 So about a month ago one of my longtime patrons bought me this this is a pine phone pro and This is the first of a series of videos. I'm gonna make on this device. It is my first impressions video I've been using it for about a month and I have some thoughts both good and bad Mostly I was fairly optimistic about this device But I did have some negative experiences that I want to share with you So other than me not knowing how not to hit the microphone when I'm doing things This video is about to continue on right now So before we jump into that if you leave a thumbs up on this video now I'm gonna send you on to past Matt who's already shot the b-roll of this video and we'll see how that goes I'll see you at the end. Okay, so here's the pine phone pro and One thing I want to make very clear as I go through this is that everything that I say despite any negativity you guys hear is said with the idea that Expectations are very important because everything is about expectations if you're going into this expecting a top-tier high-end Performing phone. You're going to be disappointed. This is a beta device. It's a beta device, but it's also a developer device It's meant for people who are Perfectly okay with the screen not staying on Despite the fact that you have it set to never go off Yeah, and that really right there epitomizes everything and I'm gonna talk about in this phone But despite all the negative that you're going to see in or here in this video, you're gonna also Want to keep in mind that I have a lot of hope for Linux on mobile not so much for plasma on mobile But we'll talk about that as we go along. So let's just before we talk about plasma. Let's talk about The hardware itself, so I'm gonna try to do this and also apologize for the fingerprints It is this thing is a fingerprint magnet and even with a screen protector on it gets very fingerprinty So the overall build quality of this was very surprising to me I thought it was gonna be very plasticky very lightweight and just feel cheap It does not it feels nice now. Does it feel like an iPhone or an Android phone? No, like a high-end Android phone. No, even a mid-tier Android phone No, but it feels but way better than I thought it was going to it's it's Hefty in the hand, but not heavy. It's you know, very sturdy You're not gonna, you know press hard on it and feel it bend like a resistive touchscreen or anything like that in the Back in the day, it feels really nice and that surprised me So from a hardware perspective build quality very impressed Now I will say a couple of things is that you can take this back off Which I'm not going to do that now because I'm you know doing this one-handed but you can take the bet back off and That means you can replace the battery if you want to and that's where you would have access to your SIM card If you you know obviously wanted to use this as a phone You had to put a SIM card in but one thing I will say about the SIM card situation is that if you are in The United States where SIM cards are going the way of the dodo. E-SIMs are not supported on this So you're gonna have to find a carrier that either offers a physical SIM like I did or hope that your existing carry carrier does I ended up having to find another carrier for a month to get a physical SIM to actually use this as a phone and That was not a great solution, but it worked. That's not this phone's problem That's just the United States living in the future. Thank you Apple But anyways, that's one thing that I wanted to mention in terms of hardware It does have a headphone jack so it's not living in the future as you can tell and It has a USB-C port down here at the bottom. The buttons are Okay, they're not the clickiest. They're not the mushiest. They're okay. Okay, so that's the hardware outside of the battery life Which I'll talk about later Okay, so this is Matt from the future I didn't actually talk about battery life later on like I just said so we'll talk about it now What you're seeing is actually a still image of the previous b-roll, but I'm new at this stuff So bear with me here. The battery life is as you might expect not the greatest on this device It's not Horrible, but if you're expecting to get a full day out of it and actually, you know, like heavily use it You're gonna be disappointed again. Remember expectations. Everything is about expectations Overall, if you were just to use this as a device where you made phone calls every once in a while and you made some text messages If that's all you did on it, that's fine You know, you're gonna probably get through the entire day on it But I didn't notice at certain points if you have applications running It's going to eat up the battery more so it doesn't do a good job of battery management like more modern phones do I Very often found that it ate up the battery while it was asleep Which is a problem and we know as Linux users that Linux does not do a very good job at Sleep especially like on laptops, right? A lot of times you'll put a laptop to sleep You'll close the lid you'll come back even just a couple hours later And you'll think well I have plenty of battery left because it was literally doing nothing and you'll find that your battery is dead I had the same experience on the pine phone. I'm you know, just press the power button Put it into sleep mode, but it's basically what that does and I came back a few hours later And there was a significant portion of the battery gone and you guys got to remember that there's not a lot of applications here Running in the background really. I wasn't like having games or you know a Samba server or anything running on in the background This was just normal