#pinephone

25 posts · Last used 13d

Hello everybody hi, since we all know everyone likes bad news (looking at you tech journalists, you silly goobers you) we are sad to say that the PineNote is now out of stock, Pine Store will be checking to see if there's any extra stock out back.

BUT! We obviously don't want to keep sharing bad news all of the time, if we're going to be in this mess for a few years then lets make the most of it!

(alright journalists you can stop reading now, it's only good news from here)

Pine Store may have stopped production on Linux hardware, but that doesn't mean all production has stopped. Hardware like the Pinecil, PineTime and PineVoice that use MCUs will continue production as normal. This is a great opportunity to come up with new ideas for MCU powered hardware.

Now that the PinePhone has stopped production, there is a gap in the hardware lineup for a "fun" device. This definition of "fun" boils down to whether a device can have multiple use cases or purposes. The PineTime, PinePhone and PineNote can be considered "fun" as they can be used for multiple purposes and multiple projects can naturally form around them.

An example of the opposite would be devices like the Pinecil and PineBuds which serve a single purpose and build less of a community around them as a result (but both are still great).

OKAY, SO! We'd like to share some initial ideas on what a cheap fun tinkerers device could be.

  • MP3 player (fun buttons!)
  • Alarm clock (do people still use these? Isn't this why we have cats?)
  • PinePhone-esque device but MCU powered (attachments possible?)
  • Handy multi-tool with screen, fido hardware key, nfc, etc (doesn't open garage doors)
  • Digital personal camera (that fits camera lenses, possible sister device to PineCam)

And of course the PineTime Pro is still in development (we hopefully have some news soon!)

We really wish to make the community heard by Pine Store on what we want to see in terms of hardware. "Community driven" is in the slogan after all (but let's do this while still being realistic).

We have made a form to keep all suggestions collated and we are excited to hear the community's feedback regarding these ideas for a new "fun" device or whether you guys have any better ideas than us. Once enough time has passed, a document with all suggestions and hardware preferences will be sent to Pine Store.

https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/HOh51fKfHU9EANigBtH2NnZ0LV-pjLD6qryCIx4QY8I/

Lets catch up with you all again soon! And please like, comment and subscribe (ding ding ding)!!!

#pine64 #pinephone #pinenote

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@okias@floss.social Let me grab that click bait 🤭 : There are people that have other priorities like the amount of firmware on the device, separation of components on the PCB, no proprietary hypervisors, full control over all bootloaders, etc. So I think as a community we have interest in devices like the @pine64@social.treehouse.systems #PinePhone's or @purism@social.librem.one 's #Librem5 to continue. It's also good to have devices that ship Linux out of the box.
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To be clear, this is not just the back case to the PinePhone, this is the entire 3D model. Broken your frame? PRINT A NEW ONE!! Broken your side buttons? PRINT NEW ONES!! Just straight up lost your phone? PRINT A NEW ONE!! #Pine64 #pinephone #pinephonepro
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For some reason I have decided that daily driving the PinePhone Pro for a month is a good idea. With encouragement from the PINE64 community chatrooms, I am prepared to endure this potential pain. For science!!!

Before we get into things, here are some ground rules and boundaries that I wish to lay out for potential readers.

  1. My employment requires an app that doesn’t work, even with MicroG. I will have my Android device with me for this reason, but my primary SIM will be in the PinePhone Pro.

  2. No Android apps, Waydroid or Android translation layer. I must use native and Flatpak Linux apps.

  3. My primary SIM must be in the PinePhone Pro for the duration of the month.

(rules subject to change, I think)

This thread will continue to get updated every day/few days when I can.

