Just bought one after seeing this review! I'm a huge fan of my Pinephone, but the speed leaves a lot to be desired. I bought the keyboard backplate, and I can use TUI replacements for most of my main apps (Mastodon, Reddit, Twitter, UA-cam Music, Navidrome, Gemini, etc), but as someone interested in doing Kirigami dev work, I'd much prefer having a device which can run GUI apps performantly. The testing / deployment workflow you laid out - git checkout, make, make install - sounds like a dream. Can't wait till this arrives! The performance looks stunning!
I was using my original pine phone for two years so it is daily drivable and yes compared to the pro it’s like molasses this thing is like sonic the hedgehog in comparison.
@@micaiahflores1592 Sure, Phosh is more mature, but the hardware is just way too weak. I guess, one day I will also buy the PP pro, but, having been an early adopter with the original PP and having gone through a rather frustrating experience with it, I think I'll give it a bit more time now.
"This is an expensive device it's 400 dollars." Meanwhile I'm considering taking out a second mortgage to buy a new mainstream phone lol. I agree $400 is a lot, especially if your not committed to try to make it your daily driver, I just think it's kinda funny how affordable it looks next to the absurd prices of modern smart phones. Great video! I'm considering getting one of these as my next phone.
Yeah, always a laugh seeing so many women (who know squat about real apps and specs) buy flagship phones from Samsung and Apple. Price is never a consideration for them. They just want it and get it. Meanwhile, us geeks are mulling over an extra hundred buck. De-coupling from Google (or the Apple mothership) might be a hard sell for millions of people though.
@@n.miller907Depends on the country. On Brazil, that's two months of salary on a phone, not everyone can afford that, even if the payment gets spread for a year or two.
Bummer that we can't flash a new OS yet. :( Can you remove any app you want? One of my personal grudges against Samsung's phones is that they come loaded up with "apps" (which are basically malware masquerading as ads) that are basically impossible to uninstall. And even when you manually shut them down, OS updates often turn them back on! Yuck!...
So the situation on flashing the internal memory has changed. I'll need to make a whole video about it but you can now install a new boot loader that allows flashing. It's hard to find the build it's in this PR github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/pull/67 And it's hard to get the device to boot off the sd card at first but once you do you can install this new boot loader which allows for easy flashing of the internal emmc and easier booting off sd cards. This device is linux and you have root so you can delete what ever you want. There is no immutable file system on any linux os for it.
It looks so smooth, did you get lag on phosh (on the OG pinephone) when opening apps too? The desktop swiping motions are way better too than phosh's tap option.
I really wouldn't fstab a folder like that, too prone to ruining boot. Better to use an init/service script that mounts it at boot, just so that if it fails for whatever reason, your system still boots.
Hey that sounds interesting. Do you have any links to blogs that walk you through a similar thing? It is a little risky with fstab. You got to get it right.
@@ryannicholl8661 Or you could just...not fstab it and make a service file and avoid breaking shit all together, and have the reliability of having something you can restart.
KDE plasma is my main desktop on my desk pc lol. I do would like a video for the desktop mode please :)Thanks a lot for the video, great info, i wanted.
im thinking about spending. but is it real linux? can it run any software that can compile for arm? all other 'linux' phones seem to be incompatible with standard linux programs. my reason i am interested is that i use a lot of weird specialist apps and hardware that i would love to operate mobile, more mobile than a laptop
@@noimnotarobotcanubeleiveit7024 I'm not native speaker and I have a problem understanding your question. Can you perhaps rephrase it? If you are comparing speed of running remote VM to running application over X11 forwarded over ssh, then unfortunately VM's always run better. X11 protocol is not really well suited for remote execution. And if it is, application toolkits like Qt, GTK+ with their theming support, make it often no longer a vector operation. Benefit of X11 remote execution is supposed to be efficiency of running X11 drawing commands over network. But all those toolkits nowadays probably send pixmap blit commands which just transfers pixmaps over network for all draw operations making remote rendering very inefficient. On contrary remote access protocols like RDP, VNC are optimises for bitmap transfer operations so working with rich gui application on server side is as efficient as it can be. VSCode remote plugin has optimisations on its own as it's dedicated solution so has means to work well. This probably doest not answer your question but then again I was not able to understand it :p Pinephone runs on native Linux with Linux/GNU userspace (in ex not Android). I don't think there is VM version (x86/64) equivalent for that pinephone distribution that you could conveniently run in VM. It all depends on video drivers that are needed for the hardware.
