PinePhone daily driver diary

by Martin Cernohorsky

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Preface

(Note: This is a work in progress. As I accumulate further experience, short description of my efforts will be added below in a linear manner.)

Originally, I did not planned to acquire the PinePhone, as I wanted to use the BB until there is some of the more interesting phones (Neo900 comes to mind) available. However, the battery capacity of my BB decreased so sharply in September 2022 (to mere minutes of standby time), that purchasing a new phone (any phone on the market) was inevitable, and Because I did not want to spend 2000 USD for the Librem 5 USA, the second choice was the PinePhone (or PinePhone Pro) (the third one being, with huge gap, any of the phones capable of running GrapheneOS [Pixel?], then fourth one some of the Android Blackberrys with physical keyboard [if they still make one; I was not sure]). I’ve chosen the PinePhone [not Pro] because of alleged higher maturity of the software. So, I ordered one from pine64eu.com and received it sometime in early October 2022. Time to do the Big Jump has arrived.

Here it is necessary to mention that the PP is not the only phone I have at my disposal — I have an employer’s dumbphone (really aged Nokia C2 still with excellent standby time) and a large desktop phone in my living room. I have redirected calls to my company phone when my personal phone is unavailable, and my loved ones know my second (business) number, therefore I am (kind of) available even when my primary phone dies. So, I was ready to jump into the cold deep water and try to use a mainline linux phone as a daily driver.

In the beginning, I was just trying to figure out how to make the phone usable and reliable. Only later I got the idea to document my experience so that other people can learn from it, and also for my own reference. Therefore, some entries in the log are antedated, and only vaquely so, as I do not remember the exact dates of the first steps (this is being written at the end of November 2022). But I do not think that this makes the log less valuable, as the versions of the distributions tried are known and documented.

Event log

(Note: Dates with three-digit number instead of the month and day denote an ISO week number.) Powered up the phone for the first time (Manjaro + Phosh). Issues with the SIM card holder. The wifi adapter was not detected, I have connected to the network via ethernet using the convergence kit. Did not like how the OS worked (it was extremely slow and extremely power hungry). I have attempted an OS update, and botched it grandiosely (the battery got drained in the middle of the process, leaving the OS in unstable state).

2022-040'
I did not like the Phosh UI much anyway. Therefore, I have downloaded the Manjaro plasma beta12 image, installed on SD card and booted from SD card:

dd if=Manjaro-ARM-plasma-mobile-pinephone-beta12.img of=/dev/sdi bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync
parted /dev/sdi # in parted, resize the partition sdi2 to 100 % of the remaining capacity
resize2fs /dev/sdi2 # (resize also the filesystem)
fsck /dev/sdi2 # (this seems to be necessary after resize2fs)

Put the sd card into the PP and boot (the external SD card is a priority boot device) and power on the PP.

2022-041
The Plasma Mobile interface looks much nicer, but is terribly unstable. It is still power hungry and drains the battery very fast when used. The PP experiences several crashes or freezes a day, especially the lock screen is troubling. Some (many) incoming calls are silently ignored, which is a showstopper. Both wifi and mobile data kind of works, but extremely unreliably. I have decided to try another operating system.

2022-042
and installed it by the process outlined above. The user interface looked much nicer, much faster (no lags anymore, all animations smooth), and kind of stable (no freezes or crashes). The only one issue I have met with Maemo Leste was that I did not manage to communicate with the GSM modem, therefore having neither mobile data, nor calls or SMS. (Wifi was working well.) That was unfortunate, so I have abandoned Maemo for now as well.

2022-042'
Because new Plasma image was just released, I have tried it again (filename Manjaro-ARM-plasma-mobile-pinephone-20221021.img, plus the same process to install again). Unfortunately, I have found no noticeable improvement in stability and reliability. Still, the phone silently ignores some of the incoming calls, crashes and freezes are common. Manjaro + Plasma Mobile is apparently not mature enough even for adventurers.

2022-043
After some research, I have decided to give Phosh one more try (with a bit of dissatisfaction, I might add). I have downloaded Manjaro-ARM-phosh-pinephone-beta27.img and installed it the usual way. Then, I have carefully updated the OS (with the charger plugged in). Lot of testing was done in the next couple of days, no calls ignored and no SMS lost so far. The PP occassionally disconnects from the mobile network, however, in that case the incoming calls are forwarded to the other phone. At the moment, the wifi is relatively stable. Since then, I regularly install OS updates when available.

