Pinephone Pro Arrived - A Couple Of Notes About Chargers And Updates

[phelion]

So the Pinephone Pro arrived and am really rather pleased with it. Manjaro with Plasma Mobile is nice to use, looks good and the phone responds well. Haven't had a lot of time to play around with it just yet but thought it might be worth mentioning a couple of things if you are expecting your order to arrive soon:

tldr: -With a 2A USB charger the battery charging indicator will show but the battery will not charge and the phone will slowly drain.
      -Updating the base installation of Manjaro with Plasma Mobile may not be entirely straightforward if you assume that a quick 'sudo pacman -Syu' will do the trick.

UPDATE: The 2A charger problem seems to be specific to the Pinephone Pro with the initial pre-loaded Manjaro Plasma OS on the eMMc.
- I'd been trying out Mobian from the SD Card (with the most recent updates applied) and thought I'd just check that the charger still did the same thing as before.
- It now charges fine with that same underpowered charger, so it looks like it's a software issue.

UPDATE2: Now that I've managed to update the Manjaro Plasma pre-installed image on the eMMc, the 2A Charger charges the Pinephone Pro - so it looks like the Pinephone Pro is not quite as picky about chargers once properly updated
- if you're Manjaro Plasma pre-installed image is not updating properly (using 'sudo pacman -Syu' in the terminal) and your phone is not charging, then troubleshoot the updating issue first before your battery runs out!


Chargers
I have quite a few old USB phone/tablet chargers that I use regularly and just assumed that they would work fine, maybe they'd just charge slowly, but unfortunately they are not up to the task - they'll happily charge a Nexus 5 phone and Nexus 7 tablet but I kindof forgot that technology has moved on since 2013

I'm pretty sure that the Nexus 7 charger is 5V and 2A but even with the screen off the battery slowly dwindled and had me worried that there was something wrong with the hardware.

Of course it states in the 'Pinephone Pro User Manual - Quick Start Guide' that "The Pinephone Pro should be charged using a 15W (5V 3A) USB-PD power adapter. Charging at a higher voltage may result in damage to the device." but I didn't pay too much attention to that, just happy knowing that I wasn't going to be damaging my device with my low powered charger, but they don't mean 'for best results use a 5V 3A charger' they mean 'use a 5V 3A charger'

Fortunately I have a half-decent laptop with a USB-C port, so I bought a USB-C to USB-C cable at the supermarket down the road and have been able to charge it with that until I order a decent modern charger to use with it.


Updating Manjaro
There were about 312 updates when I first switched on the phone and connected to Wifi. The 'Discover' application told me about the updates and so instead of using the Command Line equivalent of 'sudo apt update' for Manjaro I gave Discover's Update function a try but it threw up some errors.

Unfortunately, running 'sudo pacman -Syu' from the terminal threw up some errors as well (something to do with PGP Signatures and 'unknown trust'). I tried a bit of 'sudo pacman -Syyu' and also 'sudo pacman -Syyuu' for good measure but to no avail.

There is probably a better way to fix the issue directly but I was poking about in the terminal and found a program called 'pinephonepro-post-install' which sounded interesting and after running sudo pinephonepro-post-install it seems to have generated some trusted keys and then let me update using 'sudo pacman -Syu' without issue.

If anyone has any suggestions for a better way to get updates working on the pre-loaded Manjaro/Plasma system, then it could be useful to let others folks know so that they can easily update to the most recent version of Manjaro and Plasma Mobile and test it out on their new Pinephone Pro.


Shutdown
Not sure why this happens but it seems that with my Pinephone Pro, if it's plugged in to a charger then it will start up automatically. Even if it's the underpowered charger that doesn't charge the battery.

Pressing and holding the Power button for 8 seconds will shut the phone down
-A long press of the power button will bring up the Shutdown, Restart options in Plasma Mobile too - shutdown works from there: looks like it has stalled for a little while but then shuts down nicely.
'sudo shutdown now' in the Terminal also works similarly.

BUT if the charging cable is plugged in (even if it's not giving enough power to charge the battery) it starts up again immediately after shutdown.

