Pre-arrival questions

[ryo]

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.

[User 18618]

1. I can't comment on the quality of recent Plasma Mobile builds.
   
   
2. Phosh's soft keyboard is Squeekboard, which comes with Japanese keyboard layouts. If they don't take the 10-key form you're expecting, Purism have written a guide on creating new layouts.
   
   
3. Anbox is in a state of flux, often subject to breaking changes - I wouldn't rely on it to run Android applications yet. LINMob wrote an article and accompanying video on Anbox (which may be out of date by now...)
   
   

There is an Android ROM which runs on the PinePhone, if that's an acceptable compromise.

[ryo]

I can't comment on the quality of recent Plasma Mobile builds.

Understandable.

Phosh's soft keyboard is Squeekboard, which comes with Japanese keyboard layouts. If they don't take the 10-key form you're expecting, Purism have written a guide on creating new layouts.

That's very helpful, thank you!

Anbox is in a state of flux, often subject to breaking changes - I wouldn't rely on it to run Android applications yet. LINMob wrote an article and accompanying video on Anbox (which may be out of date by now...)

There is an Android ROM which runs on the PinePhone, if that's an acceptable compromise.

I just booted up an older iPhone, apparently I can still use LINE on it even without a valid SIM card inserted into it (because I was logged in on it before I changed to my current iPhone, and copied all the data over during initial boot).
I can live with just tethering WiFi over to the iPhone until Anbox becomes more reliable, although it means that I'll be taking 3 phones with me all the time (the 3rd one is a garake, since I can watch live TV on it, no internet required).

Or otherwise I can install Brave (since it can run desktop apps), and then the LINE Chrome extension.
It allows texting, not calling.
But I never call outside of home anyway.

Edit:
For a visualization, this is a 10-key:
 

 

[nas]

This video shows plasma mobile performance on kde neon. Seems pretty similar to the recent build I tried.

This post might be of interest for the keyboard question.

[ryo]

This post might be of interest for the keyboard question.

Looking at the photo, it seems like that person was using a qwerty on screen keyboard, which is not what the question was about.
I know that IME will work, since the OS is the same as on desktops.