sl/plan9

date: 2019-12-18 layout: post title: PinePhone review

tags: [review, mobile]

tl;dr: Holy shit! This is the phone I have always wanted. I have never been this excited about the mobile sector before. However: the software side is totally absent — phone calls are very dubious, SMS is somewhat dubious, LTE requires some hacks, and everything will have to be written from the ground up.

I have a PinePhone developer edition model, which I paid for out of pocket^1 and which took an excruciatingly long time to arrive. When it finally arrived, it came with no SIM or microSD card (expected), and the eMMC had some half-assed version of Android on it which just boot looped without POSTing to anything useful^2. This didn’t bother me in the slightest — like any other computer I’ve purchased, I planned on immediately flashing my own OS on it. My Linux distribution of choice for it is postmarketOS, which is basically the mobile OS I’d build if I wanted to build a mobile OS.

Let me make this clear: right now, there are very few people, perhaps only dozens, for whom this phone is the right phone, given the current level of software support. I am not using it as my daily driver, and I won’t for some time. The only kind of person I would recommend this phone to is a developer who believes in the phone and wants to help build the software necessary for it to work. However, it seems to me that all of the right people are working on the software end of this phone — everyone I’d expect from the pmOS community, from KDE, from the kernel hackers — this phone has an unprecedented level of community support and the software will be written.

So, what’s it actually like?

Expand for a summary of the specs

The device is about 1 cm thick and weighs 188 grams. The screen is about 16 cm tall, of which 1.5 cm is bezel, and 7.5 cm wide (5 mm of bezel). The physical size and weight is very similar to my daily driver, a Samsung Galaxy J7 Refine. It has a USB-C port, which I understand can be reconfigured for DisplayPort, and a standard headphone jack and speakers, both of which sound fine in my experience. The screen is 720x1440, and looks about as nice as any other phone. It has front- and back-facing cameras, which I’ve yet to get working (I understand that someone has got them working at some point), plus a flash/lamp on the back, and an RGB LED on the front.

The eMMC is 16G and, side note, had seventeen partitions on it when I first got the phone. 2G of RAM, 4 cores. It’s not very powerful, but in my experience it runs lightweight UIs (such as sway) just fine. With very little effort by way of power management, and with obvious power sinks left unfixed, the battery lasts about 5 hours.

In short, I’m quite satisfied with it, but I’ve never had especially strenuous demands of my phone. I haven’t run any benchmarks on the GPU, but it seems reasonably fast and the open-source Lima driver supports GLESv2. The modem is supported by Ofono, which is a telephony daemon based on dbus — however, I understand that we can just open /dev/ttyUSB1 and talk to the modem ourselves, and I may just write a program that does this. Using Ofono, I have successfully spun up LTE internet, sent and received SMS messages, and placed and answered phone calls - though the last one without working audio. A friend from KDE, Bhushan Shah, is working on this and rumor has it that a call has successfully been placed. I have not had success with MMS, but I think it’s possible. WiFi works. All of this with zero blobs and a kernel which is… admittedly, pretty heavily patched, but open source and making its way upstream.^3

Of course, no one wants to place phone calls by typing a lengthy command into their terminal, but that these features can be done in an annoying way means that it’s feasible to write applications that do this in a convenient way. For my part, I have been working on some components of a mobile-friendly Wayland compositor, based on Sway, which I’m calling Sway Mobile for the time being. I’m not sure if Sway will actually stick around once it becomes difficult to bend to my will (it’s designed for keyboard-driven operation, after all), but I’m building mobile shell components which will translate nicely to any other wlroots-based compositors.

The first of these is a simple app drawer, which I’ve dubbed casa. I have a lot more stuff planned:

Here’s a video showing casa in action:

The latest version has 4 columns and uses the space a bit better. Also, in the course of this work I put together the fdicons library, which may be useful to some.

I have all sorts of other small things to work on, like making audio behave better and improving power management. I intend to contribute these tools to postmarketOS upstream as a nice lightweight plug-and-play UI package you can choose from when installing pmOS, either improving their existing postmarketos-ui-sway meta-package or making something new.

In conclusion: I have been waiting for this phone for years and years and years. I have been hoping that someone would make a phone whose hardware was compatible with upstream Linux drivers, and could theoretically be used as a daily driver if only the software were up to snuff. I wanted this because I knew that the free software community was totally capable of building the software for such a phone, if only the hardware existed. This is actually happening — all of the free software people I would hope are working on the PinePhone, are working on the PinePhone. And it’s only $150! I could buy four of them for the price of the typical smartphone! And I just might!