Could Pine64's Cheap Linux Smartphone Replace Your PC? (techradar.com) 144
TechRadar reports on Pine64's new "PinePhone Convergence Package" handset, calling it "a Linux desktop you can keep in your pocket" that can be used as a PC when plugged into an external display and a keyboard.
The device costs just $199 and is aimed primarily at Linux enthusiasts. The PinePhone Linux smartphone is based on the Alpine Linux-based PostmarketOS that can be used both in smartphone and desktop modes... The main component that transforms the PinePhone into a PC-like device is its USB-C docking bar that features an HDMI display output, two USB Type-A connectors, and a 10/100Mb Ethernet port.
The idea of using a smartphone with an external display and keyboard to run certain applications has not gained much traction neither with HP's Elite x3 Windows Phone 10 handset nor with Samsung's smartphones with its DeX software. Perhaps, since Linux community is generally more inclined to experiment with their gadgets (and their time), Pine64's PinePhone Convergence has a better chance to be actually used as a desktop by its owners.
The idea of using a smartphone with an external display and keyboard to run certain applications has not gained much traction neither with HP's Elite x3 Windows Phone 10 handset nor with Samsung's smartphones with its DeX software. Perhaps, since Linux community is generally more inclined to experiment with their gadgets (and their time), Pine64's PinePhone Convergence has a better chance to be actually used as a desktop by its owners.
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
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Maybe it's 90,3% of time?
Re:No. (Score:5, Funny)
This just in: "Is Betteridge's Law True 95% Of The Time?"
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I'd give you the recursive funny mod if I ever had a mod point.
However, if you ask about my first PC, the answer is "yes", Betteridge notwithstanding. Any smartphone is vastly more capable than my first PC. Pretty sure it had a Z-80 and the OS was CP/M.
These days there are many of my computational or communication-related tasks that can be handled by a smartphone. It's been a couple of years since I've taken a laptop on the road (but sometimes I travel with multiple smartphones).
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I'd give you the recursive funny mod if I ever had a mod point.
However, if you ask about my first PC, the answer is "yes", Betteridge notwithstanding. Any smartphone is vastly more capable than my first PC.
Yep, same here. I don't think I could use my phone (a crappy LG K51 I got for free) as a portable PC, but in a pinch it would probably work to let me get something done.
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Problems are that the apps in the phone don't work yet, although it's a matter of time before it actually becomes a real, usable phone. Right now it's a Raspberry Pi with an LCD screen, more or less.
But Google and Apple will fight having generic Linux, as will the ecosystem businesses and carriers who want a taste of data tracking with PII sauce.
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Re: No. (Score:2)
Yeah. Could have happened once, but no longer. Smart phones have been able to replace the average persons laptop for at least five years now, in the same sense that during the 1990s most consumers were spending 2k ish on a desktop and then using it for word processing and email.
For whatever reasons, no one succeeded in selling the idea of dockable phones though. The window has since been closed by Chromebooks and Streambooks and will never reopen at any large scale.
Re: No. (Score:4, Informative)
Yes I can access nearly everything my laptop can, but when your laptop allows you to expand data trees (think directories in explorer, or Outlook showing your folders>emails>previews in one window) vs your mobile taking you down one path only, usability is a lot worse.
Next, resolution. Samsung claim to support 4k in Dex, yet I still only get 1080 output. Yes the dongle will do 4k, but for whatever reason you don't get it.
I'm about to explore RDP / Azure Windows desktop access, but guessing 1080 max output is going to limit desirability there still.
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The issue I am finding is that the UI of both my Samsung and my Huawei smart phone are horrible due to an infestation of icons.
I am an English speaker, and understand hierarchical drop downs. While I could probably work with Kanji characters at a pinch, I can't make head or tail of the shower of shit that is the current set of
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In this Pine64 case you'd just use regular Linux desktop applications.
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A lot of apps support tablet modes though
The person you replied to has pointed this out, specifically that this "vast difference in UI and capability" sucks.
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Indeed.
But the fact is, some future thing might. Neither this of Samsungs DEX just give enough computerlike features to work as such.
