are you still using pinephone as a daily driver?

[zetabeta]

"sadly the enthusiasm in the community seems gone for months now,"

I have a few suggestions for how PP can pivot for the better.

The main one is to address the two big problems of PP which is 1) actually working as a phone, and 2) Battery Life.

So why not create a "MID-PHONE" distro - Somewhere between a flip phone and a smart phone.

Given that Mobian and Arch are seen as the best performing from a phone perspective, can one or both of these Distros be stripped down to the main components of Call, Text, Camera, and Calculator to save on battery and make it like your standard flip phone that can go about a week without charging?

There's a small segment of the population that just wants a basic phone without the internet, maps, gps, social media, etc. and while that's a small market to go after, it's still larger than the current PP audience from what I've seen and given the end of 3G, there are people out there looking for something similar to switch to. There's also the kid phone/teen phone market for parents weary of their child getting lost in the internet, but still want to be able for them to keep in contact with their parents.

I say "market" because at some point PP needs to perfect some type of PP to start selling commercially to help support the development/foundation goals. If this is done by a separate entity, so be it, but it seems like this is the kind of milestone to get things back on track and attract more interest and developers since there are more competitors (Volta, Above, and Libre5) in this market than when PP first hit the scene.

The main one is to address the two big problems of PP which is 1) actually working as a phone, and 2) Battery Life.

So why not create a "MID-PHONE" distro - Somewhere between a flip phone and a smart phone.

Given that Mobian and Arch are seen as the best performing from a phone perspective, can one or both of these Distros be stripped down to the main components of Call, Text, Camera, and Calculator to save on battery and make it like your standard flip phone that can go about a week without charging?

You're right about the two big problems (but I would add "hardware quality" as another point - the most important one), and your suggestion seems interesting at first... but I don't think this would make sense in the end. I think people who are interested in Pine64 products want a real Linux on their phone, without limitations. And AFAIK there are still some "feature phones"/dumb-phones/non-smartphones available to buy (or not?) - If you don't use internet services on your phone, "freedom and privacy" is no longer really an argument here - So why use a Linux phone/Pine64 product at all if it only should behave like an old Nokia? I don't really see the point. But perhaps I get you wrong somehow?

i might be interested about basic phone software, however it needs to be updateable, so it might chew mobiledata or other internet. user just inserts sdcard and there is el dumbo phone. following might be interesting if it hits stable, https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=14780 .

what i know inner workings of most linux distros, i don't think stripping down goes very far for battery life, maybe gpsd. usually if program is installed but does not run, it does not consume resources. although, exceptions occur. better approach is to use micro-kernel or half-rtos or similar with limited background services.