10mo ago

"But my friend runs a PinePhone as a daily driver"

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Bought a pine phone because it's cool.
It is not daily driver worthy at all
- out of curiosity. What were the problems you ended up experiencing? Been tempted to get one being a linux user myself.
  
  Wifi keeps waking up the phone, draining the battery, then craps out when you want to use it. The camera has like 5fps with 1998 flip phone quality. Forget about multi tasking. It connects to the cell network so calling and texting should work. Want to use an app for something? Too bad.
  That’s my experience from two years ago, I had the distro hopping sd card and tried all os versions at the time. It’s just not there yet.
  The only use I see is dropping it somewhere and then using it as a jump host over lte, but I haven’t tested that.
  
  I have a PinePhone Pro and if the battery would last longer than a few hours, it would totally work as a daily driver. Fast enough and can do everything I need it to do, but 3-4 hour battery life. If someone can figure that part out, I think it'll be good enough for at least early adopters.
  
  I bought the keyboard addon with the extra battery and that has increased my og PinePhone's battery life a lot. So maybe give that a try. The downside is that it makes the phone pretty big and it might not always fit in your pocket. But it might be useful while traveling for example.
  For PinePhone Pro there is also some proprietary firmware, which is supposed to help. Are you using that? I probably wouldn't want to install it, but it's supposed to increase the battery life to that of the original PinePhone.
  
  A lot has changed in 2 years. But the camera on the original PinePhone will always be bad, since it's a 5 megapixel camera. For that reason nobody has even bothered to implement video recording, but there are scripts, which will let you do that.
  
  wifi wakes it up from suspend? Or sleep? I feel like that would be relatively easy to hack a fix for.
  everything else sounds about what i would expect it to.
  
  Been too long since I last tried it. I think my main complaint was lag and responsiveness
  
  as a linux user my immediate reaction is that those are fixable with good software. Modern phones run like shit because software is bloated to hell.
  Although other people have mentioned valid hardware issues too so.
- I use it as my only phone. It all depends on how important freedom is to you and if you are willing to sacrifice some things to get it.

393 comments