I backed the phone back in 2018 (like many of you) and was excited about it back then, bought the devkit and wanted to develop for it and all that. Sadly the languages and libraries don’t line up with my job that much and so it was hard to justify working on it versus trying to keep up with all the other cloud related things I need for my job so all of this kind of fell to the side.
Well just a few weeks ago my Evergreen did arrive (for those still waiting, don’t give up just yet!) and wow has it come a long way! I was able to get it running on Mint Mobile here in the US without too much struggle and MMS and pictures even work now! The UI is much smoother and notifications show up on the lock screen like the big guys. It’s so close that I even tried to use it as my primary number over the weekend and almost made it! My wife laughed at how big it is, but said I sounded good on the call.
Sadly when the work week started I was making more important calls and the people on the other side couldn’t hear me. I tried to debug it, but nothing I did seemed to fix the problem. It’s slightly different than the forum topic about no call audio period. I can definitely hear them, they just couldn’t hear me. I checked the mute setting and the input device inside the settings/sound panel and that was showing the meter move as I talked so I thought that was encouraging, but somehow modem most not be using that mic.
The other deal breaking issue is that every once in a while the phone appears to just give up on the modem completely. This is kind of scary because then you can start missing calls and texts. I found a command something like mmcli -m any
from another topic here and when it’s broken it says something like no modems found. I thought maybe restarting ModemManager
might get it going again, but no luck.
I’m sure the developers are already aware of this and I look forward to learning more about how they are investigating it. In the meantime, I’m wondering if there would be a way to cron something that would check the status and if it does lose the modem maybe turn on the LED with a different color. Originally I was thinking of making it just restart to get it going again, but since it asks user for encrypt password during boot it wouldn’t get very far without user interaction. Haven’t looked into that either, but it would be kind of nice with that disabled. There is nothing sensitive on the device. Kind of overkill at the moment.
Anyway, I just really wanted to thank the Purism team for all the hard work and let them know that there are fans out there that are looking forward to getting more involved and watching this mature even more!