Worse connectivity than the first cell phones from the 90s, worse applications than the first feature phones from the early 2000s, worse performance than the first smartphones from the late 2000s.
As of today there is nothing really redeeming about it. Sure, some tech enthusiast can hack together a GTK application that shows his FOSS conference's schedule, but that's like having a spork in the middle of the amazon forest.
I honestly don’t understand how it can be slower than those feature phones, and yet it is. Sure, bigger screen resolution doesn’t help, but those ran some interpreted Java..
Does pinephones perhaps have some scheduling issues? That’s the only thing I can think of, it either has way too many processes and/or the switching is way too frequent. But linux itself manages it quite well in my experience even on low-end devices so I honestly don’t know.
EDIT: I assume parent does as well, but I definitely meant the non-pro pinephone here. I don’t have the pro one, but that presumably performs better.
It's a SW optimization issue. Pinephone can give smooth experience with optimized software (for example libreELEC/Kodi https://xnux.eu/log/videos/libreelec6.mp4). Typical GNOME desktop is just not optimized for ARM HW from 7 years ago or so. It got better with GTK4, I think.
Those old phones didn't run Java for anything that mattered. The OS itself and all the core apps would be native code. Java - J2ME, usually - was for third-party apps, and it was slow enough that you didn't really see anything "serious" there (e.g. I haven't ever seen a full-fledged J2ME web browser - the most we got was Opera Mini, which did all the layout computations server-side).
Same thing for early PDAs like Symbian and WinCE devices - all software running on those would be native. Well, WinCE got .NET at some point, and it was usable, but that one is fully JIT-compiled.
I have a Pinebook, with the same CPU as the PinePhone, it doesn't seem all that slow when running at the highest frequency, would be interested to know what frequency the PinePhone typically runs at.
I have both (Book & Phone), and AFAIK they both run at 1.15 GHz. I agree that they aren't slow if you adjust workloads and maybe expectations, but seemingly many commenters here (but also on, e.g., YouTube) aren't willing to do that.
I don’t know, my android phone 2 devices before (sony ericcson xperia x10 mini from 2010) was orders of magnitude smoother and faster (with 256MB of RAM!), and it didn’t get scorching hot from simply being turned on.
Honestly, try browsing the web for a few minutes and it gets uncomfortably hot. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if some devices (mine included) have buggy hardware more so than the one you got, because I would expect much worse overall opinions otherwise.
And arm is not a new compilation target, so I don’t buy software differences being entirely the culprit, either. Worse battery life? Sure, that would explain it. But having trouble running a terminal and opening settings in 45 seconds is just criminal.
> Honestly, try browsing the web for a few minutes and it gets uncomfortably hot.
I really haven't had that experience in quite a while. I am mostly running DanctNIX or postmarketOS 22.06 with Phosh and browse with Firefox (with uBlock Origin - I also have a second Firefox profile that has NoScript installed for sites that just have too much janky JavaScript) or Epiphany.
It may help that the south of Germany is not super hot (just hot) and that I use Biktorgj's Modem firmware.
Edit, example: I am writing this in Firefox on postmarketOS while having 4 other tabs open and also two more apps (Tootle and Secrets), and the phone isn't even slightly warm.
That's something I really should try to measure. I would guess that it lasts a bit longer than two hours; definitely way longer than my PinePhone Pro. Battery life totally could be better (one coukld also see it as a feature to not mindlessly be on the phone all day), like OP I really hope for a battery case that's not as bulky as the keyboard case.
Yeah, I am reminded of that scene in the Sorkin Steve Jobs movie, where Wozniak is excited to show Jobs his Nixie tube watch until Jobs points out that it looks like a detonator for a bomb
Worse connectivity than the first cell phones from the 90s, worse applications than the first feature phones from the early 2000s, worse performance than the first smartphones from the late 2000s.
As of today there is nothing really redeeming about it. Sure, some tech enthusiast can hack together a GTK application that shows his FOSS conference's schedule, but that's like having a spork in the middle of the amazon forest.