2022-043'
Now the phone + OS was stable enough to put some effort into importing my contact from the old phone. It was a tedious task.

  1. I have sent the contacts, one by one, from the old phone to PP via Bluetooth. (Operating both phones at once while the old one was connected to the charger --- as otherwise the battery would be drained in couple of minutes --- was not fun.) This created a number of .vcf files in the ~/Downloads directory, each containing one contact entry.

  2. Then, I have installed the Evolution suite (by the GUI software manager app, if I remember correctly). A reboot was required for the following step to work.

  3. Then, I have opened the .vcf files, one by one, in the Portfolio file manager, and followed the wizard to import them into the contact list.

Since this exercise was done, the phonebook, or contact list, works well.

This was enough work to justify the backup of the home directory of the phone user (manjaro in the case of Manjaro + Phosh image) in case the image dies and a reimage is needed.

cd # go to home directory
mkdir -p .ssh
vi .ssh/config # and edit appropriate entry, called only "server" below
tar -cf - . | ssh server ’cat > /path/to/archive/backup.2022-043a.tar

2022-043''
I do not like the GNOME calendar bundled with the Phosh. It is not ergonomic, difficult to enter an appointment on the go, and apparently not well scaled to the screen size (sometimes the plus button for adding new entry is not visible, it seems to correlate with attempts to add a calendar entry for a day outside of the current week, which is, well, strange. I have installed also the other (Elementary) calendar applicaton to try, but it wont start (possibly some issues with Wayland). Generally, using GNOME calendar sucks.

2022-044
Web browser (firefox) tried on several webpages in wide range of complexity. It seems to work correctly, but is very slow, even to the extent I am afraid of timeouts in some cases. No firefox crashes so far.

I have installed and tested gnuplot. Works perfectly (this software is so CPU lightweight that it even seems to run fast, no significant difference between PP and desktop versions felt so far).

2022-045
I have experimented with Android emulation a bit. I have installed the Waydroid container + image, intialized it, enabled and started the container service, and rebooted the PP (yes, it seems it is necessary)

pamac install waydroid waydroid-image
waydroid init
systemctl enable waydroid-container.service # oh well...
reboot

Then, I have copied several android applications I wanted to test to the PP, and installed them into Waydroid:

waydroid app install NAME.apk

To run the application, I have used the following sequence:

waydroid session start & # only once
waydroid shell # also only once
waydroid app launch APPNAME # or launch it from the shell GUI

The results were mostly disappointing. Applications tested so far:

That are not exactly convincing results, but further experiments are planned later.

2022-047
Now I have tried to actually use the wifi hotspot feature, which seemed to work when I have configured it couple of weeks ago, but now I have realized that it is highly unstable, up to the level of unusability. The connection is usually established, but fails within the minutes (it might have something to do with the SoC attempting to go to sleep mode, but no proof so far). So, unfortunately, no hotspot for now.

2022-048
For some time I am realizing ocassional issues when turning on wifi. In some cases, it works well. In other cases, the wifi adapter never gets fully configured (three dots in wifi icon in the status line). Rebooting the phone helps usually. Once the connection is established, it is in most cases stable.

Also, issue with incoming calls when any other app/screen than the lock screen is displayed (i. e. no option to accept, or reject, the call). Similarly, when call is ongoing and I swipe to another screen, I lose all means to terminate the call (but this is usually lesser problem, as the other party can usually hang up).

There is apparently some other issue with incoming (and possibly also outgoing) calls, which is triggered by yet unknown sequence of events. I would like to investigate, but at the same time I do not want to mess up important calls, so I tend to be careful not to trigger the problem (even to the extent of performing prophylactic reboots every morning). General feeling is that the software is still somewhat unreliable and unstable.

2022-12-11
It seems that issues with connecting to the wifi might be related to the waydroid container service being enabled (it at least loosely correlates with enabling the service). FWIW, during the wifi initialization phase a second wifi icon shows in the status bar (which happens also when the waydroid is being run), with a question mark overwritten over itself shortly thereafter. Then, the second icon disappears, but the wifi connection is not established. After reboot, the wifi connect correctly immediately. Therefore, I have decided to disable the waydroid container service for now:

systemctl disable waydroid-container.service # as root

We will see if this changes anything.