everyday usage and quite a bit of the battery life was just eaten up while it was asleep So that's definitely an issue. But again, I think that some of that is going to end up being Plasma's problem not necessarily the hardware's problem. I don't know that for sure I still haven't actually tried another distro or different desktop environment on it yet But I have a feeling that it's going to be more of a software issue than an absolutely like a hardware problem But we'll have to wait until we see another device that has you know similar specs to see how that actually goes So now back to past Matt who will continue on with the first look the first thing I should talk about when it comes to the software. Let me turn this thing back on and Unfortunately, I guess I'm gonna have to take it off screen in order to do this. So here we have the software now this comes with Manjaro on it and so this is manjaro arm and it has KD plasma mobile. So this is how it comes from pine 64. This is how they ship it. I haven't done any major Changes to I haven't installed new software in terms of like the operating system on it. I've done none of those things I've been trying to use it as stock as possible since I got this thing and overall The software is as you would expect it to be Somewhat and I'll explain what I mean by that. So again Expectations if you go into this expecting a fully polished experience, you're going to be disappointed It is a not is not a fully polished experience. It is Faster than I thought it would be so I was impressed there but there are some situations where it is kind of slow and Again, I expected that so I wasn't disappointed but There's some places where you wouldn't really expect it to be slow where it is so like loading discover that took a little bit of time Now this is the software where you'd get all your software and one of the things that I don't care for the most for Plasma mobile isn't the slowness or the bugginess because this does crash quite a bit It's the fact that they don't do a good job of saying what applications are Supported on mobile and which ones are not so the featured ones here all those are so if you go a searching through discover and You search for something you have access to all the repositories that this has access to now It's not searching the AUR or anything like that, which is probably a good thing But you do have access to some applications that don't really work all that well on mobile So for example, I was able to download bit warden and well bit learn looks like it's going to you know work Okay, once it does load And it takes a minute You can see things are well It's not really meant for mobile but I was able to download now I could use this and I you know I was able to sign in and get my passwords and stuff But it's not meant for mobile and it doesn't do a good job in discover telling you that this is a mobile application This is not a location So that's something that they're definitely going to have to work on the overall function of the operating system will remind you a Lot of Android, you know has the pull-up app drawer pull down for just for your notifications and for some quick settings here and That's basically the way Android has worked for a very long time now you can also long press to actually do editing on the Desktop and once you get here is very much KDE so you can add widgets So if I wanted to add a digital clock, I could do that and you know It looks and feels kind of like you would expect plasmatic to actually work But with a touch interface and that's nice Sometimes it doesn't work all that well, especially with the larger widgets So if I go to another page that could you'd expect there to be a way to Really add a page here and you don't really see a good way to add a page so if you add widgets and That the touch responsive there. So if I had this big calendar widget here then I can go over to another page and You can see that it kind of Yeah, see there's some interesting things there now some of this might just because I'm you know messing around. There we go. Nope Very jumpy not exactly sure What's going on there? I think See as you can see it's buggy and now it's who the hell knows what it's doing now And this has been my experience throughout the whole thing and you guys know me when I see a plasma bug I call it out, but the problem here is that I'm aware that this is very early days for plasma mobile and I want you to stay on the front page. What are you doing here? Why are you doing that? That's weird So I'm not gonna be too harsh on them despite the bugs that I experienced throughout this entire Month and it was buggy. It did this kind of stuff all the time, especially when customizing things It had problems with crashes. So applications crashes quite a bit and I've had the entire device crash and freeze Several times where I actually had to pull the back off pull the battery out and put the battery back in in order to get to reset That's not going to fly for a daily driver But I was able to forgive it because again, I took the expectations of this being a early days device this is was never meant to be a daily driver right now in its current form and Because I kept that in mind throughout the whole thing. I was okay the overall usage of it is not bad So they've done a pretty good job of getting the mobile feel of things just despite this being a just a kind of mobile Version of plasma they've made this feel like its own thing and if they can put some polish on it It's actually I think going to be very good. The problem, of course is That it's plasma. So they're going to keep adding features despite this thing not being ready. So What they need