Using the PinePhone as a Daily Driver

I have known about the PinePhone for a few years, and I had always wanted one. Not just because I want to tinker with it (which I do), but also to see if using linux on a phone is actually doable.

When people talk about the PinePhone, they generally talk about it as a novelty item, that is not ready to use as a daily driver. I wanted to challenge this.

In this article, we will talk about my impressions on using the PinePhone as a daily driver for nearly two months.

How I use a phone

Before we can discuss whether this phone is usable or not, we should take the time to consider what we expect of a phone.

Unlike most people nowadays, I do most of my computing on a computer (what a strange idea?!). The bare minimum I expect of a phone is to send and receive phone calls and text messages. Being able to take picture is also a very valuable feature.

But since we live in a world where we can enjoy the wonders of technology, why don’t we let us dream about what would make a perfect phone?

For me, the ideal phone should:

This is less than most people do with their phone nowadays, but is unexpectedly difficult to achieve. The PinePhone doesn’t check all the box, nor did my previous phone (a NOKIA candybar phone), nor does any smartphone that I know of.

The software

For use as a daily driver, I used a postmarketos build with the phosh environment. Installation is as simple as flashing an SD card with the image downloaded on the postmarketos website. The first experience is quite pleasing. For someone used to GNOME on the desktop, I must admit that it is amusing to see it fit so well on a phone.

I used mainly the default GNOME apps, as well as Firefox, the Megapixel camera app, and mpv. Getting the Megapixel app to work was a bit tricky, as the GTK version provided in postmarketos doesn’t support GPU acceleration on PinePhone anymore. The workaround, described in this post, is to install a flatpack version containing an older version of GTK. Once the flatref is downloaded, it can be installed with:

flatpak install ./megapixels2.flatpakref

Most of the GNOME software worked reasonably well on a phone, with a few caveats.

Take the example of the bluetooth file sharing dialog. Some of the interface is only accessible when viewed in landscape mode, and the selection of multiple files seems to only be possible with keyboard and mouse.

The virtual keyboard is quite good. One useful feature is the “terminal” layout that is selected automatically in the console app. It adds some useful keys, such as Control, Escape and Tab. One weird thing is that it can only be in QWERTY layout when in terminal mode (at least to my knowledge).

The software for the basic phone functionality is actually quite good. The only problem I had was with USSD codes. For those who don’t know, these are a sort of interactive service for phones that comes from the GSM era. With my phone provider, I can dial #123# and have a menu where I can see some information about my mobile plan, like the remaining data and call time. With gnome-calls this is recognised as a USSD code, and I can see the text sent by the server. However I cannot send a reply, which means all I can access is the main menu.

The hardware

It is now time to talk about the hardware of the Pinephone.

The build quality

The build quality is acceptable, but not good. This is not a surprise, as even Pine64 makes it clear that this is a product meant for developers rather than for daily use. The back cover for example is made of rather cheap plastic and it fells like you risk cracking it every time you open the phone to access the SD card.

The screen is covered with some kind of film. I have read somewhere on the Internet that this film is needed for the touchscreen to work, so I haven’t tried to take it off. This is however somewhat annoying because it will easily attract scratches. There is a screen protector sold by Pine64, and I think it is definitely a good choice if you’re planning to really use the PinePhone (although I have not tried it).

The performance

Performance is definitely the weakest point of the PinePhone. While the phone is usable, it does not feel fast. For example, Firefox takes 20 seconds to start. Navigation on a complex website like YouTube will be slow, and video playback will only be kinda smooth at 360p or lower.

Moreover, the battery will drain quickly if you hit the CPU too hard. You can expect a 10% battery drop after surfing the web for a few minutes. However, the battery usage is reasonable at idle. It can at least last for a full day on a charge with light usage.

The camera

It is well documented online that the camera is not really good. While it is not as bad as the one from my old NOKIA phone, you will not be able to take beautiful pictures with this phone. The main usage I have for the camera is to take pictures of labels on some equipment, and it has been quite challenging. If you’re not perfectly still or if there is some unwanted reflexion, the picture will be unreadable.

Conclusion

Is it possible to use the PinePhone as your main everyday phone? Definitely
Is it better than any other option? I’m not sure

While the PinePhone is likely not the best phone for anyone, I am glad to see that using a Linux phone is definitely possible. That being said, I think an android phone with a de-googled rom is probably better for most use cases, but I have not tried this yet.

I have now gone back to a NOKIA phone, mainly because I find the PinePhone too big to be practical. This is my first KaiOS phone, and I hope it will be a better compromise between all my requirement listed at the beginning of this article.

What next?

Now that I don’t use it as a daily driver anymore, I am free to distro-hop on my PinePhone. I have been avoiding this because I preferred to stay in a configuration that I knew worked, but I can now test all the different operating systems and interfaces that exists.

I am mainly looking forward to playing with sxmo. I have already tried it then returned to Phosh because the cellular modem didn’t seem to be receiving calls and messages when the phone was in sleep, but I really want to give it another try.