This may be specific to my Pinephone Pro, but it seems like at the moment it isn't possible to charge the phone without the phone switching on. It might be different when I get a suitable charger, but I'd be interested to know if anyone else is experiencing this same behaviour with their Pinephone Pro.

[bcnaz]

The new keyboard also turns the phone on when power is plugged-in, and turns on the phone when the power is un-plugged.

If you want to charge with the phone turned off, turn the phone off ---> after plugging in the power cable.

That works for the keyboard when I tried it.

I think that will work for the PPPro, but my new PPPro is scheduled to arrive tomorrow, So, I will verify that when I actually have the new phone in my hands.

[Stitch]

I got the same Problem when i used a normal charger. With a better charger (2,5A) the percentage increases. It keeps restarting when it is plugged on power.

Maybe a charging box (3d printed) is usefull to charge the battery seperated from the phone. Until the point is improved.


Best regards

[Stickman]

Also having the issue with the phone coming back on when charging. Currently seems to be losing battery even with screen off while plugged into a 2.5A charger, so not sure how to proceed from here.

I've heard others say they swap the battery with their original Pinephone to charge it, but I do not have one to try that myself.

[bcnaz]

A temporary fix/ work-around.... we could use the Pine64 external battery charge adapter.... (and spare batteries)

I bought the adapter when I ordered some other parts, it does work pretty well. ---> Though it does take about 2 to 3 weeks to arrive.

[Luziferus]

The problem with the keyring during system update can be fixed by resetting and reimporting the keys again.

Code:

sudo systemctl start pacman-init
sudo pacman -Syy
sudo pacman-key --refresh-keys
sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux manjaro
sudo pacman -Sc

After that you should be able to update the system. I also wiped the gnupg files in between, so if the steps above did not work for you, try to "sudo mv /etc/pacman.d/gnupg /etc/pacman.d/gnupg.old" so that the pacman-init command will recreate the files.

Sources: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/my-keyring-i...ly/71486/4 and https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Pacma...Resolution

[tckosvic]

If the comments I have seen are accurate,  I don't see how any developer/tester of a new phone could let it ship without the ability to charge in power off mode and in fact turn on when charging.  That is so obvious a flaw that, I think, they must have been delirious, asleep, or drunk.

I felt the same way about the pinephone only charging to 85%. That is a fundamental consideration to the design of an electronic device, I would think

tom kosvic

[djselbeck]

Maybe the problem is more that people are expecting production ready software delivered on the product whereas pine64 always stated that the device is intended for developers and early adopters with experience in Linux.

It is the same problem with folks "bricking" their device by using Pinephone (non-pro) images and flodding social media with it.

[u20200719]

I tried to update my Pro as well with the GUI which didn't work. I used the command line update and it hung on shutdown. When it came back up the UI no longer worked and it booted to a command prompt.

There is no keyboard so I'm having to reimage the phone with the latest release.

[Conjada]

Maybe the problem is more that people are expecting production ready software delivered on the product whereas pine64 always stated that the device is intended for developers and early adopters with experience in Linux.

It is the same problem with folks "bricking" their device by using Pinephone (non-pro) images and flodding social media with it.

Exactly. Every part of this phone is driven by software, from the PMIC to the display. The software is entirely written by the community and they must have hardware to write the software. While much of the software written for the Pinephone will move over to the Pro, much of it will not. They are not the same phone, nor do they have the same capabilities. Pro owners are actually in a much better position than original Pinephone owners. It has taken about two years to get to this point with Pinephone. The Explorer has been in our hands for a couple of days. It’s going to take a while.

---

The new keyboard also turns the phone on when power is plugged-in,  and turns on the phone when the power is un-plugged.

If you want to charge with the phone turned off,  turn the phone off  --->  after plugging in the power cable.

That works for the keyboard when I tried it. 

I think that will work for the PPPro,  but my new PPPro is scheduled to arrive tomorrow,  So, I will verify that when I actually have the new phone in my hands.

I “believe” that the battery is a J7 Samsung form factor. I ordered a battery and external charger from Amazon and will be here Monday. I’ll let you know if it works. I think i read it somewhere in the forums and it looks right, as well as the specs seem to match. But, don’t take my word for it, please.

ETA: This thread by @Otter is where I got the info on the battery… https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...#pid105606