIM card, get question mark icon. Took the phone home, played around a bit and the phone starts recognizing the SIM and working, no explanation. I will likely have to change phone numbers as the number assigned is already getting junk calls and texting. T-mobile has low cost pre-paid plans and do not require any information to be provided for service except a PIN number that is used to make payments for service. Although i do not have the need for this kind of anonymity currently, the information may be useful to others.

I have Mobian installed on my PPP and when I plug in the USB, it often doesn't come up with the charging indicator. I have to unplug it and then plug it in again for the indicator to come up. Then, after a few minutes, I'll hear a click sound and the charging indicator will be off again. Does anyone else have this issue? Is there some work-around?

Hi,

Have Manjaro Phosh Beta 30 installed on PPP (with keyboard). Overall, works pretty good.

Have a few issues I would appreciate input on.

1. Phosh Updating

I see there is now Phosh Beta 32 available.

Do I need to update via new image file or can it be done using Pacman or ?

If can be done either way, is there advantage to doing it one way or the other?


2. Battery Charge Indicator

I use Keyboard unit with the PPP, what percentage  should I see next to battery icon? (100% or 200%)


3. Jittery Display - Settings

Most of the time, the display looks OK. However, when I try to change the display settings, the settings window is very jittery (jumpy looking). As a result, I can not change the display settings!

I have similar issue with changing setting preferences in Firefox browser and think it happened in some other situations.

Any way to fix thing this? This is a big problem in usability of PPP.


4. Display Usability

In some situations there is too much space above and below a window or app. This is really impacts usability of display when you use PPP with Keyboard and display is in landscape orientation.

Any ways to improve this?


Thank you for any and all input.

Mark

I have 8 GB of physical memory and I get that on Fishwaldo's image.

When using his kernel, modules and device tree from https://github.com/Fishwaldo/Star64_linux on Armbian https://www.armbian.com/star64/, I get only 4 GB of physical memory.

Hi,

I recently came across these tweets related to the Pinephone: https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/161...83084547#m

Twitter link: https://twitter.com/GrapheneOS/status/16...8783084547

I wanted to know whether Pine64 still markets the Pinephone as having open source firmware in the baseband, and whether the company sticks by this claim, and if so, the reasoning behind it.

I can't see the original tweets by what is purportedly Pine64 staff, so I don't know a lot about this. I also couldn't find pages where Pine64 advertises the Pinephone as doing this.

Hello, Postmarket os 22, pinephone daily driver now for over a year now. Plugged in my phone, while the phone was running, this morning to a USB-A to USB-C charge cable and the usb connector started melting down. Melted the back cover, the battery is ok, but the cable and usb-c side board is toast. The cable and power brick are both anker brand. Voltage and ripple on power brick seems more than reasonable, so I am ruling that out. Is this a common failure? Any idea on cause? I have never had anything like this happen before with any phone. Any guidance would be great

Cheers!

