New Pine Phone User In Canada

[Katsujinken]

Greetings Everyone!
I just receved my new Pine Phone last night and it seems to work with our Fido network. Fido is a dummy company of Rogers to give us the illusion of having more choices than we do. So it likely works on their network since it's really the same as the one I'm posting from now. If anyone here wants to update on the wikia of compatible carriers then please do.

Thus far I've been using the preinstalled Manjaro with mixed results. I often get error messages that the modem is busy or otherwise cannot connect to my mobile network. When making calls I have to go into the settings to manually switch from the loudspeaker to the earspeaker then manually switch it back again when I'm done. Attempting to save files like JPGs through Angelfish does nothing. Does anyone know of fixes for these?

I would consider tryjng another OS like Ubuntu Touch but it has its own compatibility issues at present so are there any other OSes that can reliably use the Pine Phone to make calls, text, lightly browse online and listen to MP3s? It doesn't have to be pretty so long as it works. I use Zorin on my desktop and a modified version of Rasbian on my Pi 4b in a tablet enosure so I have some basic experience with different types of Linux.

Thanks in advance and I will look forward to participating on this forum with all you freedom lovers, hackers and other enthusists!

Hi, Katsujinken,

I know where you are coming from. I got mine about a month ago with Manjaro installed; out of the box, battery life was about 4 hours & got a few error messages as well. Was able to fix the errors & improve the battery time, but it just wasn’t right.

Downloaded Mobian & flashed it to a freshly formatted sd card & most of my problems were solved.
Had to manually put in the APN for mobile internet, but that was a minor thing.
(If you do the same, please update the WIKI for your area’s settings or post them here).

Battery life really depends upon what you are doing, today after 17 hours still at 70% (no calls, just a short 5 minute demo of its features for the I.T. department at another job site). If I run a lot of media, then the battery goes down quickly.

I primarily use it as a phone and after some weeks of testing, I found for me, that it is a viable option to Android/Apple.

Geary is working fine for email, I’m receiving missed call messages from my mobile provider & Firefox ESR seems to be more reliable than Angelfish for most websites

If you intend to use the alarm, leave the application open; found that sometimes it wont go off if you close the app.

I’ve been using it as my only phone since I bought it last month & I love it.

If you have any questions or concerns, please post them and welcome.

Awesome thanks for the info! Would it help performance if I flash Mobian directly to the internal memory or is there an inportant reason you put it on an SD card? Maybe you're right to do it that way regardless. Manjaro will hopefully get lots of support given enough time since Pine64 chose it as their pack-in OS so I may want to keep it there to try periodically.