(06-01-2021, 08:45 AM)TRS-80 Wrote: I tried to get some cheap phone headset[0] working with my PinePhone recently, to no avail. <snip>Bluetooth audio has been a mixed bag for me. When I connect to via UConnect to my Ram pickup truck audio system, I can play audio but with some audio dropouts (I mostly use my PinePhone as a media player). Sometimes the dropouts are bad enough that I give up on it. Sometimes a reboot helps. My PinePhone does not work for hands-free phone use at all and I've never been able to get a microphone to work in a phone call but I have been able to use voice recorder. I have had no better luck with any of the OS's on Megi's Multi-boot SD card either.
Bluetooth works better with my Phillips headphones except, over half the time it connects, as soon as the audio starts to play or even before, it blows my ears out with a loud buzzing sound instead of the program audio. The solution is to manually toggle the headphones off on the Mobian Bluetooth setup screen and then toggle them back on again--at least it's a solution nearly every time, but I've had to do it twice in a row on one or two occasions.
My Android spy phones have none of these problems with the same hardware. I'm happy to be Pine customer, because I believe in the project, but countless problems similar to the above and the PinePhone's poor performance as a phone--especially in the sparsely populated rural western United States (no CDMA support without VoLTE and no support the for new AT&T rural GSM channels) will keep it "alpha" development level in my mind for a long time to come and I predict that beta" is still a long ways off.
Given that my PinePhone has been a decent portable media player and processor, I just purchased a PineBook Pro. I'm still testing it but I've already found that it fulfills its market niche more satisfactorily than the PinePhone fulfills its smartphone niche. I would recommend a PineBook Pro as a general purpose Chromebook/Netbook type computer to Linux newbies even. The pre-installed Manjaro KDE Fusion on it works as well as any pre-installed Linux computer that I've ever used and it's far less expensive than the others!
