Are you using the Pinephone as your daily driver?

[zetabeta]

1. No. I kind of knew this might be an issue going in, as the camera quality is only so good, but I thought maybe a camera module hardware upgrade might have become available (I don't think this was ever promised but I perhaps thought it seemed like a natural thing that might be possible), but that never happened, so I always expected just for "quality" pictures I would need something else.

camera is bad, i dont't know pinephone pro though. still, it takes raw images, which is good educational thing. hint "rawtherapee".

But instead it has been other deal breakers that have seemed to make it have less usability:

initially poor battery (seems to have improved a bit?) in spite of having a lot more capacity than android phones which last a long time in suspend (I have considered fixing this by attaching yet another bulky power bank to it, but kind of just gave up)

generic android seems to have 5000 mAh battery, and pinephone has ~3000mAh, 5000 tells a hint that battery probably should be bigger in pinephone. although android's power efficiency is better generally speaking.

the inability to transfer files besides an awkward workaround of pulling out a microsd card (I couldn't figure out proposed SSH or syncthing or other solutions, although they apparently work for others - I think this is solvable but I saw even a recent post where someone was struggling with it and I couldn't follow along with their solution. This was a major use case functionality failure, as I wanted to type things up and transfer them over off the Pinephone and was unable to do so - I had expected I could just plug the device in to a computer or a usb stick to transfer files back and forth);

SFTP and SSH work. but may pose some security issues. i use public IP numbers, so it might give access to unwanted attackers if security is lax. however, it sound you want something easier than sftp, maybe MTP protocol as a host. but i don't know any software at the moment.

and HDMI out didn't work for convergence so using the device as a desktop didn't work either (this might be fixable or depend on distro, but it seemed complicated if not otherwise).

usb dongle works for me, although in phosh and not so much in plasma.

Recently I have looked in to trying to install waydroid or remote desktop in to the device with more problems presenting themselves (waydroid may have had bugs and may work now; remote desktop might work too but I followed instructions I found and it did not work).

is "wayvnc" what you are looking for.

I guess I did expect hurdles, but some of these seemed excessive and I think maybe software development momentum dropped off more than expected? There are also multiple Pine64 hardware projects going on at the same time, so I don't know if that has diluted progress? I didn't really want to use it as a "phone" even, but more like an underpowered mini laptop.

2. (skip) 3. (skip) 4. Didn't figure out grayscale display yet but I think it probably is doable.

5. Another issue is persistently keeping the on screen keyboard away, I think there is a workaround available.

6. I saw someone made a backlight for the keyboard which I think is a good idea. A nub or trackball or some kind of mouse is also desired for my use case, but I haven't made it yet. A second edition of keyboard with these features and even more battery maybe might be nice; I wonder if a Pinephone 2 has been considered, but probably not yet given the Pinephone Pro not being as functional yet?

If anyone has any solutions or suggestions I am willing to work to remedy some of these issues and would like to do more in the new year with the Pinephone - I think it is a great experiment and seed planted to reap a better mobile future

My main idiosyncratic unique use case I came up with for the Pinephone, was to use it as a handheld gaming device, but a lot of the emulators were broken so I only got a few games working (but did still get some of them to work), since with the external keyboard it has tactile buttons and the feel of a gaming device

when i went on pinephone train, i expected lot of smaller issues and buggy software. however, this flipping frames bug is a low-level bug and should be more trivial to fix, but behind this bug might be possible hardware issues. if flipping frames bug is in final stable version, i cannot recommend pinephone as a daily driver for anyone, novice and pro users alike.