PinePhone Pro Announced As New Linux Smartphone

[mdedetrich]

Your government prefers WhatsApp for official communication? If you're part of the EU then it might be problematic since there are strict laws for handing sensitive information and adding Facebook to that sounds very dangerous if I understood your correctly.

Actually in the EU (and EU only) Whatsapp is not legally allowed to share data with Facebook (I think its due to GDPR, if not its some other ongoing lawsuit). That being said, at least in Germany in such cases I see Signal being recommend (one of my friends whos a lawyer at a big German company have said they have started using Signal).

[billyswong]

SMS / MMS *could* dominate the world. But the pricing from many mobile carriers screwed them up. A reasonable pricing would be counting them in terms of phone call seconds / minutes, and then tally everything in the same phone call free minutes quota. But no, carriers in many countries got greedy and gave chance for stuff like Whatsapp to grow.

Now there is no going back. All the "proprietary" chatting apps allow long distance text chat / phone call / video conference with zero extra cost. Mobile carriers can never beat that. There may be privacy issue for those centralized apps but traditional phone carrier companies don't have any better track record and are always subjected to local government eavesdrop request.

I checked my mobile plan. Each month it gives me 3000 minutes local audio phone call and 5GB data cap of 21Mbps 4G internet. To avoid the problem of price index being different over the world and to make a meaningful pricing discussion on SMS / MMS, let the price of local phone call per minute to be 1 unit. I am generous and taking the price point after my plan-included 3000 minutes here.

For every local SMS messages, if I am sending to friends using the same carrier or carriers of the same camp, then there is a free 500 messages quota. Over-quota messages will be charged 0.375 units each. But if the receiver is using another carrier, each message will be charged 0.75 units since the beginning. For local MMS, it is sized-limited to 300KB, and are charged 2.5 units. Oh just for reference, they are charging video phone call for 1.875 units per minute. 1 static photo costs more than 1 minute of live video.

All these pricing would have been acceptable if they were put into the same pool of plan-included phone call minutes and tallied in combination. But sadly, they are all extra costs. If we use the actual monthly flat cost of the mobile plan to gauge the price, then things look even worse since the monthly flat charge of the mobile plan is around 100 units, not 3000. The condition to make the monthly mobile cost doubled = 760 same-carrier SMS = 130 other-carrier local SMS = 39 local MMS = 52 minutes of local video call. For long distanced stuff, cost balloons again.

Meanwhile, if I use "proprietary" chatting apps? No worry of extra cost, ever.

[Mez']

SMS / MMS *could* dominate the world. But the pricing from many mobile carriers screwed them up. A reasonable pricing would be counting them in terms of phone call seconds / minutes, and then tally everything in the same phone call free minutes quota. But no, carriers in many countries got greedy and gave chance for stuff like Whatsapp to grow.
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Meanwhile, if I use "proprietary" chatting apps? No worry of extra cost, ever.

I can't even remember since when we have unlimited SMS in our mobile plans (all carriers), probably somewhere between 2010 and 2015, whatever the carrier of the receiver. Still, barely anyone uses them anymore.
If you subscribe to a mobile plan (starting from 10€/month), you also get unlimited MMS.

[Firnefex]

Have you seen how much a phone costs these days?

Yes, a good midrange phone costs between 150-250€, has double sized battery, way better CPU and a pretty solid camera.
Don't get me wrong, I would pay more for a device I can trust and use apps I also have on my Linux-PC. But double the price for just a fraction of the speccs...nope.

The pictures from PinePhone are really bad and because at least half of the people want a rather good camera on their phone, this is a problem.
Also, I like the idea of pure open source, but for the masses they can't just block proprietary code. Without good hardware acceleration or shitty WhatsApp and the like you won't see normal users ever adapting to this.

My favourite system would be KDE Plasma Mobile, but for example I would definitely wanted to install GCam (if this phone only had a good sensor...) in order to get the best out of the camera softwarewise.

[numacross]

Actually in the EU (and EU only) Whatsapp is not legally allowed to share data with Facebook (I think its due to GDPR, if not its some other ongoing lawsuit). That being said, at least in Germany in such cases I see Signal being recommend (one of my friends whos a lawyer at a big German company have said they have started using Signal).

I'm pretty sure if Facebook wanted to get it (in one form or another), they would

[kgonzales]

I do. I know plenty of people who use MMS, because... it works. A phone that doesn't have this sounds silly.

I know zero people who use MMS, because... their cell phone companies charge them a lot for SMS and even more for MMS. Sorry but MMS is regional and in many regions its a no-go.

Realistically, PinePhone appeals to a niche. I know nobody else who would be interested in it, and after dealing with Android for years and limiting myself in the name of "privacy", I can't say I'm that eager to jump on it either. I went to Apple because I want my stuff to just work with at least some kind of appearance of privacy and data protection.

Realistically, you are not their target customer and the PinePhone people are not trying to bring you onboard. I know plenty of people who would be interested in it, people who are into privacy and open source.

In the end, either of us saying "we know people" who would or would not use or buy something means jack shit. There are 7+ billion people on planet Earth and neither of us knows a even 0.001% of them personally.

[mdedetrich]

I'm pretty sure if Facebook wanted to get it (in one form or another), they would

And if they get caught (which isn't hard) they can get fined up to 10% of their annual revenue here in the EU. Unlike the states, EU actually goes out of their way to make their fines punishing and enforces them (and if you don't believe me you can look up some past EU fines that they have handed out against the tech giants)

[jntesteves]

more or less, but signal has the NSA hands on it, so its a no go for me..

LOL, thanks for that. I searched and it made for a very funny saturday read. Though I wasn't expecting to find such conspiracy-theory FUD nonsense on a tech-savvy community like this.

Matrix is more sound for obvious reasons, but there's nothing wrong with Signal.

[AlexDumi29]

Lots of people. Come back to reality.

In Europe it's not only not used, if you ask around, 99% of people won't know what mms is. I think the come back to reality thing was a bit exaggerated. As for the IM servicies Threema, Signal and Element are all good open-source options. Also, does any other country except for the US still use mms? I'm really curious.

[brad0]

I know zero people who use MMS, because... their cell phone companies charge them a lot for SMS and even more for MMS. Sorry but MMS is regional and in many regions its a no-go.

I don't know anyone that is charged for MMS in like a decade.