Yes (me too), we that don’t have “BraveHeart” Limited Edition are allowed just to look, but not to touch it! @ruff, have a nice day, week, …!
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Not really, how can I compare a phone I paid for two years ago but haven’t yet received to anything. Especially when the goal posts keep moving. I was expecting my librem 5 in January 2019… err April 2019… err wait, we’re going to pre-release some early editions (same price) but don’t expect to use it as a daily driver yet. But at least we made the last “deadline” to ship phones to backers, oh wait we sent them internally only. Blah blah.
What ever. They will do what they will do and I will believe it when I can see it. Seriously at this point the only purism posts I care about are videos showing what it can and can’t do at this stage.
But hey if you got a brave heart and you’re not brave enough, let me know I’ll buy it from you.
edit: from reddit "Luke_Pine64
PINE64
3 points ·
1 month ago
In general, all OS’ running Plasma mobile are smooth. Manjaro with Plasma mobile is exceedingly smooth, their newest Alpha (3) released yesterday blew me away in terms of raw performance. A new KDE Neon Alpha is promised for next week - I expect it to be very good."
And folks are reporting no power/heat issues - but yeah, you’re right it is so not ready yet.
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my goal is to run pureos there, understanding i may need to tinker with drivers/firmware. But as I’ve mentioned earlier I’ve opted for chestnut so I can still compare (though I’ve been assigned evergreen)
5 Likes
I’m about to do the same. Too much is too much.
Another delay untold to the backers…
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Just be aware the next production run won’t happen until a OS has been developed. The braveheart run was to put a near final design in the hands of experienced Linux users to iron out bugs and assist with development. Occasionally one will come up for sale used but they never last long. The last one was sold within 20 minutes of it being posted. I’ve been having fun with mine while at the same time being frustrated with certain aspects of it; it’s all part of the experience for me. If you go to pine64’s news page Lucasz puts out an update every month, good or bad, and relays the happenings and what they plan to achieve going forward; that part has been very refreshing.
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From what Lucasz said in a chat yes there’s a bunch of minor hardware changes but nothing that can’t be addressed via software for those with a braveheart edition. That being said am I going to get a new pinephone when they do the production run? Probably, because at $150 why not. If I had received an alpine librem would I spend $800 to get an evergreen? Uuuuuu, no.
I expect that the PinePhone will hit mass production before the Librem 5, but the time difference might not be as much as you think. PINE64’s last update projected that mass production of the PinePhone would start in March and shipping would start in late April, but that was before the Coronavirus was a known factor. PINE64 said that it would ship out the stock sitting in its Hong Kong office, but the border between Shenzhen and Hong Kong is still closed (except for limited ferry service), so PINE64 can’t ship anything else.
Most Chinese factories still haven’t re-opened and the ones that have are only producing very limited quantities. Foxconn is switching some of its factories to produce surgical masks rather than electronics. Some pundits are now predicting that most of the electronics factories will wait until May to reopen, because the Chinese government expects that the hotter weather will suppress the virus, but that isn’t known for sure. Given the uncertainty and the long backlogs that are currently building up, it wouldn’t surprise me if the mass shipping of the PinePhone gets delayed till July or August.
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The way I see the progress developing on the software front it may take that long anyway. Pine64 has already stated they’re not going to sell to the general public until there’s an OS ready and it seems quite a ways off at this point.
After the “Braveheart” edition Pinehone is now taking pre-orders for the UBports Ubuntu Touch, called the “UBports Community Edition”. By looking at the video in todays update it seems to work quite well, planned shipping for late May
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I ordered a pinephone with Ubuntu Touch yesterday. Ubuntu Touch and KDE are proven reliable OS’s aren’t they? Pure OS or whatever I’m getting on my Evergreen Nigerian princess phone seems kinda “not so reliable” from what I read here. By time I finally get ( 3 yrs. later ) it , hopefully it will be a daily driver. I know I sound negative but this social distancing while waiting is driving me crazy. Sorry .
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Neither OS is fully complete but a UT developer recently shared he had 10 hours of active use and a few hours of standby from a single charge. The image is supposed to hit public mirrors by the end of the week. When they ship the community edition won’t have cameras working (librem 5 is the same atm) or gps functionality but those will come with time.
Last month the battery life on the PinePhone was just as bad as on the Librem 5, but they have improved some things in Crust (the power management firmware) and repowerd. It is now possible for the cellular modem to receive a call and wake up the phone to notify the user.
UBports developer mariogrp reports that after 10 hours with the phone in sleep, he still had a 34% charge on the PinePhone battery, so you should be able to get 13 hours with the PinePhone in idle and getting notifications for phone calls. Of course, if you are constantly turning on the screen and using the phone (web browsing, texting, etc.), the battery life will be much less, so you probably will still have to carry around a second battery to get through an entire day, but the PinePhone is getting closer to being a usable phone if you use UBports. It will take longer for these changes to make it to the other ports.
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I find it interesting how big of a leap the PinePhone just took in power management, whereas the improvements in the Librem 5’s power management have been many small incremental steps in many different areas. I wonder what explains this difference.
@dos said on Reddit that there are a bunch of things like USB in the Librem 5 that still haven’t been power optimized. I understand that the Linux drivers for the Allwinner A64 are older and have already worked out must of the bugs and the chip is pretty power efficient. In contrast, the mainline Linux drivers for the i.MX 8M Quad are still being developed and the SoC still has some power management issues in the silicon. I wonder how much of a difference there is in power draw between the soldered-down Quectel modem and the Broadmobi BM818 on an M.2 card.
As I recall, it took Google years to get good power management in Android, so I guess that we shouldn’t be surprised that Linux phones will also have problems.
Talking about PinePhone UBports Community Edition (CE) here (as I was refused, recently, in this month, from my nearby EU Customs Office to get my hands on “my” PinePhone Braveheart Edition), since 15 April 2020 there is now; “Perhaps most important of all, this PinePhone edition includes CE, RED and FCC certification.”
Another thing, that I have learned from this issue (my CE experience) is to recommend, during checkout process, optional/additional cost usage of $30,00 via PinePhone DHL Shipping for delivery (to EU), 179,99 USD in total, or otherwise end user will end up (on top of already payed $15,00) with this official DHL (as discussed here already) approach:
(German only, as scanned), which includes 28,50 EUR (service cost) + 6,00 EUR (standard amount for disbursements), and those are just basic delivery cost(s) before any VAT added.
Same ($15,00 Purism + $15,00 End User) $30,00 delivery cost approach (before actual shipping), might apply to Librem 5 delivery or not? Even $10,00 Purism (while free delivery applies) + $20,00 end user (that alone chooses DHL) is still better approach, or not.
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ants and elephants. i don’t known how to compare ⁇