Bought a Pinephone convergence edition last summer. Came loaded with Kde and Plasma. It worked, somewhat, out of the box. Prompted me to do an update, from an on-screen button. I did that, and the phone was bricked. Could not get past the login screen. I put it away; brought it down to Arizona with me when I came down last week. Tried to boot it up. Would not accept the default password. So... I used my laptop the download Manjaro + Phosh, and write it to micro SD card. That worked. Got the phone running on it. But when trying to insert the SIM card, it slipped out of the adapter, and tore half the pin out of the socket. That design of SIM socket is CRAP! Such a failure should not be possible. It is a design flaw which is inexcusable. Anyway, I was able to pull up the remainder of the damaged socket pin, and got my currently-active SIM installed, using a different carrier piece. I was able to make one call, which went to recipient's voice mail.

Could not set time and date. Phone requires an Internet connection for time and date. Why not get those off the cell tower, like everybody else does? Fail.

With Phosh, once an app is opened, it cannot be shut down. All you can do is minimize it. Fail.

None of the touchscreen buttons on the top bar would work. Maybe they aren't supposed to? Who knows?

The touchscreen in general is very clumsy to use, and slow to respond, leading to buttons getting double-struck. Touch screens suck in principle, of course, and any device that purports to be a "computer" should have a physical keyboard. Like my late lamented Blackberry, now obsolete because of 4G.

I bought this phone because I wanted to avoid the inherent evil in the Apple and Google ecosystems. I wanted a phone with some of the useful functions of a smartphone, without all the cruft. Well, the "useful" functions basically don't work well enough to be useful, and there is still plenty of cruft, enough to choke a horse.

There needs to be a way to bypass the screen-unlock password. I will never put any information on my phone that I need to keep secret. Having to type in "123456" every time the screen goes to sleep is just too damned much monkey business.

Build a phone with the functionality of a Blackberry, give it the hardware switch options that the Pinephone has (one of the big selling points!), and I will buy it. If I can send and receive phone calls easily, send and receive text messages easily, and be able to use the Internet when on wifi, I will be a happy camper. I don't need a camera. I don't need a music player. I don't need to play Angry Birds.

Anyway, my SIM card has gone back into the flip phone. I'll see if I can sell the Pinephone to some masochist.

Hi, hoping that maybe someone has advice on this...

After finally getting my pinetab connected to wifi, I ran

What is causing this and how can I fix it?

After an event which caused my Pinecil V2 to stop working with a near-0V 3V3 rail until i desoldered the shorted USB C PD chip, my temperature readings jump to over 400°C. I am suspecting a voltage spike from a dodgy PSU to be the cause of this event, though i am not certian. The jumpy temperature reading only happens when the iron is heating up, not while in standby/off mode.

From what I can tell from the schematic, documentation and sourcecode, the Pinecil switches between heating and using the heater as a dodgy thermocouple. I am suspecting that another component got affected by the event and either gets stuck or take a longer-than-usual time to switch or settle. I have tried swapping the OP-Amp that is responible for reading the tip voltage, but to no avail, so i swapped the original one back in. I am currently going through the sourcecode to try and increase the measuring time and/or the time waited after switching off the heater power and before measureing the temperature.
This seems promising so far: https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS/blob/993...Q.cpp#L154

Does anyone else have a different idea to what could be the cause of this issue?

The community chat said that this may be due to the lack of bootloader on the device, if this is true, is there any way to install it?

Is it possible to connect the pinetime to Google Fit on android? Or another app that Google fit connects with?

Hello everybody,
I’m dealing with my new amazing PinePhone Pro just arrived.
I’m not new to linux but I’m facing a problem with external USB connections.

Currently, I’m running Kali Linux booting from Micro SSD.
No matter what I connect via USB, nothing is detected by my PinePhone Pro.
“Lsusb” command does not list any external device.

Is there something I’m missing?
Do the USB port have to be “activated”?

Thank you for your help!

Of course I run NetBSD on my Pinebooks Pro, but I kept Manjaru on my wife's.  She doesn't update it; so twice a year I do.  I kind of expected the totally broken boot that I've had before doing this.  But this time was bizarre.  Halfway through the updates it prompted me for the current user's password.  It was at that point I discovered that all user passwords had been deleted/changed/#?

So I used my PBP to create an emergency boot SD and created new passwords for all users on the Manjaru-PBP-in-question.

Now, I can continue updating, but I am faced with "could not satisfy dependencies: kxmlgui required by libkipi - kservice required by libkipi".

What is the way to recover from this, which I presume is due to too much time between updates?

It has not been possible to get a replacement battery for the PineBook Pro from the Pine shop. for some time now.

I've been looking for a compatible replacement. As far as I can tell, the model identifier for the original is WTL-40110175, which appears to have come from WTL in China. Their website no longer lists that.identifier.

I've searched on the numeric (40110175), which produced a couple of hits with different prefixes and suffices. They seem to be similar in voltage, &c., though only 8000 mAh, and look similar.

They are expensive enough that I want to ensure they are mechanically and electrically compatible before buying. (At least one offered has 2 variants, with different numbers of wires. The original battery has 7 to the connector).

Can anyone advise me how to ensure that I order a correct one.

I am interested in using the PCIe connector in the pinetab2, however I can't seem to find a suitable ribbon cable for connecting to it.

The connection appears to be the the part labeled U7001 in the component sheet and it confirmed looking at the schematic (page 36) where the pinout of U7001 connector is given and it is referred to as NVMe PCIE 2.0.

The only connector I was able to find was the connector for the pinebook pro. The problem however is that this connector would place the card exactly on top of the battery where there is no room for a card.

Here I show the outline (white outline) of where the pinebook 2 adapter would be in the pinetab, and the ideal position where an expansion card would fit (green rectangle).

   


The idea is that there are several wifi/bluetooth cards that work with PCIe, with various different physical formats, and most of them are small enough to fit above or below the battery in the pinetab2. The only problem is just getting a cable that will allow it to fit in the right spot.


My two questions are whether anyone knows whether there is another source of the ribbon cable that is needed for this connector? If I could just find the ribbon cable with approximately the right shape, then I could use the adapter from the pinebook pro and move the battery slightly in the pinetab2 to get it to fit.

Alternatively, it could be possible to cut the ribbon cable and solder it again to give it a different shape, however for this I don't know what the tolerance would be for the change in impedence and possible capacitance (perhaps leading to cross-talk) between the wires in such a pcie connection. Does anyone know how carefully engineered a PCIe connection must be for something like a wifi card?

I saw the PineTabV back in stock but shipping comes out at $74!  that's before ~100eur import fees.  So that's going to add up to around 300 eur! more than a galaxy tab A8 LTE   As much as I'd like to continue supporting the pine64 community and concept, I dont see how this will work once they switch to the advertised 'retail prices'. 

But it got me wondering about the pine64 community... I am still new here, and having fun messing around with my PP and Zig, but in the short 8 months since my purchase, blog posts have dried up, developers seem to be leaving, store links are outdated and information missing or misleading.  I know there are other channels more active than this board, but the lack of transparency and updates here is a little concerning.  I'd like to commit more time to the PP, but seems kinda pointless if the community is crumbling?

So what is the state of the union?