As someone with a drawer full of these types of devices, from the neo1973 to the Creative Labs Zii Egg and Google G1, I'll definitely be picking up one of these phones when its available .. I've had a lot of fun with my PineTime watch already, as there are a number of different OS'es available for it .. in various states of functionality, of course .. but that's the fun of it. Its SO rewarding to have a device like this, that has so many open options. Write a watch-face in Python? Hell yeah. Learn Rust and carry my lab projects around on my wrist - for sure. Its like a breath of fresh air after decades of walled gardens and proprietary junk.
That said, the Pine-* devices are definitely not .. quite .. ready for mainstream. The PineTime watch back-face is not glued on, even .. but that just makes it a perfect hacker statement! Something so very satisfying about having a device so open, the case doesn't even close. ;P
>That said, the Pine-* devices are definitely not .. quite .. ready for mainstream. The PineTime watch back-face is not glued on, even ..
This is a little unfair to the other Pine* products. The PineTime has not been released. A development kit was released. Of course the backcover wasn't fully polished. The finished products from PineTime are more polished, while still retaining a degree of hackability that is unheard of in most of the modern tech world.
I'll add that my PineBook is a genuinely _nice_ piece of hardware. People who don't know what it is regularly assume it's some high-end laptop, due to it looking/feeling/behaving nicer that their $1k+ Windows laptop...
I'll admit there's a bit to go still in terms of "ready for mainstream" software, I wouldn't buy one of these for my mom still, but that's pretty much a) linux's problem, and b) _why_ I bought it in the first place... (I've got several MacBooks and iDevices for all the stuff where I'm happy enough with Steve's ghost telling me "You're holding it wrong" when it's not doing things the way I wanted/expected...)
I'm genuinely happy to be hearing that the PineBook is genuinely nice .. I'd switch to it from my MBPro in an instant, if I could. Maybe I will, soon.
My intention was not to slag off Pines' efforts. Its just, once you see a generation raised on iThings and pocketRobots, trying to get them interested in the hacky nature of Pine, as a platform, is an interesting task.
I think the point is that it has to excel over the iPhone/Android/laptop classes in some, significant, manner, or else it just gets sniffed at. This is an important thing to recognise in the quest for platform adoption.
That isn't to say that PineDevices are not productive, more useful. They clearly are, and the fact of their quality competitiveness is refreshing. The PineTime watch is actually quite a cute thing to wear. I love being able to write python code on it, but its also comfortable hardware.
But as a platform, it will need the right attitude regarding the open nature of things. This takes a responsibility not common in most adopters of technological tools these days - and with each generational release from the tethers of last years consumer toy, the task becomes harder... or lets just say, more interesting for some of the hackers who want to make great leaps in a new arena.
Someone will write the killer PineDevice app, which won't work anywhere else ..
> I think the point is that it has to excel over the iPhone/Android/laptop classes in some, significant, manner, or else it just gets sniffed at. This is an important thing to recognise in the quest for platform adoption.
If you see mainstream domination as the goal, e.g. to surpass Android or iOS, you'll probably be disappointed. I see it as giving those of us that care about privacy, security and openness a way to opt out of the Apple/Google almost-duopoly, just as Linux distributions do for the Apple/Microsoft one on the desktop.
For me, it only needs to be just about good enough to use as a daily driver, for now. I know I will be buying the shit out of one when these are available in July.
I messaged friends yesterday saying "I'm totally gonna get one of these, and hope _so_ much I get stopped and asked if they can see my phone next time I cross a US border..." I'd be all like "Sure! Plug this into your Cellebrite UFED! Knock yourselves out!!!"
"It's like a breath of fersh air after decades of walled garden and proprietary junk.
That said, the Pine-* are definitely not .. quite .. ready for mainstream."