to do is actually, you know, take the time where it is right now and you know Polish as much as possible before they add on a whole bunch of features And maybe that is what they'll end up doing or they'll end up with things like this where things just don't load another problem that I've had with things not loading is there's in a camera application called Whereas it megapixels. I think this is the camera application because there's nothing else here watch it load this time and Nope, it didn't load. I've been using this for a month. I've never a single time got the camera application to actually load It just stays here now. Here's the thing. I'm pretty sure I just thought about this and it's not I should have there are Switches in the back underneath the cover that turn off the camera and what I'm wondering now You guys probably can't see this but they're like up here right above the sim card tray If you're I'm guessing that the reason why the camera application won't work is because one of those is off I didn't think about that until just this moment, which I should have but I'm guessing that that's the issue there Why the weather application didn't actually work. I don't know it should have But again, I don't know now. Let's talk about this thing as an actual phone for a minute Again, I had to subscribe to a different carrier that has physical sims in order to use it I no longer have that service. I can't actually show you anything But the phone application if I can get it to load which again false touches What are you there's like some some kind of assistive touch going on here? And I'm not sure why things are Why Katie plasma hates me. All right, you want just everything delete. Can we please delete literally everything? Okay, well, I can't I'm gonna have to I don't know what's going on here. I apparently it's frozen again Like the nothing's working. This is what this is what I'm talking about even the top bar has completely just gone away and In order to change that I'm gonna have to pull the battery out again. So let me give let me actually do that If I can do that with one hand, which I what are you doing now? Hold on a second. Oh, wait a minute. Hold on a second. It's back Ha Went went into out sometimes. Oh, does that mean we're gonna launch an app? Can we launch an app? Can we do that? Yes? awesome Linux fixed itself great. Anyways, this is the phone application Works well as a phone application call call quality was fine I don't do a lot of calls so I can't judge it really against anything else all that much But it was fine the text message application which I've cleared ahead of time Which is called actually it's been completely deleted from the home screen now It's called spacebar That's what it this is. I've deleted everything out of here. So you guys can't see anything But it's just this chat application. It works. Okay Better than I thought it would to be honest with you You can send SMS is just like you'd expect you could it doesn't do anything fancy Like there's no group chats as far as I can tell there's none of that stuff But it works fine It doesn't support RCS or any of that stuff that Android supports. So you're not gonna get anything anything fancy But it works you can send us SMS and MMS stuff and it works fine. So overall usage is a phone fairly good But the problem with with all this The reason why you can't try trust this as a daily driver yet is because As you saw the the software is just not stable You want to have a phone that you know Actually stays alive While usage and this doesn't unfortunately, it's not there yet But I think it will be there and that that's it's weird for me to be the optimistic one here But overall over after a month of using this I'm fairly optimistic that it will get there and also Everything that I've heard and this is going to hurt me to say is that the genome version of the mobile software for Linux is much better than plasma much further along has lots more applications and Overall is just a better feeling Experience than plasma mobile is I haven't tried that so I can't verify it, but overall I think From what I've heard that's the case So my next task will be to install a different Mobile operating system here. I want to try something other than men jarro And I would like to try the genome version now Before we move out of this and I switch back to my face and just talk about this kind of wrap this up Without having to hold up the gimbal. I should talk a little bit about man jarro itself Overall didn't mess around a lot with man jarro You can of course open up a terminal if you want to And you can do the normal things that you'd want to do with a with a You know a terminal They've done a pretty pretty good job with the keyboard so you can do things like clear and move up and down And scroll up and down with the extra buttons they put up here at the top But you can do the normal stuff you can do With linux in a terminal now I say that and I put an asterisk to buy it because Some things it feels like you can't do so like I was unable to install neofetch I wanted to it wouldn't let me do it not sure why has something to do with the repositories So that's something that I can look into later before I wipe this But you can do the things that you need to do you can see cd into directories here You can move files around just like you would in a traditional linux Terminal right this is just console basically And you can do all the stuff you could do in a normal terminal emulator, which is nice So that is man jarro you can see underneath, but I didn't mess around with that because I didn't want to Okay, despite this being linux at the My first impressions what I