I used to think that we are far from a future of one device, but recently I used a friends ipad pro+keyboard for a few things and it is surprisingly close to usable. Enough so that within a few more years of refinement it might fill most day to day use cases.
There is no inherent reason(except money for Apple) why the same could not come to iphones with use of external screens
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Samsung DEX. Motorola Atrix/Lapdock. Asus Padphone. Ubuntu Touch. Microsoft Continuum. Nokia N900. There have been many attempts to let docked phones be used as laptops or desktops, and every single time they've failed to find any meaningful adoption.
The iPad Pro is kind of another thing, since it's more like a laptop/tablet hybrid setup, and not quite as portable as a smartphone.
Re: No. (Score:2)
I'd use DeX if it were supported in my price range. Samsung have made it a 'Pro' feature only for high end Galaxy S and Note phones.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Motorola already tried once with one of their Droid phones, which had a laptop dock that added a larger keyboard and screen. It failed miserably because of slow hardware performance and a crummy software selection.
Microsoft also tried it with their Continuum Windows 10 phones. They also gave up on the idea because of crummy hardware performance when they stopped trying to make Windows 10 Mobile a thing.
You know who could actually pull this off, though? Apple. Now that they're migrating Mac OS X over to Apple Silicon, they should eventually be able to allow running of iOS apps in Mac OS X and vice versa without a huge performance hit from hardware emulation. Once that happens, having a port replicator attachment for a "Pro" model iPhone seems like a no-brainer.
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Motorola already tried once with one of their Droid phones, which had a laptop dock that added a larger keyboard and screen. It failed miserably because of slow hardware performance and a crummy software selection.
Motorola's Webtop was almost 10 years ago, so hardware performance would be much less of an issue now. Since it switched to a full XWindows when you connected it to a dock, you should be able to run pretty much any Linux graphical programs. It would definitely be interesting to see Motorola try it again.
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Since it switched to a full XWindows when you connected it to a dock,
Why not run XWindows all the time? The N900 did, and X can be very light.
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Perhaps better stated as Betteridge's law of headlines.
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Hell, I bought one and it's an emphatic no. It may prove useful for a lot of things, but replacing a desktop is not one of them.
With 3GB? No. (Score:2)
Get 8GB in there and we'll talk. And yes, you can charge $299.
Gonna need to fit snug in an otterbox, too
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It's questionable why they would go with specs so low. At best this will make a fine SSH terminal and email client. They seem to be trying to sell it as a novelty rather than actually useful. That said, it means people will buy this on a whim at the price and they could move on to bigger and better later.
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It's questionable why they would go with specs so low. At best this will make a fine SSH terminal and email client. They seem to be trying to sell it as a novelty rather than actually useful. That said, it means people will buy this on a whim at the price and they could move on to bigger and better later.
I had a T-Mobile G1 phone with a keyboard which worked pretty well for phone/text/maps/ssh/email
for it's time. with a screaming 192MB of RAM and android 1.6
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I had a T-Mobile G1 phone with a keyboard which worked pretty well for phone/text/maps/ssh/email
for it's time. with a screaming 192MB of RAM and android 1.6
I used to run Netscape on a 386DX25 with 8MB RAM, I upgraded to a Sun 4/260 with 24MB and it seemed like memory went on forever. But now you need at least 2GB RAM for the browser alone...
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I used to run Netscape on a 386DX25 with 8MB RAM, I upgraded to a Sun 4/260 with 24MB and it seemed like memory went on forever. But now you need at least 2GB RAM for the browser alone...
Well, yeah, but I'm running on a 4k monitor. Just a 4k RGB bitmap alone nearly 24MiB in size. By the time the browser holds a few layers with alpha channels in memory to speed up rendering, the memory usage easily gets pretty high. And that's ignoring the page assets too.
If you want to look at basic pages a light browser li
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If you want to look at basic pages a light browser like Dillo or Links will do the job just fine, be low memory and astonishingly fast. Slashdot works fine. But you won't get the heavier stuff.
Right, nothing of import will work.
Re:With 3GB? No. (Score:5, Informative)
It isn't android, it is real linux. (PostmarketOS) It is aimed at the existing PostmarketOS community. It doesn't need a lot of RAM, it isn't for apps. And a lot of stuff doesn't work yet. This is for developers, and they don't need excess RAM.
