03-09-2021, 05:22 AM
Hello forum, this is my first post!
I would like to share my experience with the PinePhone. I ordered the Mobian CE with dock and received it on 1.3.21. I started using it the day after, so a week ago. Short background information about myself: I have never owned what is commonly called a Smartphone, my current phone is an old Nokia E71, and as far as Linux-phones are concerned: I had an Openmoko and unfortunately lost some money in the Neo900 project.
With all this in mind: the PinePhone is great so far! Apart from the announced CNY delivery delay it arrived very quickly too.
Positive points:
-The convergence dock is magic! It's so convenient to have normal wired network! I haven't even tried the other ports yet. I remember the fiddling with USB networking on the Openmoko, this just works.
-Calls/sms/wifi/mobile data/hotspot: just works.
-Disk encryption: just works.
-Youtube: it looks like I was lucky, but worked out of the box after initial upgrade.
-The buttons on the side do what I thought they would!
Things that aren't 100% great yet:
-In general the UI has some rough edges (phosh), but I never got stuck or had to abandon what I wanted to do so far
-Different sound/vibrating profiles don't seem to work correctly yet, and the phone doesn't seem to wake up upon an sms (no flashing LED) - I probably need to spend some more time figuring this out.
-Only US QWERTY keyboard, I'm missing french and german accents and umlauts (again, maybe I haven'd done enough research yet)
-Webapps created according to mobian wiki with firefox -ssb seem to not have network connection after waking up the phone. It starts working once I loaded a site with the normal firefox.
-I need to use the hydrogen webapp for matrix, as mirage cannot connect to my private server (this is of course unrelated to the pinephone)
-The camera app is still in its early stages (it works fine though)
-I cannot use Tidal, due to the widevine DRM not being available for arm64. This is possibly fixable with anbox, but I'm currently hesitant to install it. Maybe one day this will change?
The fact that my PC, my server and now my mobile phone all run Debian is fantastic, I find this extremely convenient. I would not recommend this to someone who doesn't want to ssh onto the PinePhone or who is afraid of restarting a systemd unit via the onboard terminal, but otherwise my expectations are exceeded by far!
I would like to share my experience with the PinePhone. I ordered the Mobian CE with dock and received it on 1.3.21. I started using it the day after, so a week ago. Short background information about myself: I have never owned what is commonly called a Smartphone, my current phone is an old Nokia E71, and as far as Linux-phones are concerned: I had an Openmoko and unfortunately lost some money in the Neo900 project.
With all this in mind: the PinePhone is great so far! Apart from the announced CNY delivery delay it arrived very quickly too.
Positive points:
-The convergence dock is magic! It's so convenient to have normal wired network! I haven't even tried the other ports yet. I remember the fiddling with USB networking on the Openmoko, this just works.
-Calls/sms/wifi/mobile data/hotspot: just works.
-Disk encryption: just works.
-Youtube: it looks like I was lucky, but worked out of the box after initial upgrade.
-The buttons on the side do what I thought they would!
Things that aren't 100% great yet:
-In general the UI has some rough edges (phosh), but I never got stuck or had to abandon what I wanted to do so far
-Different sound/vibrating profiles don't seem to work correctly yet, and the phone doesn't seem to wake up upon an sms (no flashing LED) - I probably need to spend some more time figuring this out.
-Only US QWERTY keyboard, I'm missing french and german accents and umlauts (again, maybe I haven'd done enough research yet)
-Webapps created according to mobian wiki with firefox -ssb seem to not have network connection after waking up the phone. It starts working once I loaded a site with the normal firefox.
-I need to use the hydrogen webapp for matrix, as mirage cannot connect to my private server (this is of course unrelated to the pinephone)
-The camera app is still in its early stages (it works fine though)
-I cannot use Tidal, due to the widevine DRM not being available for arm64. This is possibly fixable with anbox, but I'm currently hesitant to install it. Maybe one day this will change?
The fact that my PC, my server and now my mobile phone all run Debian is fantastic, I find this extremely convenient. I would not recommend this to someone who doesn't want to ssh onto the PinePhone or who is afraid of restarting a systemd unit via the onboard terminal, but otherwise my expectations are exceeded by far!