PinePhone

[...] In the time I've had it, the improvements have been huge. Some say it's a bit laggy - I don't think it is, I think this is down to not having animations to tide you over between this view and that view. [...] I have tried Pinephone and found that to be horrifically slow. [...] Out of the phones mentioned in this article, it sounds like the Furi phone would out perform most of them. [...]

Lol, sure the PinePhone was slow, but I daily drove mine for at least 2 years! [...] I ran my PinePhone on ALARM, It was pretty slow, but quite reliable and I really liked the foss modem firmware that allowed me to put reminders directly into my modem so I could suspend my phone and have it wake with a phone call from my modem with the reminder. [...]

I've been daily driving the Pinephone for the last year or so. I've found its software "limitations" to be more of a blessing in disguise, rather than a handicap. [...] Calls/texts work well enough, swappable battery, hardware killswitches, and running Linux instead of Android/iOS. I'm not denying poor battery life, but given that I'm never far from a power socket (like most people) I can easily charge it on my desk while working. [...] Not to mention that it was trying to nail a fair price point, unlike the Librem phones. [...]

An extremely L take... I have been daily driving a pinephone and only a pinephone with arch + phosh since around this time of year 2022. I am not a dev in any relevant sense of the word Comparing the oneplus to the pp is an uniformed and batshit crazy thing to do since one is proper linux and the other is using libhybris and halium to boot of the stock android kernel.

An extremely L take... I have been daily driving a pinephone and only a pinephone with arch + phosh since around this time of year 2022. I am not a dev in any relevant sense of the word just a user Comparing the oneplus to the pp is an uniformed and batshit crazy thing to do since one is proper linux and the other is using libhybris and halium to boot of the stock android kernel.

Been daily driving my UBPorts edition pinephone for years (not with UBports though). [...] Calls, SMS, MMS, LTE, wifi, web browsing, convergence, battery life all work fine for me. Yes it's slow performance, but my needs are rather minimal and it works for me.

Thanks for showing off the Ubuntu touch! I daily drive a PinePhonePro. 2021 May through 2023 May my daily driver was a PinePhone running DanctNIX Arch with Phosh 2023 May through today my daily driver is a PinePhonePro running DanctNIX Arch with Phosh

[...] i used it on my pinephone daily for at least a year: it does everything you'd want and does it fast. [...] so you're either stuck using the prebuilt releases without any means to patch/improve the software, or if you do want to make improvements then it's a full-time job to keep the package in a buildable state. in the end that was too much work for me and i switched to Foliate: it's noticeably slower (webkitgtk) and lacking, but it's way simpler to develop on. maybe they've improved the build system in the last couple years, though a quick peek shows that the nixpkgs expression is still using the binary release. if it becomes practical to build from source in the future i will 100% switch back to it.

[...] You get the cameras, buttons, accelerometer, all over the cable without fuss, and they show up in Linux as just a regular DRM device. Literally by default most window managers just see them as another display. It was such a nice experience getting a 3d engine hooked up to them and adding 6DoF tracking working with visua slam (two fisheye cameras gives you instant depth, a luxury compared to the usual monocular focus). Honestly these glasses are good enough that I use them with a pinephone as my primary computing device these days. [...]

[...] It had the issue were it no longer boots when the battery is fully depleted. [...] To my knowledge the company died off. I have a PinePhone. That was just a toy gadget and nothing of value as a daily driver. [...] The latest update improves a lot. [...] 5) Convergence station cannot handle an ultra-wide, 3440x1440, screen monitor. 6) Firefox has a buggy user experience were there is no way to hide the tabs listing or options popup from with-in the application. [...] Such as watching a video in full screen mode. [...] Once it is a little more polished the FLXS1 will become my daily driver. It has become my Bluetooth music player. [...]

Original Pinephone is good enough for smartphone apps. It can run a typical smartphone UI smoothly on a single core fully throttled to 648 MHz with a lot of room to spare, probably much better and more responsively than your typical similar class bloated Android phone. [...] :D (I guess I try hard enough, perfectly servicable with a single core at 648 MHz, barely scratching it at 10-20% CPU time used) It would be a bit ridiculous if it was not, given what UIs/games people run on 50MHz 486 if like 40-80x faster phone could not move some pixels around smoothly at 60fps.

Well, can you take a picture that looks better than what I made 20 years ago on a flip phone? I have a pinephone and try it out year after year.. [...] For example one can't just let everything run whenever it wants, wasting battery life. [...]

[...] Trying it on regular Firefox on Pinephone Pro results in: This page is slowing down Firefox. [...] Weirdly, the image animation doesn't render until I hit the "Debug Script" button that Firefox presents, which pauses execution. [...] I guess a sound is supposed to be played. I checked youtube and sound works. [...] It's just really slow. Only once it ends does the sound happen (haven't used OscillatorNodes before; probably normal).

