Comment on Breaking: Google is easing up on Android's new sideloading restrictions!
Emi@ani.social 4 months agoI saw there is pine phone that is supposed to have Linux or it doesn’t? Didn’t look much into it but was thinking about trying it out.
The Linux phones that exist today (including Pine Phone) are more like early dev kits. They have really weak specs, are incredibly buggy, lack all sorts of features you’d expect, and I’m not totally sure if you can even make calls through them because phone carriers require a verified device and proprietary tech to work.
There are efforts to get things in order but these will take maybe 10 years at this rate.
I can absolutely make phone calls with both my One Plus 6T and my PinePhone.
It’s not that straightforward - pinephones have varying results depening on carriers, Verizon is notorious for blacklisting them while most of the other major carriers are hit or miss on if you’ll get penalized.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I have a pine phone - they’re super neat because linux on a phone! but… not really usable yet. Not getting texts, random bugs (they fixed the one where you could only receive calls, not make them), incredibly laggy UI even just trying to navigate,the battery life is abysmal, the battery management hardware is lacking and the software is even worse, the UIs that exist are poorly supported, while basic apps are decently represented anything not built for mobile is going to be godawful to get working (esp. through something like waydroid), the UI stabbed my puppy, the devices are so underpowered you’re gonna be unable to do things like have two apps open at once or have a video playing in a tab while trying to navigate in another one…
The pro phone has supposedly improved the hardware issues, but it’s new and niche enough that I haven’t seen much of a consens emerge (or hardly any in depth testing at all, really).
mirshafie@europe.pub 4 months ago
It’s great that smart people are working on this, but I don’t think we can expect hobbyists to make a useful OSS implementation of smartphones. Especially since there is so much dependence on the hardware. We either need a company that can throw some weight behind it, or just straight up governments that value it (e.g. from a sovereignty point of view).