My phone was released in 2021 with a headphone jack, microsd card, 120hz screen, nfc, notification led, IR blaster! You guys in the US have it rough, no Xiaomi phones available
We can buy Xiaomi phones in the US. Xiaomi phones are not privacy privacy oriented phones. Some of them can run Lineage OS but usually not well. This phone is more about freedom than features. having a sdcard and headphone jack is just a plus.
@@wolffurprogramming Most of the qualcomm xiaomi devices have custom roms for them, AOSP is perfect for privacy with features. For me the pinephones are really about having a proper Linux mobile platform
@@Jbrimbelibap I bought a xioami phone as my first degoogled experience and it performed pretty poorly. lots of things didn't work. The camera didn't work, because the camera chip had recently been updated so lineageos didn't have the proper drivers. imo, oneplus is a better brand to get if that is what you are looking for. pixil phones even better. The xiaomi phone did work pretty well with it's stock OS though. If I wasn't so worried about companies stealing and selling my data that would likely be my preferred device because it's cheap and works pretty well.
@@wolffurprogramming Oh i see. My experience on Custom roms with a Xiaomi poco x3 pro has been amazing, though one plus is a better option for privacy 100%. Unlocking the bootloader is easier and doesn't require internet, and the emergency download mode isn't locked. Thing is my phone is the only model with this much features
SailfishOS is way faster and refined than pinephone or purism. Pinephone and librem5 are still yrs away from every day carry. Although Plasma is looking good.
I would be interested in a video on making an app if that's on your radar 1:28 isn't that funny, like "what do you mean?!" I will get one of these too, after I write an app/release it for PP 4:05 that's odd would think you could just flash it on the fly like the first one lol HN reader nice, 6:35 that's neat I'll check that out can learn what the code looks like/UI framework they're using 14:06 they're gonna what? haha... well looks like I'll be ordering it sooner than I thought Nice video
@@wolffurprogramming That would be awesome. Thanks. I remember in your video you said about git cloning or even just building on the phone itself. Not sure if you have thought about deploying to some kind of app store or the OS package manager eg. apt for Mobian... but the KDE that you have will be interesting not sure what that's on. I actually did pre-order a PPP yesterday.
@@softwarelivre2389 I will make one, I'm just not sure what it will be about yet because there are a lot of videos out there including this one that goes over it pretty well. I will make an app for it, so maybe I'll document that process. I have the original Pinephone and it's using Mobian/Phosh I was going to learn that environment but the Pro I'm getting is Manjaro/KDE so still unsure. I think the Pro will get shipped out end of this month so I still have to receive it. I'm prepping myself though/finishing other projects ha. I'm trying to avoid a "wrapper" kind of deal I would usually use React Native for that but yeah I want like C++/some GUI framework or something just to learn it.
@@duckmeat4674 Nah, just figured I'd save my money. Going to wait for higher end pinephones. And if Linux phones start getting OLED screens it's game over for Android.
A conversation between someone named duck meat and someone named gunner seems sorta natural. PPP is going to be awesome. ... eventually. I'm having a blast with mine, but I can't use it as my daily quite yet. Those brave souls who are doing that and the infinitely patient ones who adopted the previous, slow as 💩 PP before are better nerds than I. It's just not there yet. I need my phone battery to last more than a few hours at a time. (..and I'd like my cameras working first, tbh.) Almost there though.
@@eljuano28 I completely agree with your take. They have some improvements, but they're getting very close to a useable daily driver. Can't imagine it will be much longer.
It was the best review about this phone thank you. What do you mean „ it’s an experimental product“? As physical product, is it completed? I mean it needs just an update for the system and will be good?
It is difficult to tell to be honest. Without suspend properly working and the audio in phone calls still sounding poor we really need software updates to be sure. To my understanding those can be fixed in software but pine64 doesn't have a large team to fix those issues. It's basically just a few developers you can talk to over in discord.
Hey just wondering if you used the case and screen protector for the original pinephone? About to order the pro, but want to make sure I get the right protector and case for it :S
The pinephone pro comes with a screen protector. Like a glass shield. It also comes with a plastic screen cover already attached you need to remove before applying the glass shield. If you need another one you can buy the iPhone 11 Pro Max screen protector because it fits perfect.
