Brave Heart First Impressions ?

[j23]

Could Somebody help me, PLEASE?

Don't worry, it is virtually impossible to brick your PinePhone!

If you build a decent SDcard and insert that you should boot fine from SDcard despite whatever state your eMMC is in. Start here in the wiki.

I succesfully reset the OS by only on SD card as now.
I tried use Pine64 Installer, but the feature drag and drop (if custom system has been choosen) didn't work well, and i have NOT IDEA AT ALL what type of board i should choose from A64.
Instead of Pine64 Installer i just used Balena Etcher. So, the all testing enviroment looks like:
1. Master Computer (CPU) : SYSTEM => PC (Amd64 Athlone) : Debian-Jessie
2. Slave device (CPU) : SYSTEM => PinePhone (Arm64) : Manjaro Linux
3. Source of OS file image: from dedicated PinePhone wiki site link to Manjaro image file OS
4. SD card used via PC onboard/internal card reader (no USB cable at all, no external USB card reader).

Some informations:
- Manjaro works fine, but relatively slow
- After PinePhone power button pressed OS started after while (not immediately, no light message from diode that something happen, but OS is already booting so a little bit patience was needed)
- some feature of Manjaro did not work correctly like checking battery details
- I have no idea also how to transfer Manjaro OS System from SD card to EMMC memory (and if it's good idea, but OS from SD card work a little bit slow then I expected)
- I have been trying install PostmarketOS (as preferred OS) but seems like I can't install pip3 (python 3.4 package installer), so I let it go away this OS and will try with Ubuntu via Balena Etcher and will see what next

Anybody know what is preferred board for PinePhone from Pine64 installer? Or maybe there is not at all?
Every time I tried use OS for A64 PineBook it doesn't work good. Result after insert and power on PinePhone was just strong light from diode (rear camera) and nothing more (I waited more then 20 minutes, but no results... :/
I believe Ubuntu will menage better with PinePhone then Manjaro.

I am also looking for some idea how to write OS directly to EMMC via USB c Cable (included with PinePhone). My PC Debian OS recognized PinePhone device as following:

Code:

#lsusb
Bus 001 Device 107: ID 1f3a:efe8 Onda (unverified) V972 tablet in flashing mode

[pjsf]

I've had the phone for two days now. Build quality, size and weight are just as unexpectedly good as the pinebook pro. Not at all as thick as I was expecting.  I'm a bit worried about the durability of the back cover, given how often I'm swapping sd cards, but no problems yet.

The battery fit on mine is quite tight meaning I have to use a fingernail to pull it out, this has already lead to the battery covering starting to lift a little - not a problem but a bit messy, would be made better by having one of those battery removal ribbon things, that used to be more common.

The Sim slot  really is a bit tight - I'm using a nano sim (from my old phone) in a commercial micro sim adapter and it really is a tight fit, to the point I worry about breaking it, so I'm not doing any sim swapping at the moment.

Tried a number of distros:

Ubports: nice looking and quite snappy, plenty of features
postmarket with plasma. plenty of features but plasma feels quite unresponsive.
postmarket with phosh, wow! really attractive snappy interface but not much in the way of working software, gnome-terminal is a useful addition, I'll probably be looking a lot more at this one when I've finished experimenting.
Manjaro with plasma, coming along nicely, but plasma is not winning me over .
Sailfish, got hit by the blank screen problem, it also seems to have done something to the emmc, I no longer can use the built in test os, and when I power on the phone with the usual long press of the power button it seems to try to start from the emmc  even with an sd card inserted. I don't know if it's documented anywhere but holding down volume up and the doing a long power press seems to force boot from the SD again, which might be useful for some people.
 
That's where I'm up to so far - off now to bang my head against Sailfish for a bit longer.

Edit: Thanks to Prophentes in the forums Sailfish is up and running, it's incredibly beautiful, and quite performant, I'm worried I'm not good enough for it.

[shadethegrey]

Had mine for a day.  Better than expected build quality.  Running Sailfish OS on it.  The phone feels good in your hand.  The LCD screen looks better than I thought it would.

