The PinePhone can do anything – it can cost you also a lot of time

Last Updated on April 5, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

• What do you expect from a PinePhone or a UBports phone?
• If we hear Linux, do we not expect that we can do anything in Linux?
• But is this expectation not dangerous?
• Are messages like for instance the one in this video not trigger this?

The Pinephone can do anything, if you code it yourself.

• The first PinePhone shipped in in January 2020.
• The first Raspberry Pi Model B was released in February 2012.
• This means software development for Raspberries was done 8 years longer than for the PinePhone, the Raspberry Pi has been developed for 10 years.
• If we are evaluating different devices, this 10 years of experience strikes us.
• Most of the open question we where interested in, we could find answers for this mostly on YouTube.
• In the Pine64 forum, question often remain unanswered. Is this forum controlled by a lawyer and a business plan?
• Is this not a big advantage of Raspberry Pi products compared to other devices, to find so many information on YouTube?
• If you cannot see a demo which proofs that the feature you need works with your Linux phone, is not the chance big, that the feature does not work out of the box?
• Are not the most features which work from a product shown in a demo or described in forum entries, since this makes it interesting for sellers?
• If you are interested for instance in hand held PC with this functionality:

Demo which shows the function of a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with 7 inch display to use it as a portable handheld computer

• paired with a touch screen display:

How to get a touch screen to work with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W

• and not primary in a phone functionality. Is then for instance a Raspberry Pi zero 2 not the better solution for you than a Linux phone?
• we recently experienced that for the Raspberri Pi zero 2 for many things which we are interested in, demos are there, so we don’t have to test and evaluate everything by ourselves. These tests have already been done by many testers.

Before you buy a PinePhone, we invite you to check our posts under the category “Linux phones”. It eventually can save you a lot of time. And we ask you the question: is a single board computer not the better solution for you than a PinePhone?