@@reality_hurtz I bought it and it's in this video. tbh it doesn't protect the screen at all. It doesn't actually extend past the screen so if you drop it it will do zero to protect your screen. As I said in the video my original pinephone was broken using that case.
Last I checked Call audio was still awful and not usable. Better wait to pick one up if you want to make phone calls. The software isn't done yet for that.
I think you are missing the point of the device. The pinephone is for privacy and security firstly. I doubt they will have a "high end" version for another 5 years.
Did they fix the issues with autorotate? When I booted mine up on KDE Plasma the autorotate would eventually make the entire system destabilize and crash resulting in an unbootable image. This was just using apps that came preinstalled.
I have not had any whole crashes. Occasionally it will get stuck in a weird state and I have to rotate it a few times before it gets back. I ended up installing the new tow-boot and then installing phosh. I need to make a video about it just have not had time.
11:20 "I haven't tried phone calls yet" ... what?... It's a cell phone. The main purpose of cell phone is to make phone calls. You talked for 10+ minutes about whole bunch of stuff and only at 11 minutes 20 seconds into the video you are telling me you haven't tried making phone calls yet, because suspend feature is not done yet. The first thing you should have said in a video is that phone cannot be used as a cellphone yet, then talk about the rest of the stuff.
I have in the description not to buy this phone. This was a developer unit review. You can make phone calls now though. My sim card tray and screen broke so unfortunately I can't test it anymore.
It can. I have a video of fluffy chat running. It runs very smooth and fast. It's still pretty buggy though. I would wait a couple months if you can't compile your own flutter engine.
6:50 - It's a relief seeing it's not choppy and that the UI actually moves smoothly
Just bought one after seeing this review! I'm a huge fan of my Pinephone, but the speed leaves a lot to be desired. I bought the keyboard backplate, and I can use TUI replacements for most of my main apps (Mastodon, Reddit, Twitter, UA-cam Music, Navidrome, Gemini, etc), but as someone interested in doing Kirigami dev work, I'd much prefer having a device which can run GUI apps performantly.
The testing / deployment workflow you laid out - git checkout, make, make install - sounds like a dream. Can't wait till this arrives! The performance looks stunning!
2 years later, how has your long-term experience been? Was it worth it?
love Pine64 and what they’re doing
I was using my original pine phone for two years so it is daily drivable and yes compared to the pro it’s like molasses this thing is like sonic the hedgehog in comparison.
I really want to daily drive one but I kept missing calls and text
@@wolffurprogramming plasma is iffy. phosh and sxmo/sway are wayyyyyy better amd more stable then plasma, its supppper buggy
@@micaiahflores1592 Sure, Phosh is more mature, but the hardware is just way too weak. I guess, one day I will also buy the PP pro, but, having been an early adopter with the original PP and having gone through a rather frustrating experience with it, I think I'll give it a bit more time now.
@@micaiahflores1592 krashes. Plasma is super buggy even on Desktop lul
what OS do you find works for internet and calls/text? gps work at all in this distro??
That KDevelop installed on the phone cracks me up.
"This is an expensive device it's 400 dollars."
Meanwhile I'm considering taking out a second mortgage to buy a new mainstream phone lol.
I agree $400 is a lot, especially if your not committed to try to make it your daily driver, I just think it's kinda funny how affordable it looks next to the absurd prices of modern smart phones.
Great video! I'm considering getting one of these as my next phone.
Yeah, always a laugh seeing so many women (who know squat about real apps and specs) buy flagship phones from Samsung and Apple. Price is never a consideration for them. They just want it and get it. Meanwhile, us geeks are mulling over an extra hundred buck.
De-coupling from Google (or the Apple mothership) might be a hard sell for millions of people though.
@@n.miller907Depends on the country. On Brazil, that's two months of salary on a phone, not everyone can afford that, even if the payment gets spread for a year or two.
KDE Plasma is THE best desktop environment 😄
Better than XFCE? :)
@@engineglue it depends on what
@@Bruh-hd4rj My question was rhetorical. ;) Everything has it's pros and cons.