Correction: The screen protector you mentioned is removable. I didn’t remove mine for years, but recently been experimenting with it and on attempting to carefully remove extra layer, a much better feeling screen underneath was revealed, with no issues whatsoever. [...] Once you get a corner lifted, you’ll see it’s not held together by much more than static, so no worries about difficult glue or anything. [...]

Since I finally wore the Pebble out, I've been using this PineTime (from the same people that made the Pinebook/Pinephone, etc.). Not near as powerful as the Pebble was, but it does basic smart watch stuff pretty well and cost me $35 new. It fills the gap for now.

[...] I needed to carry add-ons with me: a portable battery, a camera. The Pine camera sucks. [...] And I never got battery life to last without missing calls. [...] So yes my Pine worked, but I was tethered to a charger and couldn't snap good pics.

I gave up on the pinephone about 6 months after the pinephone pro came out, and i realized that all the distros were dropping debugging/development over to the pro... basically the pinephone is no further along than it was then. pinephone pro is not a big enough jump to make me move to it.

I bought a PinePhone when it first came out, and unfortunately the experience was terrible. I desperately want a phone with enhanced privacy features, such as a switch for the camera and a removable battery, but sadly I don't think this is ever going to happen. Some companies have tried, buy none of the bigger companies will ever bring these features to the market.

i got mine lst week. [...] it was hot afterward and battery was low. parked it on the charger. [...]

If you just use it for calls and SMS, why you want to buy a "smart" phone in the first place? I don't mind frickling and tweeking a long time to get the best experience for me, but without proper hardware acceleration and also little battery and a bad camera (its 13 instead of 5 MP, but still a miserable sensor plus terrible software) I can't do anything to improve that to a level I would accept it as my daily driver.

[...] I have the PinePhone 1.2b (Beta Convergence Package), that was shipped to me on April 5, 2021. [...] I see the flicker on my PinePhone's screen. [...] I see the flicker both when the screen brightness is set to a minimum or to a maximum. I have seen this problem the whole time I have owned the PinePhone. I assumed it was caused by this issue: However, rereading it, my case doesn't fit, because the screen flicker exists at both minimum and maximum brightness. [...] Maybe my screen flicker problem is special, but was the problem listed on the wiki ("When backlight brightness is very low and the CTP controller actively communicates on the I2C bus the backlight blinks heavily.") ever resolved by PINE64?

[...] I really like the idea and the drive behind the pinephone and what pine64 is doing with their products. Sadly I cancelled my order of the phone because it simply does not have the performance. Yes, it is not a performance oriented device but maybe a future version of it will be more suited to be a daily driver for the a bigger audience. [...]

"There were several pinephone HW revisions that fixed HW issues based on direct developer feedback... So communication to get HW changes was possible, and was usually via TL Lim, not via HW devs." That's great, but that wasn't my experience as an ordinary buyer of the PinePhone who wasn't on the special developers list and had no way to communicate with TL Lim. PINE64 provides no way for an ordinary user to register a bug report about the hardware in the PinePhone. When I added the "PinePhone component list" page to the PINE64 wiki ( I noticed several errors in the schematics. See: Since PINE64 didn't provide a way for me to register a bug report about it, I listed those errors on the wiki page. [...] However, the fact that PINE64 doesn't have a public bug tracker for its hardware issues is frankly an indication of problems with the way the company was run in my opinion. [...] "The article says PPP "still had major software problems when its sales were cancelled in August 2025.". [...] Pinephone Pro has almost full kernel support, multiple bootloaders, even graphics/touch support for U-Boot, etc. [...]

There are several possible causes of screen flicker. One cause of screen flicker is if display is not properly turned off and driver does not wait the required 120ms after turning it off before cutting the power to it. Then on the next display power on, it may very visibly flicker for extended period of time, depending on time between last power off and next power on of the display. [...] :-D It was fixed in Things in mainline get regularly broken by unrelated work, so maybe this got broken by the unrelated kernel change in 2024 that caused the clock that feeds the timing controller for the panel to not be able to set required 432 MHz to achieve the specified 60 Hz, so if you run mainline kernel change made for Olimex laptop caused Pinephone panel to be driven by 16% faster clock and refresh rate is almost 70Hz, which is out of spec. [...] Probably not the source of the flicker, but who knows how borderline panels behave. [...] the mentioned commit says that pinephone SoC MIPI-PLL is unstable at 432 MHz, yet it does not acknowledge what that driving the panel at 16% faster clock may result into at all, from 16% higher power drain due to every userspace app having to render at 70 Hz, to stutter of video playback or UI stutter in systems that don't derive all timing from the display (eg. [...]

[...] I love Fairphone's mission and hope they succeed but indeed it is very difficult to justify spending that much on a phone with those specs, particularly when the company is young and so its promises of replacement parts, extended updates, etc, are difficult to assess. I have played around a bit with pmOS, originally on an early Pinephone (the "Braveheart" model, which was plagued with hardware issues) and more recently on an ASUS MeMO Pad 7 (which at the time was in the "Community" support category but appears to have since been archived by pmOS). Even on devices where it "works", it tends to be slow, buggy, very heavy on battery and some peripherals like GPS and camera very rarely work. This is absolutely not intended as criticism of the Fairphone, Pinephone or pmOS teams - on the contrary they are doing fantastic and important work. [...]