Perhaps "ready for mainstream" is overrated (from a user perespective). Consider that many of the supposedly "ready for mainstream" proprietary hardware products that consumers have been continually fed for decades are laden with problems. Consumer routers are the first example that comes to mind but there are problems with almost everything, no matter how slick the marketing. The sellers try to block consumers from fixing anything and convince the buyers that they need constant "updates" that can only come from one source: the seller. They are effectively trying to destroy the concept of ownership.
Imagine if they'd just kept it around and upgraded it in hardware and software gently as a low-ish priority. It was already fantastic. Given security updates it's still better than any droid and less icky than any apple phone.
I'm currently prepping a Fxtec Pro1 that will become a daily driver once Lineage OS is stable on it (thanks TDM for your hard work - once I find a book on how to mod android ROMs I'm gonna join ya).
It turns out that I really wanted this N900 instead, I just didn't know it and at the time was too young to know about it.
There was some sort of attempted revival product called the Neo900 but it looks like it is dead / not updated any more. [1]
In the meantime, I will definitely order a PinePhone once they are in general availability and not pre-orders (sorry but Fxtec burned me so bad to get the Pro1 that I've learned my lesson RE: mobile device pre-orders), and I definitely will if Pine produces a physical keyboard for the PinePhone.
I'm really intrigued by the Fxtec hardware, but I won't buy a phone that ships with Android. I'd buy in a heartbeat if they supported a Linux SKU of the thing.
Definitely interested in adding Pine's take on keyboards to my PinePhone.
I mean sell me a product that doesn't ship with Android on it. I don't have the money to burn on expensive hardware that I then have to figure out how to flash with a probably unsupported OS to get to work.
I actually threw out my G2 yesterday (battery was missing, and it had been sitting in my drawer for... 10 years?), and it made me sad. Every day I pine for a sweet slider keyboard.
So, this Fxtec Pro1 is super intriguing! I'm sorta stuck on iOS right now because my entire family uses it I would screw up their Messages game if I was on a different platform.
Also, people have PostmarketOS running on the N900. Sure, it's an ancient device, but that still cool.
AFAIK the N900 sold great in Germany without any ads. It would have been the third place of smartphones IMHO, especially considering Android was not totally dominant in the public yet then.
I think it could have been sort of the "Thinkpad" of smartphones, used by professionals and geeks.
This device will be a nice portable computer, so I can travel lightly with a phone, but use it as full blown desktop anywhere I can get hold of a monitor and an USB keyboard/mouse, without having to downgrade my user experience to Android.
That's my dream, but I think this crop of devices isn't quite there from a performance standpoint. If I could have the hardware of today's flagships with the mobile Linux distros running on these things...
The Librem 5 might be closer performance-wise; I'd be curious to see how it performs docked. Regardless though, both devices have accelerated development of real mobile Linux DEs, and I'm grateful for that.
What about using your phone as a thin client of sorts? I've used Docker-Machine on an external VPS before when my laptop didn't have enough RAM. The experience was pretty decent (npm install didn't run locally).
I would run my code editor locally and sync the files to the remote box.
Using my phone with external monitor/keyboard/mouse as a thin client seems fairly reasonable in 2020!
That would be basically necessary for this kind of workflow, yeah. But the PinePhone isn’t quite at that level even; we’re talking hardware that’s going to feel unacceptably slow at fairly basic things like web browsing compared to even a low-spec x86 laptop.
Which is not to say it’s unusable, but keep in mind this is a $150 phone and the software is still a work in progress as well. If you’re expecting to use something like this docked as a workstation... well, it’s worth tempering your expectations.
I mean... I have a Braveheart edition PinePhone sitting right next to me, and it's usable, but I don't think I'd want to do even light development work on it. Not because an editor wouldn't run just fine on it (it probably would) but because of all the documentation I'd need to look up online during that process.
It's just sluggish enough with a few webpages open to make that sound pretty unpleasant. But fair, "unacceptably slow" may have been a bit hyperbolic.