This isn't actually targeted at replacing a desktop, that is just the media not understanding the nerd stuff. Those are just standard USB-C peripheral interfaces.
Re:With 3GB? No. (Score:4, Informative)
Android IS real Linux. If you have root you can use the Linux Deploy app to install a complete userland from one of the popular distributions on it. And if you have enough RAM then you can run real apps, especially since most phones of today seem to be quad-core or greater. The lack of RAM is the rub, though, with this device and with others. Even most of the mid-range phones are still limited to 3 or 4 GB. That's narrowly enough to run Android (although it's still limiting!) but it's not enough to do serious tasks.
This is for developers, and they don't need excess RAM.
"Excess RAM"? What is this thing you speak of? The more RAM I have, the more RAM I use. These days it can take a boatload of RAM just to do a compile. Developers need lots of RAM as much as anyone.
Re: With 3GB? No. (Score:2)
Specs are 'low' because Pine have based their products around the Allwinner A64 for its GNU/Linux support.
One could dock a high end phone as an Android desktop, such as a DeX equipped Samsung. However, the goal of this Pinephone is running X11/Wayland without any Androidisms.
Plus it's nothing new (Score:2)
Plus, this is nothing new. Phones had HDMI as far back as my Galaxy S5 (and likely before). Keyboard and mouse through bluetooth. And chroot Linux is trivial on almost any Android phone, including desktops. Or, at least, trivial for one savvy enough with Linux to actually want to do this. Anyone who would want to do this is already doing this.
I'm actually more interested in Linux build for phones. I started off loving Android and its open source roots, but now find Google to be more evil than the rest
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It's amazing what specs you can get away with when you aren't rendering everything through a browser and you aren't developing everything on a JS framework.
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I believe someone once said "640k should be enough for anyone".
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I believe someone said that, too. But I don't believe the premise. 640kB is enough for anyone to do any basic computing tasks... painfully. Stuff like WYSIWYG DTP isn't possible in that little RAM, though, for example. You might be able to achieve the same results using text-mode WordPerfect, but getting there is a lot more work.
IME, anything less than 4GB is wholly unrealistic for a modern desktop, and less than 8GB will cause enough slowdown to impact workflow. These days, software is bloated enough that
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Stuff like WYSIWYG DTP isn't possible in that little RAM, though, for example.
GeoPublish on the C64/128 would like to have a word with you.
IME, anything less than 4GB is wholly unrealistic for a modern desktop, and less than 8GB will cause enough slowdown to impact workflow.
Pretty much. Though how much slower will depend on the desktop and applications. Some combinations will strain 8GB. I've used Linux on low-RAM systems so I know the usual tricks for getting the most of it.
Replace my "smart" phone? (Score:2)
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I still use a Blackberry Classic [amazon.com]. It seems to be exactly what you want. It runs BB10, which is great, but it also means you won't be able to get apps anymore. Well, not through the store anyway. Not that you'll need anything beyond the built-ins. Blackberry did productivity better than anyone, then and now.
It's cheap enough now to take a gamble on. If you don't like it, which would be a surprise, it's not like you'd be out much.
Re: Replace my "smart" phone? (Score:2)
It was called the windows phone.
Not only did it work great, but you could dock it, and use it as a desktop.
Naturally Microsoft failed to demonstrate this and it died in obscurity
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If only they hadn't made their huge push on Windows phone before Windows 10 was mainstream. They gave up just as it was getting good, not that I've ever seen not used one.
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Any Android phone will do what you ask. Run an app to do it. I sync Exchange, Outlook, GMail, Google Calendar together all the time. Appointments are color-coded based upon where they came from.
Multiple e-mail accounts including the aforementioned Exchange, and POP, IMAP, and Gmail - all no problem. In whatever app you want for e-mail management.
Calls and texts - of course the default carrier number for both. But also a secondary carrier number that's mapped to my phone. And then there's also Google
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It can run Sailfish OS, though it looks like you're back running Android apps again on it, unless there's a native mail client.
