Daily-Driving the PinePhone

Posted on 2022-09-11

Yesterday was the first day I went outside my house with the intent to daily-drive the PinePhone. This included swapping the SIM-card from my old Android into the PinePhone. I still had my old Android with me though, if anything went wrong. So how did it go? I would neither call it a success nor a complete failure. Maybe a success with a bit of unluck would be the most fitting description.

The success

The success-part was that I just used the PinePhone, I just pulled out my Android on two circumstances, once when a friend wondered whether WhatsApp still works without a SIM-card (spoiler: It does), the other was when others wanted to see the two phones I was carrying around. I also used many parts of the PinePhone with success, for example mobile data, checking train schedules, some browsing and reading a blog.

The unlucky parts

Well, what was the unlucky part then? The first unlucky problem I had was when I wanted to show WhatsApp still worked on the Android phone, for this I had to set up a Wi-Fi hotspot such that my Android phone could connect to it. I have already tested this at home and it worked fine, but on the train it just did not want to create the hotspot. There is still some more investigation needed.

Another issue was the performance. I personally do not mind the slow performance of the PinePhone, but if someone asks "when will the next train be" and your application takes half a minute to start, this is not nice. When one of my friends played around with the PinePhone, he also complained about the lag. As previously mentioned, I got used to the lacking performance of the PinePhone, and comparing it with a semi-new Android phone is completely unfair, but some more performance would be nice. Maybe I will get the PinePhone Pro some day.

Then there was also one crash I had, while luckily no one noticed, I feel like crashes became more regular on my new installation (everything from media-player crashes up to phone-crashes). This might also just me miss-remembering the old installation.

The last problem was that the modem sometimes took some time to startup after waking up from sleep. Maybe a firmware upgrade would solve that issue?

The battery

Another point worth discussing is the battery. In total, I spent about 8 hours without charging and lost about 70% battery on light usage. While not as bad as I thought (the battery can already drain almost completely in 2 hours when watching videos), this is still not amazing. I was maybe thinking about getting a spare battery with battery chargers and always keeping a spare battery with me. This would also have the additional benefit that I would never really need to plug the smartphone in, I can just swap out the battery and plug in the spare battery, leading to a 0% to 100% charge almost instantly. But as previously stated I don't really find any batteries that I am sure will fit inside the PinePhone in my country, maybe a power-bank will also do?

Conclusion

So what is the conclusion of the one day daily-driving the PinePhone? I would mostly say positive but with some additional things that could be improved.

Worth a read

This is a small new section I would like to introduce as a "gift" for anyone that read so far. I will just share one article I recently read and comment a few words about it.

GNOME Shell on mobile: An update

This is an update on the progression of running the GNOME shell on Linux mobile, and am really impressed. This looks better than any Android phone I have ever used. Sadly, the PinePhone will probably be too weak to handle it. Nevertheless, I am really looking forward to seeing more development in this direction, even though the funding of this movement already ended.

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