(As it stands, I do have a PineTab on preorder, so... I’ll likely be giving it a try then, and that has nearly the same hardware as I understand.)
Lately I've been thinking of the ethics of buying Apple iOS devices compared to more opened devices - most, yet, not all Android devices. In the long term, iOS device are doomed to become unserviceable my users/enthusiasts dues to its closed nature, while many Android devices seem to have it's usefulness extended in time by efforts such as postmarketOS.
Is there an inherent quality of iOS devices that make them unsupportable.
Any given gen of iOS device has, arguably, more devices than any given flavor of Android devices (more fragmentation in Android platform) so in theory it would be more fruitful and impactful to extend the use of iOS devices (if at all possible) yet, this is not what we see. Leading me to think that Apple deliberately makes iOS devices unthinkerable.
This, to me, leads to the conclusion that buying iOS devices is unethical as the only long term alternative for iOS device is to have it recycled while android devices may retain the chance for reuse into the future.
Calling the project (or any project, really) "purely academic" with the implication that it will never evolve is nonsense. Like many other projects it's of course done for the hell of it, but so is most hobby/open-source projects, and yet many evolve into something much greater. There's plenty of reverse-engineering projects out there that have brought open life into closed hardware.
The question is just whether or not there's enough people interested for it to happen.
"purely academic" is not an insult. I think it a statement of fact of where running Linux on iPhone is right now. Aluminium–air battery may change the world but right now they are also "purely academic", as Lithium-Ion once was.
Do you honestly believe the average consumer, or even the average enthusiastic is going to be running Linux on the latest iPhones anytime soon? Apple is dedicated to locking iOS, and probably MacOS, more every hardware iteration. And by running anytime soon I mean usable LTE, GPS, Bluetooth and Wifi.
The opposite of "purely academic" is not being in the hands of average consumers and/or enthusiasts, nor is it that everything works and is usable.
Case in point: postmarketOS and UBPorts, as well-established and very serious projects with plenty of traction, are not in the hands of the average enthusiast, and still has ways to go to handle even the Pinephone properly.
Both pmOS and UBports are 2 of the examples I have in mind demonstrating the conceptual resilience of non-iOS ecosystem: these projects have small and fluid teams and yet manage to support dozens of devices with different HW requirements. iOS devices are so homogenous, and yet, so hard to them to be the center of these aftermarket efforts.
Yes, I became aware of that effort. And I applaud and look forward to them.
The problem I see in long term is: if there's no inherent property of iPhones that make them unhackable by aftermarket efforts I don't understand why there aren't more efforts or more success. Any given model of iPhone has many more units out in the market than almost any given model of android device that is officially supported by aftermarket efforts (ie. LineageOS, postmarketOS, etc).
I have a netbook with GMA 500, it has closed source driver for XOrg 1.9 (ten years old) and corresponding kernel [1]. I bought it because Intel graphic cards had open source drivers, not this one. Later I thought as you - someone would hack it, yes, kind of - there is a version without hardware acceleration. Eventually I was living with outdated XOrg server and patching driver to support updated kernel [2]. That I think is about as good as LineageOS - much better start than iPhone.
Hacking out of necessity is a bad idea. If not PinePhone I would definitely check open source drivers support in Replicant [3]. iPhone is too far away (and its users like iOS).
I am loving this PinePhone concept and PostmarketOS it because it’s cheap, but because it’s right, safe, user owned and secure OS is what everyone who spends their money deserves.
As mentioned in the article and the issues linked, you can already make and receive calls & SMS and use mobile data with postmarketOS on PinePhone. I have a Community Edition PinePhone with postmarketOS and have gotten mobile data working on a data only SIM, but won't be able to personally test calls and SMS until my new SIM arrives in a few days.
It's a very cool device, and while it's def not a daily driver for most people, it's a ton of fun to use and seems to be improving quickly.
