I haven't followed Pine stuff in awhile since I was researching their Single Board Computers, like the Rock64(their version of Raspberry-pi). I do recall reading a few articles on their open-source laptop and smartphone development plans. Here are some
recent articles about it.
A basic summary of what it is: a phone that doesn't lock you into using certain software. You can download from a choice of various Operating Systems to use, similar to
Linux Distributions for computers. Sometimes you hear about "my iphone/android phone needs to be rooted in order to do ___", which is akin to giving yourself Administrative Permissions to do whatever you want on a Windows computer. So rooting gives you full access to make changes to it as you please, but usually at the risk of "bricking" your phone - making it unusable. Since the Pinephone is open-source and lets you modify it to the extent your skills will allow, that is not an issue.
Since the topic has no direct questions, I'll just write what comes to mind.
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My intuition tells me that 99% of the general public would not have a good
experience with such a phone even after the alpha version is completed - that's why it's geared towards developers and enthusiasts. Ex. I was at an Ag seminar today where one of the presenters spoke of how making formulas in Microsoft Excel was so complicated that "only techies can do this kind of stuff".
I'm typing this reply on an old laptop running Linux Mint(A Linux Operating System), and it has some annoying hick-ups that most general users I know wouldn't put up with. My guess is that open-source phones will be aimed at high-end tech users for some time to come.
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Some questions that come to mind:
Will there be long-term support? Wikipedia says the phone will be in production for 5 years, which allures to support for 5 years, but tech projects make a lot of claims that never pan-out.
Will there be replacement parts readily available at reasonable prices? By reasonable, I mean not having to spend $100 for a new touch screen for a $150 phone. Google tried to make a modular phone several years ago and it didn't work out, so a small community-based developer team really has their work cut out for them, to say the least.
Along with that, the project has very few core developers (dedicated full-time to it), so it's essentially in bleeding edge-development, which means it's such a new or unconventional concept that it puts a lot of the risk in the hands of the investors - the people buying the $150 phones in this case. Ex. One day maybe the main developer leaves because of health issues, then the project stops being developed and that can potentially be the end of it. Everyone who bought the phones are kind of left in the dark.
But, if I could buy a $150 phone that would receive updates for 5 years, and I could buy a $30-40 replacement screen for it until it's not longer in production, I'd buy in. (I would really appreciate a higher quality camera on it though)
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I'm glad they're at least trying, but software development, especially volunteer-powered, can really slow down a project - I'm sure it'll be a awhile before it's close for daily usage by even novice linux users, such as myself.
If you have any other questions, I have at least
enough knowledge (I think) to explain stuff in layman's terms.