I received my Quartz64 a little while ago and have been experimenting a bit. The network is extremely slow when receiving data, but does the usual 940 Mbit/s full saturation for 1 gigabit when sending. Please see below iperf3 outputs. 10.0.0.201 is my Quartz64 model A and 10.0.0.4 is a pretty powerful amd64 Linux workstation.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on 5201 (test #1)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Accepted connection from 10.0.0.4, port 32952
[  5] local 10.0.0.201 port 5201 connected to 10.0.0.4 port 32954
[ ID] Interval          Transfer    Bitrate
[  5]  0.00-1.00  sec  110 MBytes  926 Mbits/sec                 
[  5]  1.00-2.00  sec  112 MBytes  941 Mbits/sec                 
[  5]  2.00-3.00  sec  112 MBytes  941 Mbits/sec                 
[  5]  3.00-4.00  sec  112 MBytes  941 Mbits/sec                 
[  5]  4.00-5.00  sec  112 MBytes  942 Mbits/sec                 
[  5]  5.00-6.00  sec  112 MBytes  941 Mbits/sec                 
[  5]  6.00-7.00  sec  112 MBytes  941 Mbits/sec                 
[  5]  7.00-8.00  sec  112 MBytes  941 Mbits/sec                 
[  5]  8.00-9.00  sec  112 MBytes  941 Mbits/sec                 
[  5]  9.00-10.00  sec  112 MBytes  941 Mbits/sec                 
[  5]  10.00-10.00  sec  308 KBytes  885 Mbits/sec                 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval          Transfer    Bitrate
[  5]  0.00-10.00  sec  1.09 GBytes  940 Mbits/sec                  receiver
-----------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on 5201 (test #2)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Accepted connection from 10.0.0.4, port 54688
[  5] local 10.0.0.201 port 5201 connected to 10.0.0.4 port 54704
[ ID] Interval          Transfer    Bitrate        Retr  Cwnd
[  5]  0.00-1.00  sec  1.17 MBytes  9.81 Mbits/sec  41  2.83 KBytes     
[  5]  1.00-2.00  sec  827 KBytes  6.78 Mbits/sec  23  2.83 KBytes     
[  5]  2.00-3.00  sec  1.37 MBytes  11.5 Mbits/sec  48  2.83 KBytes     
[  5]  3.00-4.00  sec  2.42 MBytes  20.3 Mbits/sec  53  2.83 KBytes     
[  5]  4.00-5.00  sec  1.24 MBytes  10.4 Mbits/sec  37  2.83 KBytes     
[  5]  5.00-6.00  sec  2.25 MBytes  18.9 Mbits/sec  102  2.83 KBytes     
[  5]  6.00-7.00  sec  1.12 MBytes  9.42 Mbits/sec  95  2.83 KBytes     
[  5]  7.00-8.00  sec  3.08 MBytes  25.9 Mbits/sec  234  2.83 KBytes     
[  5]  8.00-9.00  sec  3.11 MBytes  26.1 Mbits/sec  73  2.83 KBytes     
[  5]  9.00-10.00  sec  3.48 MBytes  29.2 Mbits/sec  72  2.83 KBytes     
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval          Transfer    Bitrate        Retr
[  5]  0.00-10.00  sec  20.1 MBytes  16.8 Mbits/sec  778            sender


Look at all those retransmits! I've verified that the cable and switch port and everything else in the setup are otherwise fine. This happens in both Arch and Plebian. Did I receive a bad board, should I submit an RMA? Or is there something else going on here?

Hi!

I've ordered a PineTab2 a few days ago. The article title says shipping will occur mid-may, which we've passed. Will the order be included in the next planned shipment, or would I have to wait until next batch is produced? And if so, what time frame should I be expecting?

Strange power behaviour of chain: Baseus 100W GAN Charger + Pinecil V2(+short tip).
After pressing button to heat up the solder tip, Pinecil starts heating, and in some moment Charger resets TypeC output, I press again it tries to heat up again and resets again, and after several tries, it reach threshold temperature and after that I can solder easily. Seems not enough power, and charger detects power peaks and resets output.
This is 100W charger from Baseus:  https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003117435688.html , I am using 100W TypeC cable.
I tried other cables, doesnt help. I tried to limit power in Pinecil's "advanced seting" to 65 to 50 W to 40W - doesnt help.
I tried to disconnect all other consumers, and remain only Pinecil connected to this Charger - doesnt help.
This Baseus charges my 65W Lenovo laptop easily.

Is there ideas what to check? Maybe some other advanced settings to try?

I would like to use the Pine Phone auxiliary microSD slot with a memory card as external storage for data files. I would like to access the auxiliary microSD card from a laptop to transfer and manage files. Is there an easy way to do this with the card in the phone? I can take the card out and use a card reader, but from a typical user perspective that is not good workflow. When i use the tow-boot like functionality in Mobian at boot i only see the internal eMMC memory as a storage device from a Mac or Windows laptop, the auxiliary microSD is not shown. The Mobian Phosh Portfolio app can see the auxiliary microSD which is formatted as FAT to be compatible with Mac and Windows. I am unable to connect the phone to a Linux virtual machine so cannot evaluate things using Linux. Any help is appreciated.