PinePhone Pro Announced As New Linux Smartphone

[blackiwid]

Yes the fact they delay advertising this does result in pine products at times get unfair compares at times. Its just something to be aware when comparing pine products that the information on the website and in community forums for products they are not 100 percent happy with is incompletely commonly missing Long term support information. So you have to directly ask them for the missing information. Lot of ways I am fine with it. You don't want a person buying a pinephone for the repairability and ignoring the other issues then being upset with what they have right.

Thanks for some of the clearification, but I am still confused, I know the term long term support only from software like linux distribution for hardware we use the term guarantee? So is that some sort of hardware guarantee but not 100% guaranteed aka like good will? Or just paid support? At least affordable prices for it?

I am sorry here in germany what is not in the law most of the time does not happen I know it's more common in the US where companies do some support things that they are not legaly required in a spirit of the customer is king...

So what's their business modell then? do they have some products they see as ready like the cheap notebook and others they try to sell to only few people, or do they just take huge debts and hope to make money in 5-10 years?

I think I never stumbled over a company that goal is to sell as few devices as possible

I would argue that they overdo it, while maybe Librem overhypes their products they seem to do the exact opposite, maybe somewhere in the middle would be better... but well I can't dictate them what to do, it's just common business practise that after some time late customers get some incentives, I don't know if it was for free but they gave at least very cheap a updated version with more ram and flash space...

Again even if they don't make something cheaper I can't buy the phone without a keyboard so I hope they get that done 1 year after teasing it.

I mean how long is the device out, they designed it with connectors for the keyboard in mind, so it would be time to deliver a modul that is can be used and is useful for people... Sorry a bit bitchy about this, but even the 200 euro or what it costs is a investment for some people so I need some uniquness besides software to justify it, and the shitty alpha state is not stopping me, as long as I can run emacs but emacs without a keyboard makes no sense

[oiaohm]

Thanks for some of the clearification, but I am still confused, I know the term long term support only from software like linux distribution for hardware we use the term guarantee? So is that some sort of hardware guarantee but not 100% guaranteed aka like good will? Or just paid support? At least affordable prices for it?

Sorry I suffered from LTS screw up. LTS (long Term Supply) is your hardware one. Pine is kind of horrible in some ways for the time frame of Long Term Supply they also do Long term support on the software for the platform as well.

Long Term Supply is not a warranty/hardware guarantee. This is a hardware supplier thing. As in you are going to be supply X part new for Y number of years. When you sell product that you will be selling it under long term supply for x number of years you better have one to sell on the last day.

So what's their business modell then? do they have some products they see as ready like the cheap notebook and others they try to sell to only few people, or do they just take huge debts and hope to make money in 5-10 years?

https://www.pine64.org/philosophy/

pine64 normally does not take on long term debt. They work by pre-orders for new products and even pre-orders when they have sold out this is short term debt to customers. Pre-order model results in a lot more sane orders.

Pine64 does not have goal of make as much money as possible. Pine64 wants people to know when they buy pine64 products that will be decent quality. So repeat customers.

I think I never stumbled over a company that goal is to sell as few devices as possible

Pine64 does not have the goal to sell as few as possible. But they don't have the goal to sell as many as possible. Pine64 wants their customers happy with the product they get. So they always keep good will so that customers will be willing to do pre-orders on future products so avoiding pine64 having to take out huge loans.

The pine64 model is quite a stable model and it comes with the price of being slow growing and not that common.

https://pine64.com/product/14%e2%80%b3-pinebook-pro-linux-laptop-ansi-us-keyboard/

The pinebook pro that they were aiming to sell more volume of has nicely got screwed up by current market issue.

[Paradigm Shifter]

I'm interested in getting one. But it probably won't be easy here. I now seem to use precisely four applications on my current phone: Brave browser, e-mail client, Skype and LINE.

Of the four, LINE is the big sticking point. If a phone can't use LINE in Japan, you may as well not bother having one.

Still, it might be worth an experiment when/if they're actually available.

