Today I got a card from Royal Mail that I needed to pay £11.81 before the phone could be delivered. This, BTW, is not an import tax or customs duty. The phone is marked as a gift at the value of $25. They charge an £8 Royal Mail International Handling Fee and £3.81 in VAT. Assuming a VAT rate of 20%, they calculated the value of the phone to be £19.05, which is about right taking the exchange rate to Dollar into account.
So I dashed down to my local sorting office, paid the fee and finally had my Pinephone in my hands.
I opened the package straight away, in the car.
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The first thing I noticed was a slight imperfection in the manufacturing process in that the front cover was not fully snapped on, it was bulging out in the area of the volume rockers. Fortunately, it was just a matter of pushing it in with my finger nail, but I thought I'd better mention it as a quality issue.
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The reason why I did all this in a rush was that I went straight to the nearest mobile phone high street shop to get a cover (to protect my brand-new phone), a PAYG Sim card (until I am ready to use my standard one and make this my main phone) and a spare USB-C cable.
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It turned out that a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 cover provides a fairly good match, apart from the cutouts for the earphone and the camera. I was prepared to try and adapt the cover myself. As ithappened, I slightly botched it up: The first hole for the camera went too high up and with hindsight, I could have made just 2 individual holes instead of 3. But it will do for now. Buying another new cover is not really a problem.
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One final precautionary measure: Rather than peeling off the film from the screen protector, I carefully removed the white tab and cleaned the residue with lighter fuel. As long as the film stays relatively intact, it will provide further protection until we are able to buy replacement screen protectors.
The battery tab came out without any problems, the factory tests went OK apart from the modem (Somebody mentioned that the SIM PIN may have to be removed).
Now charging and then playing with all that exciting software...
