Initial impression of Pinephone Pro Explorer Edition
TL;DR it needs work but it’s snappy
What do I want out of this phone?
It would be nice to use it as a daily driver however I have not tried that yet (force myself to). I see this phone more as a phone and PC in the future, where I can dock it and use it like below:
Initial impressions
I received the phone with Manjaro/Plasma Mobile. Plasma Mobile is a pretty UI, it looks/feels more like a phone as opposed to Phosh, where a third of the screen is taken up by the active apps. As of right now, the cameras don’t work (lol) can you believe that? Well that’s how it is kernel’s don’t grow on trees. Those have to get worked on before I can use the “webcam” feature/intent above.
Physically the phone is almost exactly the same as the original, I think it’s a little thicker. The one thing I noticed is the body is harder to close (snap latches), you really have to clamp down on the edges to get all of them to close. Battery life seems to be better, although that’s hard to say for certain, this is comparing Pinephone vs. Pinephone Pro both using Mobian/Phosh where in airplane mode the battery barely goes down slower as you’d expect.
Plasma Mobile had other issues like half the screen not rendering/have to rotate it to landscape then back to portrait to get the full screen to render. If you change the zoom of the display (default is 200%) the bottom bar would not scale with it/there would be a gap on the right side of the navigation bar.
The main reason I went to Phosh is I wanted the external display to work. The modem has been solid, just works with my T-mobile sim that I was using with the original Pinephone.
Oh that’s right I forgot, with Plasma Mobile there is this problem where the phone takes a long time to wake up after it goes to sleep. And of course external monitor wouldn’t work for me in Plasma Mobile/don’t think it’s a thing yet. Arch Phosh had this problem too (wake) but it seems an update fixed it — nope still there, damn. Might stick with Mobian on SD.
I will note the external display is very hard to guarantee that it will work and also the display manager is buggy. If you hit apply after making some changes in Displays the renderer just crashes, this is Mobian/Phosh. I actually don’t really know how it’s working, I thought it was wlr-render that makes the extended display work. Also I had problems with the original USB-C dock working, I had better luck using an HDMI-only adapter, which means the phone just dies over time/no charge coming in while docked.
The booting is interesting, if you hold the power button down for around 4 seconds or less, it will boot from the eMMC but if you hold it longer say 11 seconds, it will boot from the SD card if something’s there. There is also a reset button on the back to bypass the eMMC boot and go to SD.
Current thoughts…
Well this post was supposed to be a meta post about creating a Pinephone app with a Pinephone… however I ran into some problems like the external display not working and I’m also trying to wrap up my robot project so I decided to just post this for now and the video below.
I’m using Arch Phosh now which does boot from the eMMC, It is not recommended to flash onto the eMMC from the SD card but that’s how I did it, the Pinephone Pro Wiki tells you how to use dd to flash an image onto the eMMC .
This is the stand I designed to hold the phone, it’s specifically designed for this monitor that’s a rectangle when viewed from the side. It faces down to the person’s face at 10 deg. I’ll post it with the Pinephone Linux CRUD app source, but this stand is really only designed for this monitor.
Video
Upcoming follow up post
I will make my first native Linux app for this phone and talk about it.
Note
Be aware of whatever you’re doing, there is a difference between the Pinephone and Pinephone Pro regarding software.
