I have been thinking after the announcement about the new pinephone pro about the consequences the users of the normal pinephone will have. A major concern, in my opinion, is the possibility that a great part of the developers will soon focus on the new pinephone pro. This could leave the normal user with an unfinished product in the hand, at least for some more years.
I am also disappointed by the fact that our pinephone cannot be upgraded. This is very upsetting.
At this point, I would expect at least a discount for the new pinephone pro for the early adopters of the pinephone (braveheart ones). The early adopters supported the project and maybe deserve some recognition.
It would be nice an official answer on this matter.
A lot of the development we still need is with the EG25-G or above the hardware level, so progress on one phone will be equally beneficial to the other, much as Phosh developments benefit both the PinePhone and the Librem5. Are there any specific areas of hardware support you're worried about?
Brave Heart owners already had the offer of a cheap mainboard upgrade, even if we didn't all take it. While discount offers are always nice, I don't see any reason to expect another one.
i'm not so sure it goes that way. we will see.
my pessimistic prediction: pp pro will become heat bomb with poor battery life, therefore buyers stick to the basic pinephones. pine org quickly re-develops pp pro2 with some fixes. and we end up with three models, which is a mess.
eg25-g is my biggest concern as well. it seems that eg25-g is full of sewage stuff. therefore cheaper phone might be better until this sewage is fixed.
I think the allwinner CPU is better suited for a phone, the software just needs to be lightweight like the old Maemo/N900 software was.
There will be situations where a user needs a phone form factor with a CPU better suited to a lightweight laptop, pinepro is for them.
As far as software development goes, the original Pinephone has disadvantages; the biggest shortcut app devs like these days is to make a website, wrap it in a bloated web browser wrapper like electron, and call it an app. Devs are going to do that either way, its easy/convenient. These are a mixed to mostly rough bag on the Pinephone currently, but if the Linux Browser experience can get optimized to Android levels on the Pinephone, then I think you have nothing to worry about, mostly...
What excites me most about the Pinephone Pro is that it can use newer 3d graphics APIs (Vulkan specifically). That it can use Vulkan instead of the ancient OpenGLES2.0 opens so many doors for modern 3d graphics and games getting ported to it.
On the other hand, the most important software like phosh and Plasma Mobile, and hardware drivers are only going to get better as they evolve. Ultimately, I'm not getting the Pinephone Pro myself because the Pinephone is powerful enough for me. Once software finally goes from "beta" to "consumer ready", I bet most people will feel the same, especially for the price tag .
10-26-2021, 02:17 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-26-2021, 02:27 AM by ivanB1975.)
I don't agree in toto regarding the fact that we received a discount for the board and so now we are done. The original idea of the pinephone and the major point that made me agree to support the project was to be able to upgrade it with the time. And this is being disregarded.
I think that the main developers (megi, pizzanerd and so on) will switch to the pro. And this will mean the end of the normal pinephone development as we see it now.
We should be able to upgrade our pinephones. One of the main developers in a video states that the pinephone problems are not the software but the hardware. And the pinephone pro will solve these problems. Is this just marketing?
If it is then I am even more disappointed.
I fully understand the concern.
It's Android development all over again; all the developers will go to the newer models because better hardware, while the older models will be for either hobbyist hackers who already have a full time job and therefore somehow need to allocate time for it, or there'll be no development on it at all.
On the software side, I think all the soyware (apps made in Electron, Python etc) will infect only the Pro model, most apps made proper UI libraries and more optimized languages will work on both perfectly fine for many years to come.
And if this really is the end times like some people fear monger about, then it doesn't even matter.
母語は日本語ですが、英語も喋れます（ｒｙ
