PinePhone Questions

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I use a flip phone (non smart phone) as my regular phone. Only use it to make calls and send texts. No apps. I've read mixed reviews on the PinePhone but I believe the people reviewing it are comparing it to the top Android/Apple phones. I'm thinking of getting a PinePhone and running Mobian (I use Debian 12 on my PC) on it and I'm thinking this would be an upgrade for me with no downsides. Any thoughts/disagreements?

Also I use Visible as my carrier which is basically Verizon. Does anyone know if PinePhone would take a Verizon sim card? Does it have a hotspot option/feature as well? I looked at the below link and it says it supports Verizon but it would be great to hear from someone who has the phone and knows for sure.

PinePhone Carrier Support

wiki.pine64.org wiki.pine64.org

This is the phone I'm interested in purchasing (the one for $199.99):

PinePhone Archives - PINE STORE

pine64.com pine64.com

Not sure what are differences between the $149.99 and $199.99 phones but the $149.99 is out of stock.
 
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Unfortunately the pinephones are geared to/for developers. They have Big bugs like if the battery dies the phone will not reboot...
i like the idea of a Linux phone but its not quite ready.:(
 
I have a 3+ year old pinephone keeping a box from floating away. I made the mistake of not checking Verizon compatibility before I purchased it. At the time, it wasn't supported by them. A few people jumped through a whole circus show worth of hoops to get theirs to work with Verizon. But I don't have that kind of time or patience. Maybe they've started support? I don't know.
 
I bought the pinephone convergence edition basically as a toy as I friend had one said it was definitely -not- usable as a daily driver. I had hoped that over time the software would develop to the point where it would be usable, but so far that has not happened with -any- of the distros I've tried.

I have certain functions that I need it to provide before I can replace my cheap android with the Pinephone:
  1. has to be able to make and receive telephone calls with acceptable quality and reliability
  2. has to be able to send and receive SMS / MMS text messages
  3. has to have an acceptably working camera
  4. has to have an acceptably usable POP3 email client
Beyond those are a raft of support / accessory applications like calculator, contact list, alarm clock etc that are less important.

Since it requires a SIM card to connect to the cellular network for phone calls and text messaging, and that requires spending money on a service provider, I decided to put off testing Items 1 and 2 until last, even though they are critical functionality for a phone. I'm glad I did because no operating system that I tried (and I tried a bunch of them) was able to satisfy items 3 and 4 on the Pinephone.

The closest I came to a usable POP3 email client was good old thunderbird, which is what I use on my PC. But it simply does not translate well to the small screen of a phone - to the point of being far too cumbersome to actually use. Sure, with the little dock I can plug a full size monitor into the Pinephone... but that's not at all the point. Most of the phone-size mail clients are IMAP only or claim to support POP3 but it doesn't actually work.

The cameras on the Pinephone, I've been led to believe, are not actually junk but the camera app in the distros available for the Pinephone (they all include the same app, I've forgotten the name of it) makes them look like junk. On the main camera, the results are "usable", at best, but on the selfie camera it consistently fails to adjust for ambient light levels (there's no flash on the screen side of the phone, of course).

After failing so dismally to get usable results on email and camera, I've never even tried to register the sim card (I think its for Cricket in my case) because I can't use it as my daily carry phone anyway. For me, it's basically a little desktop computer and I've got better desktop computers coming out my ears.

Every few months, I check for updates of the various available distros for the Pinephone and try out any that look promising. I'll probably do that again in September, but not holding my breath.

I don't mean to sound like a complainer - these organizations are producing Linux distributions for free and I'm thankful for their hard work. It just seems like a bit of a let-down that the cheapest android device out there can get these things right but we "can't have nice things" without Android or Apple.
 
I've used both the Pinephone and the Pinephone Pro for quite a couple of years. It runs Linux smoothly in my experience. I'd recommend to use sxmo https://sxmo.org/ with it, super nice window manager.

There are a reasonable number of apps to do things and those work reasonably well in my experience. You can't just run android apps, which may mean you have to carry two phones depending on your needs.

It freezing or "not working" happened more often than with a normal android, but not that often (maybe once a month).

If you are a nerd and you don't need it to "run in production" then I would highly recommend it.

Of course you have to install kali https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=PinePhone_Software_Releases#Kali_Linux on it (and then sxmo) ;)
 
I use a flip phone (non smart phone) as my regular phone
Click to expand...

If you are looking for security the pinephone has hardware switches to turn off things you don't like. This way you can be sure that what you switch off doesnt have power. If you are looking for data privacy, its also really good as you can set it up like a normal linux (vpn, dnscrypt-proxy, anti tracking blacklist and so on), like you would your laptop.

If you are looking at it for software security, i'd rather recommend a google pixel phone with cyanogenmod I think. I wouldn't trust the security of both either devices, neither pinephone nor an android with cyanogenmod.
 
Thanks all for all the feedback.

I would only use the phone for calls/texts primarily. The current flip phones (or at least that I've seen) are actually semi android smart phones if that makes sense. I would like to get a Linux smart phone and lock everything down like I do with all my Linux computers so security and privacy wouldn't matter for me as I wouldn't be using the phone for much other than basic stuff. Basically I want to use my desktop setup on a phone so I won't have any distractions.

As far as apps go. I don't need any.

Blunix have you tried the Mobian OS and does that run smoothly on the regular PinePhone (not the Pro its too expensive for me)? Also does it have a hot spot feature and how well does that work?
 
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I've never heard of a pinephone...there are heaps of cheap android phones out there that will do exactly what you want.
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@User740985915675054 well "working well". its a bit of a developer thing, you might have to debug.

Calling and sms worked well for me and the hotspot too, i was using mobian as well, works ok. If you have zero linux knowledge then i'd advice against it though.
 
blunix said:
@User740985915675054 well "working well". its a bit of a developer thing, you might have to debug.

Calling and sms worked well for me and the hotspot too, i was using mobian as well, works ok. If you have zero linux knowledge then i'd advice against it though.
Click to expand...
Thanks I will probably wait until my current phone dies out or I am forced to get another one for whatever reason. By that time the Linux phones will have advanced along a bit more.
 
Thanks for posting that.
 
I pulled down the mobian image and tried it but apparently didn't get it onto the tf card right - the phone booted from the internal storage instead. I'll look into it later. I just spent an hour and a half checking for latest versions of twenty pinephone operating systems (it was depressing)... and now it's time for coffee!
 
I have high hopes for mobian since the guy leading it is one of the debian developers (the guy in the video above).
 
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