[novhack]

I bought the Pinephone in February. I never expected to daily drive it but it's getting really really close these days. With almost every update of Manjaro Phosh it gets a bit snappier. I have high hopes that this new version will sell much better and increase the amount of users of mobile Linux. Just don't forget about us early adopter plebs who can only run GLES2 once you start making cool apps for your fancy Pinephone Pro.

[phoron]

Well, since there seems to be people here who know Pine better than I do, I'll risk asking a question without having done my due research first (or rather not being sure to have done it well enough).

Does anybody know of any resellers of Pine products (not necessarily the phones) in the EU ? I'd love to be able to pay by SEPA bank transfer and not have to worry about customs, even if it costs more than what Pine charges directly.

I kind of remember Pine once saying something about starting a more mainstream sales channel with higher price to pay for the customer support but I never knew whether they did and whether that helps customers in the EU. I guess they never had anything against companies reselling their products, but specially since the component shortages they may just not have any excess capacity to serve resellers ?

[novhack]

Does anybody know of any resellers of Pine products (not necessarily the phones) in the EU ? I'd love to be able to pay by SEPA bank transfer and not have to worry about customs, even if it costs more than what Pine charges directly.

If I remember correctly every time I ordered from Pine64 to Czech Republic the package arrived from a warehouse in Poland. They automatically add VAT to the order. I had absolutely no issues with customs. I do know now how following customer support works though because I had no issues but I heard that it's not "ideal".

[Flaburgan]

As everybody is sharing their experience about SMS / MMS I'll also share mine. In France SMS are unlimited and free since 2009, MMS since 2011. They are still the main way to communicate for everyone older than 30yo. WhatsApp is the other way people go. Tech people push for better alternative like Signal, where I personally have a hundred contacts.
SMS and MMS are working fine with Ubuntu Touch on Fairphone 2. I never put a simcard in my pinephone braveheart but I may try if people here are interested. There is no WhatsApp client on Linux phone, there is a community effort to build a third party signal client. I contributed to it but stopped, it will never reach Signal level of security so I switched to /e/ OS to use the official signal client.

[Nibel]

As everybody is sharing their experience about SMS / MMS I'll also share mine. In France SMS are unlimited and free since 2009, MMS since 2011. They are still the main way to communicate for everyone older than 30yo. WhatsApp is the other way people go. Tech people push for better alternative like Signal, where I personally have a hundred contacts.
SMS and MMS are working fine with Ubuntu Touch on Fairphone 2. I never put a simcard in my pinephone braveheart but I may try if people here are interested. There is no WhatsApp client on Linux phone, there is a community effort to build a third party signal client. I contributed to it but stopped, it will never reach Signal level of security so I switched to /e/ OS to use the official signal client.

Signal is centralized + need a phone number so it's no secure as you think...

Since you have unlimited SMS/MMS, juste encrypt them... On Android you can use Silence to do it easily.

[Flaburgan]

Signal is centralized + need a phone number so it's no secure as you think...

Since you have unlimited SMS/MMS, juste encrypt them... On Android you can use Silence to do it easily.

SMS also need a phone number, and the recipient, the date, and every other metadata are freely readable.
Signal is not the best tool (see Briar for decentralization, or Matrix), but it is by far the best if you compare security level with constraints added: my parents are using it without draw back. This can't be the case with a decentralized service at the moment. Contacts discovery is hard.

[reba]

Nobody mentiones XMPP/Jabber yet?

Pros:
- Open Source clients and servers
- End-to-End-Encryption (e.g. OMEMO)
- no single central server
- you can host you own server on a Raspi if you desire
- clients are available for all systems (Win/OS/Linux/as plugins, e.g. for Pidgin) as the protocol is open source.
- can share text, images, videos, PDF, any type of file

Here's a very nice multi-part explanation and summary about modern messengers (Signal, Telegram, etc.) (you might use a translation service as it's in german)

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/die-verrueckte-welt-der-messenger-messenger-teil1/