Highly debatable
Wayland is the way...
use Matrix chat named moment is has encryption and runs smooth even on the OG pinephone and has encryption which is important to use
I'll check it out. Thanks!
Bummer that we can't flash a new OS yet. :(
Can you remove any app you want? One of my personal grudges against Samsung's phones is that they come loaded up with "apps" (which are basically malware masquerading as ads) that are basically impossible to uninstall. And even when you manually shut them down, OS updates often turn them back on! Yuck!...
So the situation on flashing the internal memory has changed. I'll need to make a whole video about it but you can now install a new boot loader that allows flashing. It's hard to find the build it's in this PR github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/pull/67
And it's hard to get the device to boot off the sd card at first but once you do you can install this new boot loader which allows for easy flashing of the internal emmc and easier booting off sd cards.
This device is linux and you have root so you can delete what ever you want. There is no immutable file system on any linux os for it.
It looks so smooth, did you get lag on phosh (on the OG pinephone) when opening apps too? The desktop swiping motions are way better too than phosh's tap option.
Great review, I appreciate it! (I don't think the word "memory" means what you think it means.)
Is it 4g or 5g?
4g
I really wouldn't fstab a folder like that, too prone to ruining boot. Better to use an init/service script that mounts it at boot, just so that if it fails for whatever reason, your system still boots.
Hey that sounds interesting. Do you have any links to blogs that walk you through a similar thing? It is a little risky with fstab. You got to get it right.
@@wolffurprogramming I keep trying to respond and give you the info, but UA-cam keeps eating my comment. Is there another way to contact you?
@@wolffurprogramming Contacted you via reddit
there's a nofail option for fstab
@@ryannicholl8661 Or you could just...not fstab it and make a service file and avoid breaking shit all together, and have the reliability of having something you can restart.
KDE plasma is my main desktop on my desk pc lol. I do would like a video for the desktop mode please :)Thanks a lot for the video, great info, i wanted.
im thinking about spending. but is it real linux? can it run any software that can compile for arm? all other 'linux' phones seem to be incompatible with standard linux programs. my reason i am interested is that i use a lot of weird specialist apps and hardware that i would love to operate mobile, more mobile than a laptop
It's real linux. You basically can run anything a raspberry pi can. It's actually better at being linux than being a phone.
Install a vscode server and remotely develop straight on the pinephone perhaps? Just an idea.
Or run KDevelop over ssh with X11 forwarding. He already has KDevelop installed on the phone. Vscode remote mode might run more smoothly though.
@@reav3rtm has it any system that i can use a vm on my linux server with full speed connectivity, and graphics speed is at least near realtime?
@@noimnotarobotcanubeleiveit7024 I'm not native speaker and I have a problem understanding your question. Can you perhaps rephrase it?
If you are comparing speed of running remote VM to running application over X11 forwarded over ssh, then unfortunately VM's always run better. X11 protocol is not really well suited for remote execution. And if it is, application toolkits like Qt, GTK+ with their theming support, make it often no longer a vector operation.
Benefit of X11 remote execution is supposed to be efficiency of running X11 drawing commands over network. But all those toolkits nowadays probably send pixmap blit commands which just transfers pixmaps over network for all draw operations making remote rendering very inefficient.
On contrary remote access protocols like RDP, VNC are optimises for bitmap transfer operations so working with rich gui application on server side is as efficient as it can be.
VSCode remote plugin has optimisations on its own as it's dedicated solution so has means to work well.
This probably doest not answer your question but then again I was not able to understand it :p
Pinephone runs on native Linux with Linux/GNU userspace (in ex not Android). I don't think there is VM version (x86/64) equivalent for that pinephone distribution that you could conveniently run in VM. It all depends on video drivers that are needed for the hardware.
My phone was released in 2021 with a headphone jack, microsd card, 120hz screen, nfc, notification led, IR blaster! You guys in the US have it rough, no Xiaomi phones available
We can buy Xiaomi phones in the US. Xiaomi phones are not privacy privacy oriented phones. Some of them can run Lineage OS but usually not well. This phone is more about freedom than features. having a sdcard and headphone jack is just a plus.
