On Thu, Mar 10, 2022, at 13:48, Tony White via luv-main wrote: > I am currently looking at the Pine Pro Explorer on pine64.com. > https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-pro-explorer-edition/
Yeah. I got a Pinephone Pro (Explorer edition) just about a week ago. In short, the hardware is really nice (display, cameras, speed, RAM, eMMC storage), and there seem to be no problems with that (as there were minor hardware problems with the early editions of the Pinephone). But the software has a way to go before it's a fully usable phone. The basics all seem to work, like making and receiving phonecalls and SMSs, connecting to wifi, web-browsing, terminal. But a quite a few things don't work (said to be waiting on the software). The Megapixels app doesn't work with the camera, and the battery consumption is high (also requiring software tuning still to come). Like yesterday, I left the phone running idle for just a few hours, and found it had run out of juice. When I tried to start it up again, it got into a boot-loop. This morning, suspecting it was a too-low battery problem, I swapped in a half-charged battery from my Pinephone (non-Pro — it's good they take the same commonly available battery, easily swappable). After that, the Pinephone Pro started up fine. It's hard to know with these things, but I'd say that the Pinephone Pro is well worth getting, so long as you're willing to be patient waiting for the software to catch up. From my experience with the Pinephone, that development can be expected to happen pretty quickly, on account of the active Pine community. After all, the Pinephone Pro is pretty new. While it has much more modest specs, the (non-Pro) Pinephone is a very usable phone (especially the "convergence" edition with 3GB RAM, 32GB flash memory), so long as you're not reliant on Android apps. Scrolling (and other interaction) can be a bit sluggish, but workable. I think there are setups for running Android apps under ordinary Linux (like the Pinephone), such as Waydroid — but I haven't explored this option much. One notable difference between the Pinephone and the Pinephone Pro (besides the hardware) is a different out-of-the-box boot order. The Pinephone tries to boot from the micro-SD card first, then from the onboard eMMC. This is very handy for experimentation with different operating systems and setups — while you can leave your daily OS on the eMMC. (One gotcha is that if you want to re-use a boot micro-SD as for plain data storage on the Pinephone, you need to clobber the boot stuff.) In contrast, out of the box, the Pinephone Pro boots first off the eMMC, which is less convenient for experimentation — though there are workarounds for this which I have to investigate. Worth mentioning is that I've encountered some problems using either Pinephone (Pro, non-Pro) with my Decatxt chording bluetooth keyboard. Up until recently, on the Pinephone with Manjaro, it worked fine. But since then (some upgrades in the meantime) it seems to pair fine, and says it's connected, but the typing doesn't appear. One of the many things that I need to investigate further. — Smiles, Les. _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