Does it support group messaging? I don’t see that mentioned. That was the deal breaker for me when I used Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch, and Sailfish OS in the past. I loved them all! But they all had a dealbreaker or two.
Assuming you mean group SMS: I suspect not, since it seems to be using mostly the same stack as the Librem 5, and that doesn't seem to yet. (This is my dealbreaker too; I have a PinePhone sitting next to me running Ubuntu Touch, but I won't be able to use it as my daily driver until that works.)
Group SMS == MMS. This is the one thing that is stopping me from switching as well. There is someone who has gotten experiental support, but it sounded like there is still some work left to get it to work.
The pinephone like the librem5 has hardware kill switches so you can operate with the baseband off whenever you don't need the cellular network enough to justify the risks.
I don't know if the Librem5 goes beyond what the PinePhone is purported to do here:
"The LTE modem on the PinePhone is a ‘black box’, and runs its own Linux system internally. This includes all the proprietary modules (blobs) needed to run the actual cellular radios. However, this system is almost entirely isolated from the main system running on the A64 SoC. The only data contacts between A64 and modem are USB connection for data and I2S connection for audio. All data going in or out of the modem must go over these connections.
There is no RAM or flash storage shared between the systems. In short, unless you explicitly send data to the modem, it is never in contact with the blobs running inside it. The modem cannot send any data to the phone unless phone is willing to receive it (that’s the basics of USB)." [0]
That's in addition to the kill switches.
There might be other blobby aspects of the SoC/peripheral support story that the Librem5 gets better than the PinePhone, I haven't dug deep there.
Both Pinephone and Librem 5 have open GPU drivers and boot firmware. However they have proprietary WiFI/Bluetooth drivers. For the latter, Pinephone is using blobs in Linux, while Librem 5 made the firmware part of hardware (non-updatable), trying to get Respects Your Freedom certification from FSF.
>So what's the point of running it on hardware designed to address the issue of running FOSS alongside a blackbox baseband?
The exercise of maintaining an open baseline is valuable. Also, having a development platform is valuable.
Some modern phones keep the blackbox baseband isolated on a non DMA bus, such as usb. In those cases, you simply don't t rust the baseband as anything but a packet forwarder, and enforce full TLS/VPN at a low level in the operation system.
> As for the hardware, we will be making an announcement closer to date; presently we are working on the assumption that the PCB to ship with this edition will still be version 1.2. We may, however, decide to make some further tweaks to this PCB design. We will, of course, document and inform you of any changes to PCB 1.2 there may be in the future.
Hmm, it will be interesting if there are any major things than need to be fixed with the v1.2 PCB. There were quite a few things fixed between 1.1 & 1.2.
I've been researching getting a mobile "phone" that is only ever used as a hotspot for an iPod touch which runs (1) an always-on VPN and (2) apps for SMS and VoIP voice calls. So in a way, phone that can't do voice calls sounds like a good thing to me.
Android and postmarketos are both linux in the same way as whales and rabbits are both mammals. It's true, but not usually the useful way to compare them.
Do remember that this device is running a full kernel, so actually you can get the speed and memory benefits of running such. Expect some Raspberry Pi 3-eque performance.
The biggest bottleneck in RPi performance has always been the slow SD card access times. I have hardware from the Pi 3 era that still flies because they run off SSDs.
They definitely seem low when compared to androids, but If 2 GB works as great as it does on my iphone 7 then it should be doable to get a good experience here too. 3 GB is the max ram for the chip, hopefully they come out with a version that has that, or one with a different soc that can support more.
Like the other guy said with SD card you won't have an issue with storage.
Rather the opposite; it runs an up-to-date Linux kernel and an Alpine user land. An exploit against this would likely work against most servers and/or containers on the net.
That said, the Pine-* devices are definitely not .. quite .. ready for mainstream. The PineTime watch back-face is not glued on, even .. but that just makes it a perfect hacker statement! Something so very satisfying about having a device so open, the case doesn't even close. ;P