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Mail client, sure there is: https://sailfishos.org/wiki/Em... [sailfishos.org] .
I guess other things (especially apps) might be severely lacking or backwards but it's a pretty serviceable Linux. I might install it again just to see if I can get working some bluetooth sensors in CMD.
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You're one of these people who very carefully eliminates every available choice, and then complains you can't get what you want.
Re: Replace my "smart" phone? (Score:2)
Lol. Fake-techie iLuddites, and the bubnle they live in.
Hint: An iPhone is buying yourself a techie look on front of the hyper-luddites because you are too dimb and lazy and mentally poor to handle a computer, and need the Playmobil toy kitchen version of it, nanny included.
Except everyone with a clue now instantly can see your mental disability and you don't look like a techie, but like somebody who wants to look like a techie!
Loser.
Re: Replace my "smart" phone? (Score:2)
P.S.: Does it hurt, that even after all those typos, caused by having to go through the insanely retarded iNterface [sic] of a touch screen virtual keyboard, I still got a proper argument and am right?
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Get a non-Google android phone (they do exist) and get 9Folders "Nine" on it.
Or write your own unicorn OS and an Exchange client.
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Performance seems ... lacking (Score:3)
I think I'll keep my PC, thanks
Re: Performance seems ... lacking (Score:2)
Re: Performance seems ... lacking (Score:2)
Lol. "text to speech at the OS level".
Kid, we had that in DOS in the 90s! It was, like, a small TSR/driver of a few KB.
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HELLO BAReFO0t, MY NAME IS DR SBAITSO.
I am here to help you.
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It sounded like shit, though. I mean, I had an Amiga, it came with speech synthesis. But I never used it for anything, because it was terrible. If I'd been vision-impaired I might have cared, because it was better than nothing for doing what it did, but it still sounded like a chicken being put through a taffy puller.
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I have the pinephone, but can't use standard docks (Score:2)
It's a hardware issue: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.... [pine64.org]
Newer revisions supposedly have this fixed. You shouldn't need to have to use a custom dock for any of this.
Ram and storage to low (Score:2)
Ram and storage to low
No, but: (Score:2)
My most major complaint/concern about smartphones has always been that the end-user basically has zero say in how secure it actually is. Give me the flexibilty and level of control necessary to accomplish that and I might consider it.
Re:No, but: (Score:5, Informative)
I've got one, albeit the last revision which requires some minor (!) re-soldering to get the USB port to work as a device host as required for the hub. You can run any flavour of Linux you like, and there are already ports of Debian, Manjaro, PostmarketOS, and Ubuntu Touch which work reasonably well, although daily-driver usage is probably a few months off. Ubuntu Touch implements it's own smart-phone style security permissions, but the rest are just like regular PC distros. The phone will try to boot off the microSD before defaulting to what's been flashed to it, so you can dual-boot as you like by swapping cards around.
It's got physical kill switches for the modem, the wifi, the camera, and the mics, and the modem is neatly walled up inside it's own system with no access to the larger phone and user OS, so it's as secure as you want.
I'd really recommend it because we early-adopters are basically hammering out all the major bugs right now. Once the next revision is finally shipped it should be in pretty good shape.
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Basically, yes, you can install just about whatever you like on it and customize it as you see fit, similar to any other distro.
I want one, but it needs to have an Android compatibility layer. There's work being done but it's not there yet.
But all that aside, I want one.
Re: No, but: (Score:2)
They correctly called "smartphone"s.
Because it implies you are a dumb user, and that is exactly the condescending overbearing mindset those things are designed with, through and through.
Note that most user stupidity actually comes *as a result* of being treated like morons for decades.
E.g. scripting languages are completely trivial and on a grandma level of difficulty. All its ideas are things used by everyone all the time. Shopping listsand bullet point trees and tables are data structures, saying "he" ins
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I'll have you know my grandma used to write JCL for an IBM 709.
Solution in search of a problem (Score:2)
There are plenty of ways to make phones and desktops play well together. Sufficiently powerful desktops are so cheap now that cost isn't an issue. So why combine them? Who wants to be unable to use their phone and desktop simultaneously? Who wants to have to pull out plugs to take their phone out with them, or to have to bring their phone to a specific spot and hook stuff up to use their desktop? Who wants to pointlessly drain their phone's battery?