I've paid 200€ for my PinePhone. [...] Messenger apps are a bit tricky; I'll probably end up hosting my own matrix homeserver and then have bridges running for Signal and the likes.

[...] Currently mid-high level hardware with PinePhone-like openness would probably let Phosh (and Plasma-Mobile, SXMO etc.) distros strive. [...]

[...] I wish it had a mini battery that could remain connected while the main battery was being replaced though. It would only need a few minutes worth of capacity.

I recently purchased a PinePhone. [...] I love Plasma on my computer, and I love Plasma mobile, but is so sluggish, its nearly unusable in my opinion. [...] I have AT&T, and had to update the firmware of the modem to keep it from crashing. [...] For me, it sounds like the other person is talking to me from a distance in a tunnel, and they say I sound far away from tge device. Can't get any bluetooth headset to work properly (setting sound settings to use the headset mic crashes the bluetoith), so I use a wired headset, which is fun while driving.

[...] I've been using my old pinephone pro as a desktop recently. [...] not exactly snappy, but fine. [...]

Pinephone pro looks like prottype but not real phone: Pros: 1)I really like alternative to android and Ios. [...] 4) probably i expect more updates than android, it wil lbe more like IOS update Cons: 1) really really bad performance, it is like samsung phone from 2014-2015 2) Camera really sucks, now we have phones with 5 cameras and 108 MP, while this machine has 13MP and front with 5 MP, which is worse than huawei mate 9 from 2016 which has 20 MPback and 12 MP front. 3) battery, 3000 mAh is not enough 4) screen resolution is not even full hd, but it is IPS which is good. Conclusion I would definitely buy this phone if it get a bit better performance, and i really hope the will do it next year.

[...] (and also run dosbox hahaha) the convergence feature works sometimes with my monitor, and right now with the stock distro it's very fickle when connecting to my monitor/keyboard/mouse. [...] what's worth it's weight in gold to me is the excellent terminal, access to vim, gcc, and lynx (yeah i like text based web browsing, i know i'm weird). [...] all in all, i'm glad i got it, but i'm not entirely sure it will replace my android phone just yet without more tinkering. [...]

I'm always interested in a new OS but this phone looks like it's stuck at least 10 years in the past. They have a decade's worth of examples from Android and iOS. The software shouldn't be so underdeveloped.

I had a pinephone and switched from phosh to plasma-mobile. The hardware was very limited but with plasma it was much much better at least.

[...] Maybe what I want is just something that doesn’t exist.

[...] The PinePhone Pro wasn't a compromise, it was unusable. The Pro version had a very small developer community and thus quite undeveloped software. [...]

[...] I enjoy postmarketOS on my pinephone, the phone's hardware is just far too shit for daily driving.

[...] I would consider the PinePhone, but my experience with it left me cold. And they EoL'd the Pro and the original PinePhone is fairly anemic by modern standards. [...] My memory was the PinePhone also had some land-mines with respect to drivers, but it's been several years since I touched mine, so I could be mistaken. [...] I really dislike writing drivers from scratch.

Got a PinePhone Pro with 4GB. [...]

I have a Pinephone Pro. I really like the prospect of the keyboard case making it as usable as a laptop, ( but after trying it out, the keys bind almost as often than they work, so it's entirely unusable. I need to find a lubricant that can make plastic (probably ABS) slide against the same type of plastic without binding.

[...] I was hoping that my PinePhone Pro would actually be usable. [...]

[...] What can someone who values their agency and wants FOSS choose? [...] How's the situation with security updates? [...] I tried PinePhone a few years ago, but it was crappy. The OS also lacked basic features like new windows showing up inside the screen. [...]

Over the decades I have used Neo Freerunner, Nokia N900 and now Librem 5. All of them were fully usable, though I'll admit the first one required quite some patience (similarly to the PinePhone these days I'd say).

Damn, this is really impressive, I have a feeling that the Pinephone and its successors are going to become the raspberry pi of the phone market in terms of being awesome for tinkerers!

I ordered the newer pinephone last month and they said mid month this month for estimated shipments. I can't wait! I've been a full time linux user for over a decade and I've been waiting for something like this to come out at this level of functionality.

[...] The Pinephone is just a little new and kinda "slow", but once they've straightened everything out, it'll run fine. [...]

Using Mobian on my Pinephone right now and things have improved a lot, especially with the camera.

Finally got my pinephone in today and have just been playing with different distros. It's definitely still in the 'potential' stage, but it's neat, and I'm hoping I can find an interesting niche use for it. So far postmarketos running sxmo feels the most "linux"-y

I always check up on how things are going for the Pinephone. I really can't wait until the day average users can use Linux mobile.

Great video on Ubuntu Touch on the Pinephone. [...]