thaughts on pinephone

[rvh]

first let me say, I'm abscessed with this phone. I just love the idea of a private phone. as far as os's, i have tried ut, plasma, manjaro, arch, pm and mobian. All recently. The best by far is mobian. As this is supposed to be a phone, it would be nice to be able to use it as a phone. As in being able to make and receive calls. With mobian its about 95% there, the others, in my experience, calls are not there. Arch impressed me with how fast it was but no calls (yet). 
  Its been fun watching mobian improve. its stable and getting faster. It has been my daily driver since 2/2021. for me there are only three gripes. 1. received call have a lot of static 2. no netflix. 3. not able to sent attachments with texts.  
 I'm an average user so I'm not tech savvy enough to get a vpn or axolotl working so i guess I'll have to impatiently wait for an app. So thanks all you folks at mobian, nice job!

[gamerminstrel]

I agree with you, it's been a blast watching this phone evolve. I started with UT, then Mobian, and I've been giving Plasma Mobile a chance. It is incredible how much everything has evolved in just the last year since I first got my pinephone.

Passively watching for news updates, it looks like a few people have been making their own custom (better) firmware for the cellular modem in the pinephone. I don't think this will ever come with the phone by default for legal reasons, but I get the feeling that once a bit more progress has been made, installing that custom firmware will help with some of the issues with phone calls.

Personally I've been using my pinephone for media consumption and general internet usage, since the phone aspects just aren't there yet. I too would appreciate Netflix on this thing, but I don't expect that anytime soon, if ever.

[megous]

...I don't think this will ever come with the phone by default for legal reasons...

Actually Linux is GPL, so there are no legal reasons not to run it on the ARM SoC part of the modem. It would be against the contract to prevent users from modifying it and running it as they want.

[amosbatto]

...I don't think this will ever come with the phone by default for legal reasons...

Actually Linux is GPL, so there are no legal reasons not to run it on the ARM SoC part of the modem. It would be against the contract to prevent users from modifying it and running it as they want.

I assume that the FCC won't allow a phone to be sold with free firmware in the cellular modem, since people can modify it to use unauthorized bands. I haven't investigated whether that is possible with the free firmware for the EG25-G, but that is probably what gamerminstral is talking about.

[jfenn2199]

RE: Netflix support
I know that the chipset on pine64 devices is slightly different but there is now a Widevine plug-in for the Raspberry Pi (https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-widevine/).  So playing DRM content on Arm based SoC's is technically possible, but I don't know what work it would take to get it working on pine64 SoCs.

[dsimic]

Actually Linux is GPL, so there are no legal reasons not to run it on the ARM SoC part of the modem. It would be against the contract to prevent users from modifying it and running it as they want.

I assume that the FCC won't allow a phone to be sold with free firmware in the cellular modem, since people can modify it to use unauthorized bands. I haven't investigated whether that is possible with the free firmware for the EG25-G, but that is probably what gamerminstral is talking about.

The part that the certification bodies are interested in, or at least should be interested in, is the DSP part of the modem.  This closed-source part is responsible for the wireless communication coming in and out of the modem.  The part that runs on the ARM SoC inside the modem is pretty much a bridge to the phone, and cannot do much with the wireless signal that gets out of the modem, such as make the modem use unauthorized bands.

[battlegarden]

RE: Netflix support
I know that the chipset on pine64 devices is slightly different but there is now a Widevine plug-in for the Raspberry Pi (https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-widevine/).  So playing DRM content on Arm based SoC's is technically possible, but I don't know what work it would take to get it working on pine64 SoCs.

As far as I know widevine exists only for 32 bit ARM, so this won't work for the pinephone.

[radioheadfan]

seemed good but then  had loads of problems and kept sending me to the lock screen