If people didn't want to dock their laptops into desktops o
HP 200 LX (Score:5, Interesting)
Everything old is new again.
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It seems that most attempts to sell a linux based desktop suffer from this... Instead of providing a fully functional distro, something half assed is provided and then pretty much not marketed at all, then when it fails to sell they blame the technology and claims noone wants it.
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A laptop dock would be good. Especially if it contained its own secondary battery that charged the phone over USB PD.
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More effective than a stake through the heart by most people's analysis.
Yes absolutely... (Score:2)
I see LibreOffice and I said YES (Score:2)
Then look at the demo.
I will wait !
Root access (Score:2)
That's what I want for me on my phone.
Re: Root access (Score:2)
My rule is: My bootloader, or GTFO!
root access still means the lower layers and the manufacturers "grant" me access, but still want to be in control and shame me for not dominating me like a gimp.
Frankly, it should not fuckin have a pre-installed anything at all! Like a PC! (Yeah, I don't buy those pre-made things you are now thinking of.)
Not a developer's PC (Score:3, Interesting)
I run an enterprise stack on my laptop and it struggles with 16GB and an i7. Visual Studio itself chews up 3GB of RAM just loading some of the larger projects. Big companies are too busy developing features to be able to keep up with efficiencies and so these chunky setups just become an accepted part of doing the job. There are plenty of innovations still be made for developers' setup, perhaps just running most things in the cloud will be where we all head in the near future. It all sounds logical and doable but it's still not a reality for many. Plus there will always be the consideration of needing to work offline. Flawless internet is not ubiquitous, especially not when working from home.
For someone who uses a PC just for communication, documents, working online then yeah, sure, this should work just fine. But then what is the point of the device itself? What are you actually carrying with you? It's not a laptop so you can't do much when you're actually travelling, it only serves as a way to move from one base station to another. If you've got a base station then what's the big deal in also having a PC? I don't know if it's ever going to be convincing enough a case.
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The convenience is in carrying your data with you... If you have a bunch of disparate desktops then you need some way to transfer your apps, settings and data between them all, and when you leave a location you're potentially leaving behind copies of your data.
USB-C should be enough of a standard that you get standardised docks that will work with any model of laptop or phone, so you'll have a compatible dock pretty much anywhere you go - very useful when you frequently visit clients etc.
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I'm struggling to think of what data we'd be storing on the device. My local documents folder is synced to onedrive so it's entirely seamless no matter where I am or what machine I login with. Apps ... how many can you have and how useful can they be? If they are small enough to fit on a mobile device then they are mobile apps, not necessarily desktop apps. You're not installing a full featured office suite on your phone, not when the online version of those apps are probably better and easier to use and ta
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Can we PLEASE have an "ironic" tag
10 seconds (Score:2)
I watched the video...
It took *10 seconds* to launch the settings function??? 4 seconds to display battery capacity? 11 seconds to launch Firefox (which was also not showing mobile pages)???? It has some cool features for sure, but some of the stuff seems unreasonably slow to start for a modern device. Much of it seemed fast, once loaded, though.
LibreOffice- really nice, but it looked like a disaster on the small screen.
Needs a hardware keyboard (Score:3)
Touchscreens suck. They have been successful because they are cheap to manufacture and easy to clean. But really, if you plan on creating anything on your phone, (like the intended market for this Pine thing) you need a keyboard, even if it's tiny. The old Backberry keyboards were pretty good, so was the Nokia N95.
Likely contenders today include:
Cosmo Communicator - great form factor but doesn't seem to support Linux properly.
Dragonbox Pyra - community developed (IE, significantly delayed at this point!) and required big pockets. Otherwise it look like a nice package, and the community spent months wringing every bit out of functionality out of the keyboard. The fact that you can disassemble the thing with nothing more than a screwdriver is promising too. https://pyra-handheld.com/boar... [pyra-handheld.com]
For now though, the most promising mobile device seems to be one of the UMPCs from GPD, combined with a 4G dongle. The GPD Micro sounds promising and the proper RJ45 ethernet port and real hardware serial port look really useful: https://www.dragonbox.de/en/mi... [dragonbox.de]
I'm not affiliated with the Dragonbox shop, but when I do commit to buying I am more likely to buy through them than Amazon.