2022-12-12
Another batch of updates installed. Kernel now on 6.1.0-rc8-1-MANJARO-ARM. (Manjaro version pinephone – phosh – beta27, LSB release 22.12).

Also, cron version (cronie) was installed to play with.

2022-12-20
The latest Manjaro + Phosh version (beta 27) seems to be significantly more stable (though not perfect). For example, during the last week I needed to reboot the PP to power on the WiFi only once (out of about 10 attempts). Also, no calls missed or otherwise botched due to freezes or missing call screen. I have experienced one Xserver crash, though.

2023-01-01
It is funny that I have reached an uptime of three days twelve hours. Without freezes, without crashes, without profylactic reboots, all the functionality I currently use regularly (as described above) works as expected.

Happy new year!

2023-01-06
Yesterday there was one call missed (but successfully forwarded to the other phone and received). Also, the wifi did not started again, forcing me to do another prophylactic reboot.

I have installed another wave of updates. Kernel now on 6.1.0-2-MANJARO-ARM, release 23.01.

2023-01-08
The latest update broke the firefox, clicks (touches) are not passed through in portrait mode, some menu issues, landscape mode also does not work perfectly (not much tested yet).

One crash experienced yesterday (probably the Xserver died). On the other hand, the calendar now works better (the button for adding entries is now visible reliably).

2023-01-20
Mobile hot spot does not work. The mobile data is apparently accessible, the wifi AP is created and apparently connects hosts (and lends them IP address, and even provides DNS service through its wifi interface), but the routing/NATting does not work. Short search on the Net showed recommendation to use the connection to a hidden network menu entry instead of wifi hotspot one, but the result was exactly the same.

And, by the way, uptime of 10 days and 6 hours (and counting) achieved:

[manjaro@manjaro-arm ~]$ w
23:43:59 up 10 days, 6:22, 2 users, load average: 0,11, 0,26, 0,41
USER TTY LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
manjaro tty7 09led23 10days 14:19 19.46s Xwayland :0 -rootless -terminate -core -listenfd 32 -list
manjaro pts/1 23:41 1.00s 0.16s 0.05s w
[manjaro@manjaro-arm ~]$

2023-01-25
After about two weeks of uptime I have shut down the PP to do an image backup. After powering off the phone I removed the SD card, inserted it into the card reader and executed a command:

# in my case, the device was sdr, but your device name will be different
dd if=/dev/DEVICE of=/path/to/archive/pinephone-backup.img bs=1M conv=fsync

Gzipping, bzip2ping, or other further processing is of course possible. The restore procedure will include dd’ing the image back to the SD card, then unpacking the latest home directory backup (in tar format, created as described above).

While the PP was down, I have tried to boot a newest manjaro plasma image (filename Manjaro-ARM-plasma-mobile-pinephone-202212201610.img). FWIW, it does not boot on my PP (the RGB LEDs keep up, no vibration, no nothing). Therefore, back to phosh.

Shortly thereafter, I had a crash (incoming call in the same instant I have tried to unlock the screen). Funny enough, the calling number was recorded in the call log, so no information was lost as I could call back.

This evening I have installed the newest batch of OS updates. Hopefully it will fix at least couple of the remaining issues.

2024-03-03
After more than a year of relatively stable service, my PinePhone died, most probably because of a charging chip failure. The overall experience was mixed: Call reliability was only mediocre, the data service was much better, I was regularly using it for mobile wi-fi for my business laptop while running local firefox for occassional private purposes (and mutt for e-mail). For significant period of time I was using the PP inside the keyboard case, without troubles, with really, really extended battery time. All that ended last week when something happened, after which the PP basically stopped charging. At about 5 % charge, I have connected the PP back to the charger. Couple of hours later the PP was dead. It does not boot, does not charge (draws no current from the charger), does nothing. I have no way to check whether the keyboard case works, but at least it charges when plugged. I will reasonably charge it and store for possible distant future use.

My journey with PinePhone ends here, at least for now. As a mobile phone, my experience was not exciting, while as a mobile computer, the PP served much better. For foreseeable future, I have decided to use different hardware with different software (GrapheneOS), and dedicated modem for portable wi-fi. However, I want to return to the PinePhone at some unspecified time in the future.

(c) 2024 Martin Cernohorsky, CC BY-ND

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Last revision: 2024-03-03