Sadly disappointed.

[zetabeta]

Bought a Pinephone convergence edition last summer. Came loaded with Kde and Plasma. It worked, somewhat, out of the box. Prompted me to do an update, from an on-screen button. I did that, and the phone was bricked. Could not get past the login screen. I put it away; brought it down to Arizona with me when I came down last week. Tried to boot it up. Would not accept the default password. So... I used my laptop the download Manjaro + Phosh, and write it to micro SD card. That worked. Got the phone running on it. But when trying to insert the SIM card, it slipped out of the adapter, and tore half the pin out of the socket. That design of SIM socket is CRAP! Such a failure should not be possible. It is a design flaw which is inexcusable. Anyway, I was able to pull up the remainder of the damaged socket pin, and got my currently-active SIM installed, using a different carrier piece. I was able to make one call, which went to recipient's voice mail.

Could not set time and date. Phone requires an Internet connection for time and date. Why not get those off the cell tower, like everybody else does? Fail.

With Phosh, once an app is opened, it cannot be shut down. All you can do is minimize it. Fail.

None of the touchscreen buttons on the top bar would work. Maybe they aren't supposed to? Who knows?

The touchscreen in general is very clumsy to use, and slow to respond, leading to buttons getting double-struck. Touch screens suck in principle, of course, and any device that purports to be a "computer" should have a physical keyboard. Like my late lamented Blackberry, now obsolete because of 4G.

I bought this phone because I wanted to avoid the inherent evil in the Apple and Google ecosystems. I wanted a phone with some of the useful functions of a smartphone, without all the cruft. Well, the "useful" functions basically don't work well enough to be useful, and there is still plenty of cruft, enough to choke a horse.

There needs to be a way to bypass the screen-unlock password. I will never put any information on my phone that I need to keep secret. Having to type in "123456" every time the screen goes to sleep is just too damned much monkey business.

Build a phone with the functionality of a Blackberry, give it the hardware switch options that the Pinephone has (one of the big selling points!), and I will buy it. If I can send and receive phone calls easily, send and receive text messages easily, and be able to use the Internet when on wifi, I will be a happy camper. I don't need a camera. I don't need a music player. I don't need to play Angry Birds.

Anyway, my SIM card has gone back into the flip phone. I'll see if I can sell the Pinephone to some masochist.

pinephone updates time and timezone from internet, is it wifi, ethernet or mobile data (bluetooth might be possible as well). you may set manual or automatic update. carrier time might be available but i wouldn't totally trust it, although it is supposed to supply timezone info as well, i hope correctly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NITZ

for general information. pine64 provides hardware and not software. so software community is responsible for quality of software. and yes it is full of issues. my biggest annoyance is poor battery life.

btw, phosh is more stable than plasma mobile. manjaro seems to have issues going on, try other distributions, like archlinux, pmos or mobian.