Re: Needs a hardware keyboard (Score:2)
Their blog post does mention scope for a hardware keyboard but any sourcing delayed by covid lockdown.
Toy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing signals confidence in build quality like "Device Warranty: 30 Days"
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I once bought a car with a 30 minute warranty - and I had it for 7 years.
Short answer: no (Score:2)
Does the pine phone have 8-16GB of RAM? Can it run Arch Linux? Can it run things like Plex Media Server or Airsonic (run them well)? The answer to those questions are "no", so no, it can't replace my desktop PC. My desktop is actually a Desktop + media server for the local network. Until a phone can do that, I'll keep my desktop and my phone separate, thank you.
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I think a good fraction of the time all I need is a mouse, keyboard, and external monitor and enough specs to run a web browser, text editor, and ssh client. The 3GB on the device is probably sufficient for that, if I'm not in a hurry when it comes to the web browser.
Does it replace every possible computer for every possible person? That seems like an unreasonable standard. Could it keep me from opening up my laptop or be practical, if a bit spartan, when I'm on a trip? I think in my case it could do the jo
Re: Short answer: no (Score:2)
arch-derivative Manjaro is actively being ported.
It's first, an open source phone (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it would be nice when it was docked, it could double as a desktop. But, having 8GB, (and one person wanted 16GB), of memory, multiple USB3, plus more horse power, would increase the cost noticeably. And yes, many people might pay that higher cost. Except that would eliminate people looking for a phone first, then potentially a light weight PC.
Also note that the Pine64 projects tend to have privacy oriented goals. So the PinePhone, (like the earlier Pinebook Pro laptop), have privacy switches to disable the camera, etc... Last, the Pine64 team does not seem to try to compete with existing markets. True, their may not be a high end phone that is dockable and usable as a desktop PC. Perhaps if the PinePhone ends up reasonably successful, a higher end model may come out. Their are few open source, privacy oriented options for cell-phones today.
Their is no one cell-phone to rule them all.
i dont know (Score:2)
no dual SIM so not replacing my phone (Score:2)
Why does it have to come with its own distribution (Score:2)
Why does it not just offer the software packages in existing distributions?
Or is it more like Mint, aka Ubuntu with light sanity goggles on? Aka Debian with too condescending consumer PC goggles on and sanity goggles to correct part of that.
Because if not, they are kinda missing what is the whole point to their target group.
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I suspect Ubuntu needs ground-penetrating sanity radar!
Neat idea but no (Score:3)
The same goes for smart phones. If the phone is unusable garbage then people won't buy it. Even if it's an amazing phone experience but has no apps then people won't buy it.
As for the desktop idea - yes there is some merit and cool factor to that. It isn't the first time people have tried to make a phone be a desktop when it is docked. It's a powerful idea but one which is somewhat redundant these days when devices sync their data through the cloud.
I currently have a Huawei Mate 20 (18 months old) (Score:2)
Well, despite the Chinese spying elements of the phone, it contains tech copied from Samsung, similar to Samsung Dex. (I think EMUI?)
I can plug my now $500 phone into a USB-C dock, like a HP branded one and it will work in 1920x1080 at quite reasonable speeds on my monitor.
USB keyboards are recognised and they're hooked up to the dock.
Unsure if the dock Ethernet port works.
The phone supports OpenVPN being Android.
You can then establish a connection to your workplace open up SSH or RDP clients and genuinely
Psion revenge (Score:2)
PocketPC concept won't die NOR will it thrive w/o KILLER.app.
At most Psion was a good pocket planner (calendar,reminder, note) AND remote Terminal for sys admins. In fact, some of its UI elements remain unsurpassed to this day like its selector method for recurring events.
Pine might be an emergent tip of the wedge that's dissembling all-in-one devices IF it obsoletes boxenPC's. That would put us all on-track to rent and tenancy in Clouds.