[aleadom]

Hello I´m new pinephone user from Spain, mine arrived yesterday sicen january 22.

Just found this review of terminal and different os.
https://medium.com/@fviard/my-first-step...0b7277b60a

Best construction than expected, good design, I´ve read something about durability of the back cover, I think the same, it may not be too long...

I´ve tried only ubports, having to install three times, and now I´ve to do it again.

I had problem with wifi, dissapearing networks without solution only flash.

Also problems with brigthness. The bar not well calibrated, if you go down 1/5 of bar, the screen turns black, with no return.

Power drain with modem activated, or wifi, really big power drain, only few hours and terminal gets really hot. Sometimes when you powerff of terminal stays on.

Last night left charging the terminal and it got really really hot, dangerously hot. Today I power on and faliure of dbus without interface, Im going to flash again or try postmarketos.

So I think it's a brave unit for now, weeks left to be functional, but promising.


Too much time without writing in English forgive the mistakes.-

[Oleffa]

Hi everybody,

I received my pinephone a couple of days ago and finally had some time to play around with it.
The build quality is very good and Ubuntu Touch, which I have tested so far, is working way better than I had expected.

In case someone is interested in a quick start guide, I gathered all the things I found throughout the pine64 forum and reddit and compiled it into a collection on GitHub: https://github.com/Oleffa/pinephone-guides
This includes a guide on how to set up Ubuntu Touch, SSH, syncing data through wi-fi using rsync and installing Ubuntu Touch on the phones eMMC. I also added some scripts for quickly restarting wi-fi if it stops working and how to enable sound. In the future I plan to make it more beginner friendly and add all the other problems and fixes I come across.

Feedback and input is welcome!

I also have one question, is there a place where software are coordinating? If I wanted to contribute how can I get started?

Thank you so much pine64 for making this amazing piece of technology and thanks to everyone contributing to the project!

[bcnaz]

There have been a few outside sites stating that "shipping" started on the 17th,  but yeah I guess there could be different definitions to the word shipping.

  Besides Luke and others here on the forum stating that as well

But I have not yet seen with my own eyes someone posting, saying they received their shipping notice.

I attempted to get in at the moment they started accepting orders, but it may have been 30 minutes or so before I successfully completed my transaction.

UPDATE :   February 08,  2020

  Finally !
   I received my Brave Heart phone about lunch time today.
 After holding it and taking it all in,  removed the rear case,  slightly different than I expected, it is not flat but rather kind of wraps around the phone.
  Pull the battery out using the notch at the bottom of the battery, no problem, not tight, just slightly 'snug'
   Remove the in transit isolation tape from the contacts.

   Replace the rear cover and plug in the battery charger,  the phone did start up then, maybe I bumped the power switch,
     or maybe it started just from being plugged in ? ?
   I did look through the test software, but no Sim card yet and no SD card installed yet.

   I left it on the charger for 3 or 4 hours,
             meanwhile I downloaded the latest UBPorts Pine phone OS release...
           I waited until now,   so I would have the most recent version.
    Using Etcher is a bit slow, but it seems to produce perfect results.... 
           (I have used Etcher for SD cards for my Pinebook Pro's.)

            Finally :  I plugged in the SD card and took it for my first "Test Drive"

  Lots of apps on the Ubuntu Touch, but only a few actually work so far.
  I did make a few Posts elsewhere on the forum using my new Brave Heart,
               it is a bit of effort scrolling across the pages  Horizonaly,  
           as the screen is only portrait mode for now, no landscape mode yet.
    ( With only the one mode, I would prefer just landscape over just portrait,  Oh Well )

     I am just getting started, but it is very interesting !  Kinda "FUN"

          UPDATE :
           Tested the Post Market OS,  errr  

   Cannot hardly use this, the user-name and password they give at their website does not work.

      Their wifi never did connect...!

           One redeeming item :  Their screen does rotate both Portrait and Landscape..

