PinePhone Keyboard Review, Part II

It has been almost two weeks since I wrote my initial review (I had to double check that timeframe a few times, it feels like it has been so much longer) and I have some additional thoughts to share.

PinePhone Keyboard Review, First Impressions

Everyday Use

Hardware

Even though I have gotten used to the form factor, it still leaves me a bit cramped and sore, but not intolerably so. I have used it to write every post on this gemlog since the first review.

Despite the almost-too-small size for my hands, I'm now starting to get some muscle memory built up for some of the non-alphabetic keys, many of which are awkwardly placed (especially for non-qwerty typists).

The keys feel even stickier now. Before, the only problematic ones were really the numbers, but it is now affecting more keys, or maybe I am only now noticing after all the extra use?

The phone is not fully clipping into the case anymore. Was this happening before? I am not sure.

Software

The on-screen keyboard annoyance that I mentioned last time is mostly resolved with a daemon I found. I do have to manually restart the daemon after rebooting, but it's not a big deal for my use case because I am mostly in the terminal anyway and so restarting it is trivial.

PinePhone Keyboard Battery Daemon

The battery percentage is also now visible in settings. I have no idea if that was fixed via system software updates or new commits to the daemon code that I compiled and installed tonight?

Verdict

I started to type that I stand by my original verdict of the keyboard not being a selling point for the phone itself, but I think I have changed my mind on that. With the changes listed above, if you are looking for a small, lightweight, low-powered and cheap 'laptop' or 'PDA', you can definitely make do with this, especially if you are short on cash and stick to CLI and TUI applications, which run much faster.