Pine Phone requests and tips

[jack1]

After the latest details on the project, here are some requests / tips / questions:
- 1 The lower border is too large (if it has no buttons).
- 2 The display manager should be i3 or lxde (kde or gnome would be f00l(no offence ubports)) and the OS arch or debian. All the always-running apps should be gtk2.
- 3 I hope that the pinephone 2 will use a mediatek or qualcomm soc. Not a surprise a battery of 3000 mAh.
- 4 USB host mode ? USB guest mode ?
- 5 A second USB ? mini hdmi ? But all those holes in the box could be a problem for water resistantce...
- 6 Some feature could be battery killer, like sensors are always on ? And the rgb led is fun (less bright /efficent ?) but I hope it doesnt use 3 pwm! it would kiII the battery. Also there could be minor useless module features that are on by default, must verify that.
- 7 Is the modem chip on the main board ? Then why not to use directly the qualcomm 9x07 modem rather than the quectel based on it ?
- 8 After the first launch you will need a period of testing to verify that the module doesnt spy. The threat can come from queltel qualc0m or andr0id small tools
- 9 Multi boot
- 10 Recovery from brick(boot from sdcard?)

Anyway, I love it ! I want one as soon as possible !

[jack1]

Your requests are wellcome

[gamelaster]

Hi and thank you for your questions,

2) there will be more OS available for PinePhone, I heard about KDE and PostmarketOS, but probably more
3) I doubt, since Mediatek and Qualcomm SoCs (processors) are way more expensive, and the software support is small
4) PinePhone will have (almost) fully working USB-C connector, which means USB OTG support (so host mode) (afaik, not fully confirmed yet)
5) Second USB will be pogo pins on the back (if there will be space and good case). About HDMI, you will be able to get DisplayPort from USB-C (afaik, not fully confirmed yet)
6) It will be classical rgb led like in any other phone, no reason for battery consuming
7) Same reason as in 3. , Quectel is cheaper etc.
8) That's why PinePhone will have A64, since almost everything is open source, you can run whatever you want, and check everything, so you can be sure that nothing spying you. And if it's not enough for you, (afaik) on back plate will be kill switches for disabling modem, microphones etc.
9) No problem, already supported
10) It's already done, A64 supports FEL mode, so if something will happen, you still can recover it via FEL

[Luke]

I think that gamelaster has answered most questions. Let me deal with 1) first: I think that for the asking price you're already getting a really solid (IPS) display and personally I have not even noticed the chin (bezel) at the bottom of the phone render / mockup. 3) I think that is there ever is a Pinephone 2 then it will make use of a SOC we already have on one of the boards - or at the very least uses a SOC from one of the vendors we work with.

[jack1]

Thankyou gamelaster and Luke!

3. More expensive than the soc + the modem ? Yes the support for linux is very small*. But the efficency is much higher(I think).
7. Cheaper than the quectel that contains it ? May be for low quantities...
8. A spyware or a backdoor can be well hidden, I hope that some expert will check the firewall logs I'm happy for the switches.
4.5.9.10. Cool !

*But for some models without the modem, there is linux support....

[jack1]

- 11 How sensors and gps (these 2 are 2 separate electronics right?) communicate with softwares ? with what security ?

[mitcoes]

I would love a 5G modem probably better the qualcomm one
Also the phone board sold separately to be able to REPLACE old ones in old tablets and phones with still a good screen.
I have 2 dead tablets one with 32bit ARM the other with Mediatek and with very few hours of use so battery and display will be in food shape.
And I would like to convert them to lignux (GNU/Linux) with android compatibility or dual boot.
And if the board would allow M2, better if 2 M2 NvE ir would be great.

[nyxxenator]

My only crazy moonshot request would be an integrated rtl-sdr dongle, but I'm not sure how that would affect certification.

[Z80]

Sounds like a small thing, but for me, if the new phone and tablet devices are going to support a gtk style linux desktop, then they absolutely MUST support Touchscreen-as-Touchpad functionality similar to the TouchMousePointer app available in Windows (Google lovesummertrue).

One of the reasons that the multitudes of Atom based Windows 8 tablets were such a total commercial flop (aside from the fact that Windows 8 sucked) was the fact that the morons at Microsoft were too stupid to realize that that you can't fat-finger existing Windows desktop apps in absolute mode (like Android or IOS) in Windowz because neither the apps nor the desktop environment were designed to handle it.  Turns out that fixing the issue is actually not that difficult, as proven later by the introduction of an aftermarket app called TouchMousePointer, but the idiots at Microsoft were too dumb to package it with the Windows 8 OS.

The TouchMousePointer app fixes touchscreen precision issues for older apps by letting you activate a virtual mouse mode where the whole screen acts as a nice big  precision trackpad, letting you control a mouse pointer with precision at least as good as a keyboard trackpad.  This works because, since touchpads are setup for relative motion, you can use any section of the screen to nudge around the pointer at any other point on the screen, and thus keep out of your own way while still controlling the virtual mouse pointer very accurately. 

It takes only moments to get used to the idea that, for example, you can diddle the lower left corner of your touchsceen to accurately control the pointer at the upper right (or vise versa) - and once you get the hang of it, this works every bit as precisely and easily as a standard keyboard attached touchpad, letting you do things that are virtually impossible to do on a standard touchscreen, like precisely cutting and pasting text, or dragging and resizing windows, etc.

Until recently there were NO good TouchMousePointer equivalents available for Linux.  There wasn't much pressure to develop such a driver since virtually no one was running any of those cheap Atom based Tablets using desktop style linux because the kernel support from Intel was total shit at the time and they would crash approximately every 5 minutes.

With the most recent kernel patches though, it is now finally possible to run desktop Linux on these Baytrail/Cherrytrail tablets, which has apparently motivated someone into re-visiting the problem of finding a way to duplicate the functionality of that oh-so-wonderful Windows TouchMousePointer app in Linux.

Here is the link to how it was done:

https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?sho...e=threaded


... and a link to a youtube video showing how it works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsJn3eMvG7w


It's not quite perfect though, because, unlike the Windows App, he doesn't provide a simple gesture based way to switch from Absolute (Android/IOS) to Relative (Windows/Linux desktop) mode on the fly.

I hope you can build on his simple driver, to let the user seemless swip to active trackpad style pointer mode then just as easily swip again using another gesture to switch back to absolute mode.

As I said above, this may not seem like a big thing, but please believe me IT IS, as without it it's basically impossible to run old-school desktop apps on a tablet or phone touchscreen device without an external keyboard/touchpad.

If you REALLY want to create a 'disruptive technology', shake things up, and make a ton of money in the process, figure out how to seamlessly swip in a custom Android launcher panel onto the user's active X11 session, then use that to load and run standard unmodified Android Apps from the Playstore (using the standard Android Absolute Touchscreen mode) - then let them swipe back to Ubuntu Mate, Xubuntu, etc. running in touchscreen-as-touchpad mode, to open and edit a 500 page document with Libreoffice, and while doing that, seamlessly bounce into Android to check their messages - GLORIOUS.

[GRATS]

Several of you guys are asking for features that are available in phones that are 3 times - 5 times the price.
You're asking for hardware that is closed down and impossible to work with unless you add binary blobs.
You're asking for a different type of phone, a different phone and an entirely different aim of the project.