I blogged about how the reviewers of mobile phones never ask the right questions.

When writing that article it struck me that the PinePhone would rank much higher in the reviews if reviewers cared about the right things when reviewing mobile phones.

https://gitlab.com/as400l/pp-sailfishos-images


02.11.2020 - new img added.

I have the ubports edition of the phone and I ordered the new board with the deal they are giving but now I wonder what to do with the old board when the new one arrives? Any interesting ideas?

I got my Manjaro pinephone today and currently tinkering. Most things work out of the box, WiFi was straight in and even seems more stable than my android phone which is a big checkmark in the pinephone's box.

The only problem is I can't seem to configure my data connection. I'm happy hacking into text files if need be, but I have no idea where to start. My Telco's APN details are here

https://apn-settings.com/australia/telst...-settings/

As far as I can see, the modem supports the LTE B1, B2 and B28 and I seem to be having no issue making calls, but data is just not connecting at all. Can someone give me some pointers about where to start debugging it?

Hello guys, I have a question

Is the RPi Module  compatible with the SOPINE Cluster board and vice versa? Can I use a SOPINE in a RPi Compute Module board?

Thanks!

First of all I'd like to say "I love my Pinebook Pro!"

Next, I'll state my problem.

I am unable to boot from sd-cards.

I can still boot from the main drive and I used to be able to boot from the sd-card but... I installed Armbian on the Pro (which is awesome) and I installed "firmware" through armbian-config. Maybe I should not have done that but I have had nothing but great experiences with Armbian on my other Pine64 boards so I didn't think anything bad would happen from doing this.

How can I restore the original boot preferences?

Thanks!

Bryan P.

Does the BH mainboard upgrade (https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-com...ts-owners/) fix the USB PD issue with docks and hubs, or do we also need to replace the USB-C side board?

Manjaro edition Pinephone was not shipped yet, but it gives me time for some questions:

1. Is Plasma Mobile more or less buggy than Phosh?
I can see videos of Phosh mostly, and videos of Plasma Mobile are mostly old (August or before).
I prefer KDE since it runs more smooth on my PC, but I am willing to contribute to both.

2. Does Phosh or Plasma Mobile have a 10-key keyboard option?
I know that Ubuntu Touch has, since I'm using it on an old Nexus 5.
Probably not used much in western countries, but here in Japan we usually prefer a 10-key keyboard over a qwerty keyboard since it's more familiar if you come from a garake, keys are bigger, and keys are sorted conveniently in the way Japanese syllables are sorted like.

For those who don't know, garake or ガラケー are what you guys would call "flip phone", modern garake are running a de-googled Android under the hood, plus super restricted to make it feel more like a traditional pre-smartphone era garake.
However, now with the push of smartphones, popularity of Twitter and manga apps, and the slow killing of LINE support on them (all 2020 models come without LINE at all!), garake phones started to slowly become less and less used over the past 2 years.

3. I know about Anbox to run Android apps on a Linux phone, but does voice calling over LINE (or a different chat app like WhatsApp or Telegram, I don't think it really matters which one) work via Anbox?
And is it reliable?

I don't expect the best from a phone that is still under development, and I'm willing to help in the development (mostly language support, Japanese translations in KDE are often either lacky or weird, or adding a 10-key keyboard if it doesn't exist).

But my provider requires everything to be done over the phone as of late, which has operators who keep looping over a question for 40 minutes that can easily be answered within 40 seconds, so I prefer to not get a second SIM card from them, or at the very least get a second SIM card from a different provider.

And unlocking my SIM card can be done only once per 101 days, so as soon as my SIM card gets activated on the PinePhone, I'll be stuck with it for at least 101 days.

   



The console is dead, especially on a phone.  Right?  It is Halloween so lets bring it back to life



One of the things I want to have is the ability to keep a small BT keyboard around and be able to remote admin, instead of always having a laptop on hand.  Well none of the graphical terminals work well on PinePhone so what to do?  How about the console?  With a little attention it can be made usable!  That pic is ssh into a remote system and editing a PHP file with vim.




Install the kbd package first.  Then we need to make the text readable and landscape mode.  Easy enough.




Modify /etc/init.d/consolefont:

Hi All, I'm trying to read the BMA421 on my P8 but all I get from it on I2C is all zeros. Reading chip id gets zero, reading acceleration gets zero. I checked the SDA and SCL lines with logic analyser and they look good. Anybody seen this before?