Just bought a PinePhone
I’ve just bought a PinePhone. I’ve ordered the Brave Heart edition, as that one is the only version available at the moment. Currently it seems that the only difference with the “propper” version will be that it is not comming with a usable OS on it.
This is where I would put the picture of my phone, If I had it here :-)
I am not going to go through the specs, feel free to click the above link and look at them. I’ll just try to think about how I could use it, and if it will be usable as a daily driver phone.
The first thing I’m interested in is the amount of phones they are making / are being sold. I hope the the amount of units will be enough to fuel a comunity, and that we will get sizable chunk of peoples effort to get a OS that we can use and want to use. The price (~150usd) is certanly good enough to facilitate that. And I’ve read somewhere that pine64 are selling it at cost. If that is true, than my hat is off to them.
I am really excited in having a PC in my pocket, and the smartphone to be just an app. I am imagining that I will be able to carry a BT keyboard and maybe a small mouse and that it will be possible to use standard linux applications. It will probably not be ergonimic to work the whole day on it, but having your phone in your pocket and a peripheral or two in your backpack and being able to do more or less any task you can do on your laptop is great.
The specs say that it is going to be able to connect a display to the usb port. I guess a dongle or a dock could be made have a desktop setup.
The most apps I use on my phone are available as web apps. Gmail, whatsup, riot.im, mastodon, reddit. I am not really sure, how that will help battery life, or the whole integration in the system. What will I do with, for example, banking apps I am not really sure at the moment.
Anyways, we will see how the whole thing will work out, but between the x210 that I’ve been waiting for for the last six months, and this phone it seems that the 2020 could be the year of opt-in.
If you control what is run on your computers, you have to explicitly start the programs that will be run.
Also, it would allow for niche products that are will not be made by the big smartphone manufacturers. E-ink smartphones, smartphones without displays and braille input and output for blind people, etc.