Last Updated on January 5, 2025 by pg@petergamma.org
The Pinephone was advertised as a phone which can do anything:
After I had installed LibreOffice on my Pinephone on postmarkedOS and connected it to the Pinephone keyboard my setup worked great with this setup for what I had installed.
But then I urgently needed a privacy phone:
So I started to use my Pinephone as a privacy phone in the above setup. But unfortunately it constantly crashed. I had to take out the battery and then reset date and time for restarting it. And I did not want to change this setup and install another PP distro.
So I watched different reviews about privacy phones, and I bought a used GrapheneOS phone. The Swiss Ricardo seller asked me: „do you want Android or GrapheneOS on your phone?“ What a kind seller. And now I bought a third phone to flash iodéOS on it. To use my Pinephone as a privacy phone is gone for me personally for the moment.
But I invested a lot of time in LibreOffice on the Pinephone:
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=16614
I gave this project up, too, although it is great in principle. Softmaker for Android is the better alternative for me personally:
https://petergamma.org/category/mobile-office
But still I miss a community of users for LibreOffice on the Pinephone. Which other smartphone can run LibreOffice except for the Pinephone? I gave up the Pinephone keyboard, too, since it seems not to come back to the Pine64 store. There are some used devices available, but when will they become short?
But I found an alternative keyboard which works fine with the Pinephone after a first test, and that is the Rii mini 4 over Bluetooth:
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=19352
With other Bluetooth keyboards I had issues when connected to the Pinephone, but not with the Rii mini 4. I still regularly check the Pine64 forum for new developments for the Pinephone, but these seem hardly to happen. And also the Pine64 community seems to be very negative as far as further developments of the Pinephone is concerned, for instance concerning in a re-launch of the Pinephone keyboard. A wired keyboard would be great in principle for privacy reasons, it is better than wireless keyboards for this purpose. And which keyboard for Android is wired? But this requires that the PP keyboard is available, on stock, or a community who wants it back, which seems not to be there.
Why I lost my interest in the phone which can do anything? Because it can t do what I bought it for. It could do anything I bought it for, is someone would program it to do so. But this would require a community of developers similar to what the Raspberry Pi s have. Maybe in 10 years from now, if the Pinephone is developed further, my interest could come back. But also in this respect, Pine64 seems not to follow the example of Raspberry Pi and seems not be able to gain the world-wide community of Linux phone developers to develop it further.