Hopefully this goes fine /s

#pine64 #pinephone #pinephonepro #mobilelinux #linuxmobile

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Beginning day of daily driving my PinePhone Pro (1) – 18/07/2026 Today I start my journey daily driving the PinePhone Pro for a month. I started by asking abcde and xmn from the PINE64 chatrooms which distro I should use. I personally wanted to use something different so I was personally thinking either Mobian or Arch Linux/DanctNIX. In the end we decided that I will use Mobian with Phosh as the distro I will use for the month. After I finished installing Mobian to the internal storage, I had switched some settings around (pin, timezone, etc). While doing that, I accidentally disabled cellular networking in Gnome settings. Around five minutes after this I tried calling the PinePhone Pro from my main phone and it failed as both devices went to voicemail immediately. I fixed this by rebooting the device, I tested on both PostmarketOS edge and the latest Mobian weekly image afterwards and calls worked no problem. Some initial observations is how hot the device gets from doing nothing. The RK3399S found in the PinePhone Pro is a binned variant of the SOC in the PineBook Pro (less power usage and better thermals). Even after binning, the power usage is high (3.0W-4.0W idle) and the device is constantly hot. While I was setting this all up, it had been around 35 minutes. Battery life went from 70% to 17% within that time. The performance however is good, I am happy with how web browsing and general navigation feel. Web browsing hitches a little bit, but once the page loads scrolling is smooth on Firefox. So far I have installed Tuba for managing the PINE64 community Mastodon on the go, Telegram for online messaging, Speech Note for voice to text notes, Pure Maps for navigation, LocalSend for file transfer and FreeTube for watching stuff. That’s about it, I’m going to bed. See you next log! #pine64 #pinephone #pinephonepro #mobilelinux #linuxmobile #mobian #phosh
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Day two of daily driving my PinePhone Pro – 19/07/2026 Day two went well. Mainly because I was at work all day. In the morning I installed "gnome-secrets" to open my KeePass database. Since I was mostly at work today, I didn't use my phone much. Notably, I did receive a call from deep sleep midway through the day. This went through fine, I have not experienced any modem crashing or anything like that today. I need to call my doctor tomorrow morning to book an appointment, so let's hope that all goes well. I will end up getting some actual usage tomorrow on day three. See you then! #pine64 #pinephone #pinephonepro #mobilelinux #linuxmobile
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Day three of daily driving my PinePhone Pro – 20/07/2026 Today was the big day and I had a lot of things to do. This time, I used my PinePhone Pro to navigate, which went very well. I noticed that the navigation of the GPS kept up quite well. It wasn't immediate, like you'd find on something like Google Maps on an Android phone, but it was more than usable and I was happy with it. While I was waiting at the doctors I was texting my friend using SMS. I had no issues with this and I had a decent uptime with no modem issues until later in the day (keep reading to find out more!). Unfortunately, I did end up running into some issues today. My haptic feedback, and my sensors for proximity and light detection did not work correctly. I tried to diagnose this issue, but I did not have any luck at all. The best thing that I could do was check I2C and IIO devices in sysfs but I couldn't find anything. I ended up just rebooting device, and that ended up working. So, I'm not sure why that happened. It was quite frustrating to diagnose, and I never actually got to a conclusion. My second big issue today was when my modem just completely stopped being able to make or receive calls. I didn't really know what to do, so I started flashing various ADSP firmwares to no avail. But, after reading many issues and forum posts online, I realized that this is a known issue with later PinePhone Pro models. What I ended up doing was finding a recovery guide for EFS on the modem distro website, which I followed and I had to put in my IMEI number back into the modem. Apparently part of this issue is that your IMEI number just straight up disappears. This took most of my afternoon to diagnose and figure out, I was swapping between a few operating systems on SD cards to make sure things were working again. I think it would be pretty rude of me to leave out what actually fixed my issue in the end in this post. Here’s the link: https://themodemdistro.com/efs_recovery Overall, I would consider this a pretty successful day, albeit with a lot of annoyances. I'm currently still running Mobian/Debian, but I'm also switching between Arch Linux now too. This is going pretty well, I helped Danct12 out with a callaudiod segfaulting issue, a patch has been submitted upstream to hopefully fix this issue. So far, I'm learning that not a lot of things are going to go right for me. I'm hoping that not too many other issues will plague my journey. But, it's only day 3, and I've already been plagued with some tough issues that would deter normal folk or even people with a bit of experience. So, I'm getting a bit worried now as to how many problems I will face. It’s like 3am right now so I’m going to bed. See you on day four! #pine64 #pinephone #pinephonepro #mobilelinux #linuxmobile #danctNIX #mobian
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Day four of daily driving my PinePhone Pro – 21/07/2026 Today was pretty relaxing with minimal need to pull out my phone. I only encountered one modem issue where it decided not to show up when I turned on my phone. I decided to restart ModemManager and the modem itself and it came back. Other than that the modem did not crash and I received all of my texts during the day reliably. I checked my Mastodon account using Tuba a couple of times during the day. I have noticed that it runs pretty poorly due to all of the constant post loading it has to do (that’s what I’m assuming). An update on the proximity and light sensors disappearing problem I was having yesterday. I have noticed that it seems to happen randomly. Sometimes they won’t even be initialized at boot. I’m going to take a look at this problem tomorrow in the hope I can find the root of the problem. I know most people don’t care about these sensors but it’s genuinely bugging me. Like why are they randomly dipping? WHY!? RAGHHHH!!! Anyway, sorry for the short one today, not much happened on my phone! (which is probably a good thing) Overall my experience is positive thus far, minus the blaring modem and sensor issues. Battery is currently manageable when I’m not using my phone intensely so I can warm my hands during winter. I’m also using a 20K powerbank to top up on the go when required. One last thing that is peeving me is how the time difference for getting things done between my Android and Linux phone is making me use my laptop a bit more for web browsing tasks. Don’t get me wrong, the performance is fine, but the difference is large enough to annoy me. ALRIGHT! I am going to go to bed at a slightly more reasonable hour this time. I will see you peeeeeeeeps in the next log! *backflips* #pine64 #pinephone #pinephonepro #mobilelinux #linuxmobile
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W.r.t. #accessibility of #postmarketOS, I'm thinking maybe we should have some sort of flashing lights warning for the #PinePhone given that—at least on my device—the panel sometimes starts flashing rapidly on startup? Of course this is a bug that should be fixed but perhaps it would be good to figure out how we can present information like this since presumably it won't be the last time we have bugs that affect accessibility.
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If you are getting a #pinephone, you are also going to need a microSD reader. The manjaro distro on the phones is too antiquated to update. Even if you are fine with a manjaro distro, you will need to flash a new one.
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I'm trying to get back to tinkering with tech. I have an OGU ( https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid_go_ultra/odroid_go_ultra ) with a broken data line on the USB-C connector, so I can't flash a different distro to it. Sometime when I have the time and spoons, I want to crack it open and track down the issue to see if I can fix it myself. It would be more costly to ship it out for repairs than it would be to buy a new one. I know my partner wants my OGA ( https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid_go_advance/start ) and I'd be fine letting him have it if I can fix my OGU. I'm also interested in getting my pinephone back to a reliable state for wifi and bluetooth. Anyone know of any low-profile USB-C wlan/bluetooth adapters? I could just have it hang off of it for now. I'd love to get another keyboard attachment for it since I pretty much use it like a pocket sized laptop anymore. #pinephone #odroid #tech #DIY #repair
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