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by tpoacher 1467 days ago
My wife recently bought me a Pinephone Pro as a present. I liked the idea, but in practice I still haven't managed to use it because I'm stuck with basic problems.

E.g., the battery wouldn't charge in the phone. I bought an external charger, and this seems fine, but ideally I'd like a backup battery so that I can charge one while I use the other. But pine64 batteries have been out of stock for ages. Their wiki says "The supplied battery is meant to be compatible with Samsung part number EB-BJ700BBC / BBE / CBE from the 2015 J7 phone": I bought the CBE one, but it's such a tight fit that I'm terrified of using it in case it explodes or something. I have no idea where to get a proper pine battery from. And the forums are not exactly flooding with activity when I asked my question (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=16851)

Beyond that, a lot of the stuff that is supposed to work on Pinephone, turns out doesn't work in the Pinephone Pro. In particular, the multiboot sd-card demo (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=11347&pid=77027#...), which I was really keen to try, because I found the 'stock' distribution that came with the phone pretty ugly and useless (to my needs, anyway). I had the Jolla phone in the past, and I was very happy with it, so I may try to install Sailfish when I get the time to figure out 'if' it's possible, and if so how ...

But for now the pinephone pro is just sitting there, waiting for a compatible battery to show up, and me to find the energy to experiment with a compatible OS, before I'm even going to use the phone for anything even remotely productive. I'm gutted.

3 comments

I just grind off the bottom plastic tabs from the samsung batteries. Otherwise they really don't fit.
Thanks, that's a good tip. I might try that.
If you’re in Europe: I like my replacement PolarCell battery.
Would you mind sharing more details / specification? Is the fit ok? (and are we talking about Pinephone, or Pinephone Pro?)
It's this one [1]. I have used it with the PinePhone for a long time, and it fits and works with the PinePhone Pro in my superficial impromptu testing - I have not yet checked whether it's able to drive the PPP at full load. This could be relevant as I vaguely recall the batteries of PP and PPP are different with regard to their coulomb spec.

[1] https://www.ebay.de/itm/373621998423

the pinephone pro is definitely still thoroughly in the bringing up phase. for people just wanting to play around with it/actively use it, and not intending to develop it, the regular PP is the better option. They do make this pretty clear on their store page for it, to their credit.