             

[CloudHackIX]

Finally got mine this morning after a missed delivery (East-ish coast US)!

Spent all morning trying different UI options with PostmarketOS and UBTouch:
* Phosh feels the snappiest, but no launch indicator
* Plasma at least indicates app is launching
* Frequently applications fail to launch for a 2nd time: Still investigating

UBTouch is by far the smoothest, but it feels kind of like a "Chromebook": I know there's Linux underneath, but it's pretty well hidden beneath the fancy UI.

Between PmOS and UBT, I'm rooting for PmOS as the apps are more/less unmodified GTK, while most of the UBT appear to be built specifically for UBT.

As for the hardware:
* Bigger than I realized, but not huge
* Back cover is really hard to remove: Worried about repeated removals, but so far seems to be ok.
* Screen is beautiful: Text is clear and easy to read, plenty of room while browsing sites
* App loading is sluggish, haven't tried eMMC yet
* Pages are slow in browser (eMMC? CPU?) but very reasonable for an early-adopter $150 device
* As a long-time android user, I really miss having dedicated "home/back/switcher" buttons (even considering this is usually a "soft" feature of modern devices) 

As soon as GSM/LTE is confirmed, I'll be trying to make this my daily-co-driver next to my Android phone. For now it'll be my couch-surfer :-)

[edge]

The device is a bit larger than expected and the modem unit on the back is positioned well for a semi-transparent case along the lines of LG Fx0.

For software, are there any special steps for getting to the factory test app? On boot, the device shows a splash screen for A64 Android 7.0 and loads Android in Chinese with popping noises from the speaker. pmOS loaded on external media does boot as expected.

[MIchael]

It's a neat toy. At first I thought it was on the light side until I weighed it against my OnePlus and they feel roughly the same. It's very far from being useful but it's great as a toy for now. Been playing in terminal to see what will install and work. Neofetch doesn't, htop does but you can't see the right side on window.

Not sure I trust any app from the software store and can't bring myself to use it. Going to try and get KDE Connect working in the morning, it's a must.

Ohhhh, won't really shut down with the button, it just reboots. So have to use command line to shut it down so it'll charge. When it's on it doesn't show any charge progress.

[lemon]

Got mine a couple of days ago and have tried PMos w/xfce4 , Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish, and Plasma Mobile. All from SD.

I wasn't able to get PMos to work with any other interface (errors during copying to microSD card), but xfce4 was surprisingly smooth (though I couldn't test much without a keyboard).

Ubuntu Touch does seem to be the most polished of the bunch, but I am having some issues with it. I can't adjust date/time settings at all (no errors or anything, it just doesn't have any affect after changing the hour and pushing "set") and some apps just don't open (notes, clock, weather, camera). Others do work (internet browser, calendar, calculator, file manager, openstore,terminal). Checking the UBPorts gitlab page, they are aware of these things and are releasing new builds quite frequently so I imagine a lot of this will get cleaned up relatively quickly.

Sailfish was okay, but was a bit slower feeling than Ubuntu Touch and I was unable to use the internet browser (I could enter website addresses and it indicated they loaded, but it just returned a blank screen.)

Plasma Mobile was painfully slow and basically unusable because of it.

At this point, my preference is toward a pocket computer with the ability to send texts and make calls so PMos w/xfce4 is almost perfect if it had an on-screen keyboard pop-up when in typing fields and an included "act like a phone" app for making calls (and perhaps some other functions like texting, camera, or mapping, but in reality those could be handled via normal xfce like programs/interfaces).

As far as the hardware goes, it's actually a lot nicer than I expected for a $150 phone. The screen isn't great, but gets the job done and the phone is thinner than expected for having the ability to remove the back cover and battery. I don't know for sure, but it does seem like once the software side gets cleaned up, the hardware should be robust enough for this to be a daily driver.

As a side note on OS installation, I found it much easier/comfortable to install Ubuntu Touch and Plasma Mobile (basically dd from an image to SD Card). But that's just my personal preference.