@@wolffurprogramming Most of the qualcomm xiaomi devices have custom roms for them, AOSP is perfect for privacy with features. For me the pinephones are really about having a proper Linux mobile platform
@@Jbrimbelibap I bought a xioami phone as my first degoogled experience and it performed pretty poorly. lots of things didn't work. The camera didn't work, because the camera chip had recently been updated so lineageos didn't have the proper drivers. imo, oneplus is a better brand to get if that is what you are looking for. pixil phones even better. The xiaomi phone did work pretty well with it's stock OS though. If I wasn't so worried about companies stealing and selling my data that would likely be my preferred device because it's cheap and works pretty well.
@@wolffurprogramming Oh i see. My experience on Custom roms with a Xiaomi poco x3 pro has been amazing, though one plus is a better option for privacy 100%. Unlocking the bootloader is easier and doesn't require internet, and the emergency download mode isn't locked. Thing is my phone is the only model with this much features
OnePlus One runs pretty well with LineageOS.
is this phone now available to the general public? or is this still the developer edition?
It's the explorer edition which everyone can buy but it's not daily driver ready yet.
SailfishOS is way faster and refined than pinephone or purism. Pinephone and librem5 are still yrs away from every day carry. Although Plasma is looking good.
Which Pinephone or Pinephone Pro can be use as daily phone use?
None of them. Sound quality is garbage.
I would be interested in a video on making an app if that's on your radar
1:28 isn't that funny, like "what do you mean?!"
I will get one of these too, after I write an app/release it for PP
4:05 that's odd would think you could just flash it on the fly like the first one
lol HN reader nice, 6:35 that's neat I'll check that out can learn what the code looks like/UI framework they're using
14:06 they're gonna what? haha... well looks like I'll be ordering it sooner than I thought
Nice video
Sure i'll make a video on making a app.
@@wolffurprogramming That would be awesome. Thanks. I remember in your video you said about git cloning or even just building on the phone itself. Not sure if you have thought about deploying to some kind of app store or the OS package manager eg. apt for Mobian... but the KDE that you have will be interesting not sure what that's on. I actually did pre-order a PPP yesterday.
@@jacobdavidcunningham1440 neat, man! Happy for your purchase! Will you make videos about it? If so, I'd be the first to subscribe!
@@softwarelivre2389 I will make one, I'm just not sure what it will be about yet because there are a lot of videos out there including this one that goes over it pretty well. I will make an app for it, so maybe I'll document that process. I have the original Pinephone and it's using Mobian/Phosh I was going to learn that environment but the Pro I'm getting is Manjaro/KDE so still unsure. I think the Pro will get shipped out end of this month so I still have to receive it. I'm prepping myself though/finishing other projects ha.
I'm trying to avoid a "wrapper" kind of deal I would usually use React Native for that but yeah I want like C++/some GUI framework or something just to learn it.
Thumbs up for Dio - Rainbow in the dark ❤️
Might upgrade from my s21 to the pinephone pro.
Did you? I'm thinking of pinephone or wait until new pixel and install grapheneos
@@duckmeat4674 Nah, just figured I'd save my money. Going to wait for higher end pinephones. And if Linux phones start getting OLED screens it's game over for Android.
@@gunner75171 fair enough my guy
A conversation between someone named duck meat and someone named gunner seems sorta natural. PPP is going to be awesome. ... eventually. I'm having a blast with mine, but I can't use it as my daily quite yet. Those brave souls who are doing that and the infinitely patient ones who adopted the previous, slow as 💩 PP before are better nerds than I. It's just not there yet. I need my phone battery to last more than a few hours at a time. (..and I'd like my cameras working first, tbh.) Almost there though.
@@eljuano28 I completely agree with your take. They have some improvements, but they're getting very close to a useable daily driver. Can't imagine it will be much longer.
It was the best review about this phone thank you.
What do you mean „ it’s an experimental product“? As physical product, is it completed? I mean it needs just an update for the system and will be good?
It is difficult to tell to be honest. Without suspend properly working and the audio in phone calls still sounding poor we really need software updates to be sure. To my understanding those can be fixed in software but pine64 doesn't have a large team to fix those issues. It's basically just a few developers you can talk to over in discord.
@@wolffurprogramming I guess google and apple are sorcerers the way they made all this work 15 years ago
@@outlaw1179 they had a huge team of developers and a bunch of money to throw at it.
Can you use different OS's with different sd cards?
You sure can. I should make a video about that.
