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by mjard 1606 days ago
Slow, short battery life, buggy. You don't want this for your daily driver.

Now, it is a fun toy to play with. PostmarketOS with SXMO is an interesting experiment and I love the idea of a pocketable linux computer with a modem. It could potentially even be a phone if people stop trying to treat it like a feature phone and accept that you are running on limited hardware and software needs to be written as such.

1 comments

I daily drive it.

>Slow

But it's fast enough. Since you can use overlapping WMs you're not stuck staring at loading screens and can use other apps while you're waiting with no time spent switching. Android is heavy. It's way worse than people realize.

>Short battery life

You can fix this by adding an extra run level that uses RTCWake to sleep the phone when it's "locked" without missing notifications. I think a number of distros have added this.

Also you can swap out batteries unlike nearly every other phone. They even sell a charger. I have three that I cycle through.

>Buggy

IME it's better than Android now. EDIT: Well, let me clarify this. You will have to tolerate some bugs, the EG-25 modem firmware is particularly bad. I use VOIP for MMS and voice because I don't trust the modem to behave. Everything else (the stuff the community actually controls) is better than Android though in my opinion.

>> You can fix this by adding an extra run level that uses RTCWake to sleep the phone when it's "locked" without missing notifications.

This should be part of the default configuration, because the battery life is way too short. Swapping batteries isn't a workable option for a daily driver, and besides the extra batteries have been out of stock for over a month.

Fast enough?

Can it scroll the contacts list at 60 fps? Can it run youtube with hardware acceleration?

Congratulations! From having purchased a Pinephone myself and read the forums, you are probably one of a dozen people in the world able to do this. Pinephone is not yet intended or ready as a daily driver for regular users.
Does it support 5G?
It does not.
My 3G phone will soon be obsolete as 3G is being phased out in the U.S. in favor if 5G. What non-apple non-google 5G options exist?
To my knowledge, none. But I don't think 4G is going away anytime soon to be honest.