[MartijnBraam]

The cameras are far from "the simple stuff", it's one of the more complicated systems in mobile devices with multiple high speed components from different vendors that have to work together and not very much documentation for the hardware existing.

[noasaservice]

Admittedly, that's doubly concerning. Pine chooses the BoM; we don't.

And if they're choosing unsupported/unsupportable chips without doing the barest of legwork to get them functional (or hell, get docs public), then that's a huge problem.

Pine should be showing on their pages a hardware matrix showing what works and what doesn't. The Pinephone Pro doesn't qualify for the definition "phone".

If they were serious, they'd put this page up front, with a list of all the stuff that they imply works, but doesn't: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro_Software_State

[MartijnBraam]

There is not really any good options for the sensors, it's all a few closed developers.

[ocdtrekkie]

Martijn, I want to really give you some credit for these responses: It's rare to see someone who will step in and defend bad takes against the party they are also taking issue with.

[bombcar]

Agreed, for someone who is watching from the sidelines it lends a lot of credence to Martijn.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Pine should be showing on their pages a hardware matrix showing what works and what doesn't. The Pinephone Pro doesn't qualify for the definition "phone".

I'm actually on board, but do note that that's going to be a chart full of subnotes and caveats - things like "camera produces an slightly red-shifted but passable image on default software shipped from factory, red-shift is fixed with kernel 5.19-patch-foo but that breaks focus, Mobian ships that kernel with a userspace correction filter that fixes it in the latest nightlies[...]". You'll end up with a small table that's 90% little yellow "works with caveats" boxes and then several pages describing the caveats and various working and shades-of-working configurations. Oh, and it'll need to be timestamped and constantly updated (as in "major bugs fixed, and sometimes added, on a weekly basis")

In short, summarizing active development is never going to be simple.

[hertzrat]

If it’s no, but has a dozen asterisks, to the end user, that’s still a “no, this component does not work properly.” The footnotes can be 5 pages long but the chart is still straightforward

One day I’ll probably end up with a Linux phone, but I mean, not if I’m worried I’ll get surprised when it arrives

[ac29]

In the store right above the add to cart button it says:

"The PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition is aimed at Linux developers with an extensive knowledge of embedded systems and/or experience with mobile Linux"

To me thats pretty a pretty clear implication that many things may work poorly or not at all.

[noasaservice]

That indicates that hackers can do shit to get it to work.

And, they call it a Pine *PHONE* Pro.

It can't even do the "Phone" thing.

And read up about the hardware critical failures that can destroy stuff when you plug in the wrong usb-c connection.

Yes, I expect a minimum functionality. You know, like NOT FRYING SHIT. They couldn't even manage to do that.

[seba_dos1]

What's up with those "can't even do the phone thing"? It's not 2007 anymore, GNU/Linux phones can do phone calls, and PinePhones aren't different.

[megous]

Not sure what you'd have to plug to Pinephone Pro to destroy anything. Maybe a badly broken charger or a dirty plug.

There's nothing wrong about Pinehnone Pro's Type-C port supporting circuitry. It's pretty much a reference design this time.

[zozbot234]

> should be showing on their pages a hardware matrix showing what works and what doesn't.

inb4 What works: You tell me!

[megous]

> Admittedly, that's doubly concerning. Pine chooses the BoM; we don't.

Actually camera sensor was changed on request from Martijn. (or so I was told, when I was asked to add support for the cameras in the kernel)

[MartijnBraam]

Rear sensor was chosen as a balance of kernel code available and picture quality, I had some influence there, front sensor was originally the ov5640 but that just got replaced due to availability.

[Aeolun]

My $5 bargain bin webcam can take pictures and video at 24hz.

My $200 pinephone can, on a good day, do 0.5hz. I dunno, but I expected more.

[megous]

Nobody wrote the driver for H.264 HW encoder support, yet. When that happens, Pinephone will be capable of that, too.

That's not a $200 proposition, though. :)

And I guess there's no huge motivation, given the expected quality of the resulting image. Maybe someone will write it for some other similar AW SoC that uses the same HW block.

Such is the power of FOSS.

[effingwewt]

If it's beta software and prototype hardware then they should be in the 'give it to some people willing to help with bugs and documentation' phase, not 'charge people for a phone that can't make phone calls' phase.

I used to be all for early adoption, but too many people ran off with my money via Kickstarter and Steam Early Access.

edit- add phase x2 =p

[megous]

> If it's beta software and prototype hardware then they should be in the 'give it to some people willing to help with bugs and documentation' phase, not 'charge people for a phone that can't make phone calls' phase.

It can make phone calls.

It took a separate $31,000 kickstarter and 4 years of a multi-vendor cooperation to create and upstream then non-existent accelerated stateless video decoding API for Linux. Pine64 would have never released anything if they waited on Linux API standardization process (have multiple users of the API in kernel, etc.). And even after 2 years of availability, the only major user of the API is gstreamer, and it's still bubbling through the stack so that you can just open Firefox and play an accelerated video.

Pushing through this process even nicher accelerated encoding feature, usable pretty much only for the cameras (which are quite crappy on the OG pinephone, so motivation is already low, there), is just not going to happen for giving someone a 7 year old outdated phone worth $150 only to some enthusiasts and $0 to pretty much everyone else, lol. That's just ridiculous.

[hammyhavoc]

Your $5 bargain bin webcam doesn't work without the computer and the software that runs on it though. The PinePhone isn't the problem, the problem is the lack of software. It is ridiculous to compare the two things.

[Aeolun]

The $5 bargain bin webcam comes with software.

I’d expect my PinePhone to come with software too. I mean, I guess it did, I think I just expected more from the open source community than from the nameless fly-by-night vendor.

[hammyhavoc]

Are you sure it does and isn't just the bog-standard generic driver for your OS? Because likewise, you provided the computer, OS and everything else for it to work with.

[noasaservice]

Or, Pine should sponsor a kernel dev or 2 for mainlining hardware that pertains to them (and helps the community as a whole).

Software takes time. But their plan is "cobble shit together in an untested and unmaintained state and YOLO".

[seba_dos1]

Webcams work in a completely different way than phone cameras. There's no point in comparing them at all.