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Dedicated Chat and Phone. - Printable Version

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Dedicated Chat and Phone. - Chief - 07-07-2022

Greetings folks,
After reading plenty of issues related to sound and phone I thought I might suggest a possible solution for Pine64 staff to consider. Since Android devices work excellent as phones but not so great as data devices whereas PinePhone works excellent with data but not so great as a phone ... why not marry the two together? Is it possible to have a PinePhone flashed from the factory with a dedicated Chat/Phone system separate from any o.s.? Further to this a system that can boot from the dedicated phone app with no other o.s. on the eMMC card? In doing so people can flash whatever o.s. they wish BUT the phone/chat system are already there preinstalled by factory and unaffected by any o.s. except where an address book is created in any Linux o.s. This way the phone will always work regardless and the sound system also dedicated to phone/chat. On the PPP we can flash tow boot to the SPI chip which I have done so I am suggesting something similar to that. So instead of a rolling update that destroys (potentially sometimes) the usability of the device a dedicated system unaffected by any update except where a flash update is released to the phone if required.
Just a suggestion to consider.


RE: Dedicated Chat and Phone. - zetabeta - 07-07-2022

if i got this explanation correctly, i think it's possible for current pinephone and pp pro already. essentially just messing with partitions and some coding that provides basic phone app/os. someone still needs to do this. and that other o.s. is in bigger partition.

in android world, storage memory has lot of partitions, and usually one partition only is updated or written at the time. whereas in pinephone, whole storage mem is written. because different function are separated into separate partitions in android, therefore android tend to be recoverable. some partition are read/write and others are read only.

even for basic phone o.s., i think it still needs some few gigabytes of storage, so it cannot be flashed into spi boot.


RE: Dedicated Chat and Phone. - Chief - 07-07-2022

(07-07-2022, 01:22 PM)zetabeta Wrote: if i got this explanation correctly, i think it's possible for current pinephone and pp pro already. essentially just messing with partitions and some coding that provides basic phone app/os. someone still needs to do this. and that other o.s. is in bigger partition.

in android world, storage memory has lot of partitions, and usually one partition only is updated or written at the time. whereas in pinephone, whole storage mem is written. because different function are separated into separate partitions in android, therefore android tend to be recoverable. some partition are read/write and others are read only.

even for basic phone o.s., i think it still needs some few gigabytes of storage, so it cannot be flashed into spi boot.

As far as I know a main Linux o.s. must be installed or no boot. This is my point that I want to see no Linux system installed at all yet when the power button is pressed the core bios system of device boots, looks for sim card, then pin and system ready. We would have a basic screen with chat and calls only. The device is now a phone self standing. If a Linux system is installed the device only looks for say Arch Linux and then asks for a password to continue into Arch only AFTER the phone system is up. basically I'm saying separate desired o.s. from the core phone system. The core system would be read only and only able to accept a simple phone number, email and name data base system. After a Linux system has been installed then the phone core system will still only look for name, email and phone number while the Linux system can handle all information such as Evolution for example. But the core system only see's the three values.