wanted to do was just use this as a normal user would use it And I think that a normal user wouldn't mess around with the terminal that much Right so later on as I get further into this series I'll mess around more with the underlying operating systems. I'm going to be you know I'm going to flash a couple different ones on there I'll try a couple different desktop environments at least gnom and kd again And that's the way that I'll go with that and during that process then I'll do more messing around with The terminal and using this thing actually as linux also With the request of sid who bought this phone for me will be Trying to figure out how to get this thing to work as a desktop computer replacement So that you could theoretically hook this thing up to a dock Use it as a desktop on your monitor unplug it take it with you, right? That's the dream of this But I haven't tried it yet But my initial impressions as this thing comes it'd be impossible Just running it as a phone on the device Is slow in places and definitely not stable I'm expecting Put plugging this thing into a dock and trying to run a 1080p monitor on it is probably going to be a bad experience But that's something that I'm going to try and see where we're at right now In terms of using this thing Continuously while Trying to use this thing in a continuity way Not the right way to say that apple calls it a continuity thing I don't know what we'll call it convergence is what I think ubuntu used to call it whatever Anyways, so I'm going to stop recording this now and we'll jump back to me In traditional form on the computer And we'll I'll see you in just a future mat. We'll see you in just a second Okay, so like I said throughout the video is that this is really a matter of expectations If you go into this thing expecting this to be an iphone You're going to be disappointed that's just absolutely 100 true and I think that I had the proper expectations going into this because I expected it to be really really really really bad And it impressed me actually for not being as bad as I thought it was going to be It is a good step in the evolution of mobile when it comes to linux Let's put it that way I think that plasma mobile has a long ways to go And I'm looking forward to trying the genome version of linux on mobile devices To see if that's as good as I hear that it is so We'll see how those two things compare in a future future video in this series But overall it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be and it gives me some hope right? I wasn't really around in the early days of linux But when I used it for the first time in 2003, it was still a very Not mainstream thing a lot of the hardware stuff in 2003 didn't work all that well Obviously gaming was a big problem and there was just several problems that I had Experienced myself in 2003 this kind of feels like that somewhat But I have to remember that linux on mobile wall. Yes, it has been around for a very long time Really hasn't gotten off the ground until just recently the last few years And the fact that they're this far along is pretty impressive to be honest with you. So Overall, I'm impressed with it I think that once the mobile hardware catches up just a little bit to the mainstream And we start seeing arm chips that are just a little bit more powerful and can actually run The linux desktop without having to stutter through a lot of this stuff. I think that it's going to be a lot better Especially things like plasma are going to necessitate more powerful chips I think at least until they get used to doing the mobile thing as of right now It's not as optimized as you'd want it to be and that causes a lot of the issues you saw in the video I think that more power and more ram would probably solve that problem. So overall I was fairly impressed for my first impressions Like I said in the b-roll there My next step is going to be to remove manjaro arm on there completely and install Some other linux mobile distro on there and when I do that I will choose gnomes the desktop environment as well to see how that kind of stacks up Or maybe I'll try gnomes on manjaro. I that's probably something that you can do I haven't done any of the research that is necessary to do any of that stuff yet So I'm not sure what the landscape really looks like. I just I just hear mumblings from the community So all this stuff is in the future If you are interested in this series make sure you hit the thumbs up button It helps the channel make sure you hit the subscribe button So you don't miss those videos when they come out Again would really help the channel and I really do appreciate it. So That's it for this video again My first attempt really at trying to shoot something like this and I'm sure that I could have done a better job And the next one will improve upon this one just a little bit and as I make more and more of them They'll get better. So we'll see if you if you want to tell me how I did you can leave a comment in the comment section below You can follow me on mastodon or odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast Make sure you head on over to the the merch shop and check out our merch as well that's at shop that the linuxcast.org Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and youtube because you're all Absolutely amazing without you the channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. You guys are awesome And again, thank you to sid for sending me this device You've been my patron for a very very long time and I appreciate your support for this entire period So thank you so very much. Thanks everybody for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time