@@wolffurprogramming I am a Debian man and like MX, Parrot, and other Debian distributions. thanx
@@dennisdevine9563 I like manjaro and that is what i'm running now. mobian works good on the ppp I hear though.
Does the camera work now?
No still no camera support.
It kinda works, but the camera currently turns everything into green and pictures are mostly low-res. (As of september 2022)
I buy also one and just wait 😁
I shouldn't say that is smooth 😅 It's still laggy like hell.
Hey just wondering if you used the case and screen protector for the original pinephone? About to order the pro, but want to make sure I get the right protector and case for it :S
The pinephone pro comes with a screen protector. Like a glass shield. It also comes with a plastic screen cover already attached you need to remove before applying the glass shield. If you need another one you can buy the iPhone 11 Pro Max screen protector because it fits perfect.
@@wolffurprogrammingThanks! What about that transparent plastic case? Is that a case for the original pinephone?
@@reality_hurtz I bought it and it's in this video. tbh it doesn't protect the screen at all. It doesn't actually extend past the screen so if you drop it it will do zero to protect your screen. As I said in the video my original pinephone was broken using that case.
PPP uses much better glass than PP, but I'd like to see a better protective case for it in the near future.
What’s Bluetooth like for headphones
Nice review!
I am porting Briar Project to it once I get mine.
Also going to take meshtastic and mash it together with briar project since I got the LORA case to go with mine.
All I see him is clicking the screen 3 times to get a response, constantly.
So the App was Qt/Qml , which means that the phone support hardware accelerated graphics (OpenGL ES 2.0), right?!
I believe it pro supports up to opengl es 3.1. It can run flutter whereas the pinephone 1 cannot
Does it make phone calls? 😂
How's the audio?
Calls work now and audio isn't so bad. My sim card tray broke so I can't test it anymore. No shop around me could fix it.
@@wolffurprogramming god damn bro ಥ‿ಥ
are calls and txts ok
Last I checked Call audio was still awful and not usable. Better wait to pick one up if you want to make phone calls. The software isn't done yet for that.
Seems it is working fine on Debian nightly
I would need a Pinephone ultra, this is just not up to 2022 specs (720pScreen?) I will most likely get these Pine64 Earbuds though
the screen is 1080P
It is 720p, or their own website is lying
@@Jbrimbelibap Interesting I guess it is, although a little more than 720p because its 1440 not 1280 by 720
@@caleb7475 True, that's because it is not 16by9, most phone have a 2400x1080 or something like that
I think you are missing the point of the device. The pinephone is for privacy and security firstly. I doubt they will have a "high end" version for another 5 years.
Did they fix the issues with autorotate? When I booted mine up on KDE Plasma the autorotate would eventually make the entire system destabilize and crash resulting in an unbootable image. This was just using apps that came preinstalled.
I have not had any whole crashes. Occasionally it will get stuck in a weird state and I have to rotate it a few times before it gets back. I ended up installing the new tow-boot and then installing phosh. I need to make a video about it just have not had time.
Can you have the google play on a pinephone pro?
no
@@wolffurprogramming Isn't it possible if you use Glodroid or something?
11:20 "I haven't tried phone calls yet" ... what?... It's a cell phone. The main purpose of cell phone is to make phone calls. You talked for 10+ minutes about whole bunch of stuff and only at 11 minutes 20 seconds into the video you are telling me you haven't tried making phone calls yet, because suspend feature is not done yet. The first thing you should have said in a video is that phone cannot be used as a cellphone yet, then talk about the rest of the stuff.
I have in the description not to buy this phone. This was a developer unit review. You can make phone calls now though. My sim card tray and screen broke so unfortunately I can't test it anymore.
How’s the battery life as of current?
Like 5 hours of casual use.
@@wolffurprogramming continuous use? That’s not bad. Maybe it has improved.
What best linux phone in 2022 year?
Definitely the pinephone pro. Atleast it has the most promise for the price.
Wonder if it can run flutter apps
It can. I have a video of fluffy chat running. It runs very smooth and fast. It's still pretty buggy though. I would wait a couple months if you can't compile your own flutter engine.
Seems most Flutter bugs have been fixed! Pretty neat! Fluffy chat seems to be working pretty well by now (september 2022)
👍👍👍👍👍!!! If I was you I would employ P R O M O S M!!!