Got the Beta edition of PinePhone yesterday (running Manjaro).
I've played with it for a day and want to share my experience. Excuse if some things are already reported. But i wanted to share my full experience so far with it.
Note: I mainly visited it from the UI side, as my linux development skills are very limited (i know how to use the terminal/vim but my programming skills are mostly related to Web applications React / SpringBoot and not to an OS or C++ apps of any kind).
Hardware
The phone itself looks fine. It's nothing special compared to some of the latest flagships, but it is well built and definitely polished enough for day to day use.
It was very easy to get the back off, pull out the battery and insert the sim/microsd card. Only thing to keep in mind is you need a micro sim and not a nano sim. But for the rest it was all very easy to get unpacked and set-up.
Pro tip: There is a screen protector with a peel tab on it. By accident i only removed the peel tab but this left me with a free screen protector still applied
Out of all the hardware, the camera is definitely the weakest part. You do not want to get this phone if taking decent photos is of any importance to you.
Software
This is the special part of the PinePhone: it runs a fully open-source OS (or to say, can run many OSes). The intention is awesome, but in my opinion, right now it's also the Achilles' heel of this phone. I've only used the default OS of this beta edition (which is Manjaro) so your experience may vary with other OS.
I had expected that there will be limited 3rd-party apps and was positively surprised with how much apps came already pre-installed. Apart from Maps and Mail, almost everything that a regular smartphone comes out of the box with, is included.
But while most parts of the OS and apps are there, most of them are still very rough. The label "beta" made me aware that there will be some bugs, but in my opinion there are more than a few bugs right now and "Alpha" would still better describe how i experience this OS right now.
In order of annoyance to me, here's my (non-exhaustive) list of encountered bugs / issues:
- The phone seems to freeze or get stuck after not being used for a while. I've had to force-reboot it numerous times in the last 24 hours already. Sometimes it is not clear if the phone is still loading something or got stuck (doesn't respond to touch for several seconds when navigating, multitasking, opening apps).
- The convergence dock seems to cause graphical glitches or the phone to get stuck on a black screen when unplugged. With my main monitor (up to 4k) it doesn't work at all. Only with an older monitor (up to 1080p) it can sometimes work. But even then it takes multiple tries before the keyboard, mouse and HDMI are all detected and working properly.
- The home screen fails to keep its order of added icons and widgets. Sometimes everything gets crushed on top of each other and on 1 place. Other times icons are just moved to a different place than i dragged them.
- The modem sometimes shows funky messages ("IP configuration is not available") and sometimes loses signal. This must really be fixed before you can use this as a real phone. And when switching from wifi to LTE you have to run some terminal command to get DNS...
- Rotating the screen is slow and often leaves artifacts or half-sized windows.
- Some of the apps sometimes don't open. Right now, Clip will never open.
- The lock screen is slow to pop up when pressing the power button. It also shows a 12-hour clock instead of the configured 24-hour clock
- The battery percentage indication is all over the place: it jumps up and down without being plugged in to a charger. (this reminds me of the battery indicator of the iPod touch a long time ago.)
- There is no email client included and i couldn't find one that is optimized for mobile display (Geary is the only one but doesn't support Oauth which is now needed for Gmail)
- The browser seems to lack hardware accelaration, causing slowdowns and videos to play back at very low quality only
- The camera app (Megapixels) sometimes opens the camera wrong aspect ratio and the camera has issues with screen rotation
- The settings look incomplete: there is no way to customize the lock screen, the screen timeouts are broken (see also the other topics) and you cannot change the APN settings (if needed). There is also no airplane mode (isn't this legally required on every phone?). And where can you change things like the ringtone?
- The phone can get quite hot when being used / charged
- There is no maps app / GPS
- Most apps in Discover are only meant for desktop computers and there is no easy indication to see if something is optimized for mobile or not.
All in all, a phone running Linux is a very cool idea, but I wouldn't call this a Beta OS right now. If at least the bugs with freezing, the convergence dock, home screen lay-out resetting and the modem losing signal are fixed, then this can be considered a beta in my opinion.
