- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Ooof. After having a pinephone, I know what 2 or 3GB of RAM can handle these days. Not much, really. Specially the moment you open the browser. I’m going to pass from any project that doesn’t attempt to at least get close to this decade’s standards.
My current Android phone has 4GB and it’s really smooth. I’ve got 90 Firefox tabs open and several apps. I’d love to see that level of optimization in a startup, but more RAM will just mask the bad optimization.
As an ex-Andrpid dev, all this optimization is what killed the creativity. Every feature you currently have is hyperoptimized (even with dedicated battery optimizations turned off for the most popular apps), and as a result nothing you can’t easily change is changeable anymore.
Want a widget that self updates every couple minutes by connecting to the internet? Can’t have that, even if the user explicitly accepts it. Want to customize behavior of things in the settings? Nope. Want to hook into the phone memory and do crazy hacks? Not even with root. Want to keep running some checks to determine when to send a notification? Can’t do that either, non-push notifications are all scheduled in advance.
Specially the moment you open the browser
I’d be curious, did you profile if it’s for all pages or only some? I’d expect e.g. Facebook or Instagram to be more demanding than Lemmy or ProtonMail but to be honest I have no idea.
Website currently lists 4gb
I think you’re checking the Pro model. This one has a more powerful CPU and more RAM, and would have been a better option, except it had miserable failures to get it to boot or control the battery on launch, and development has been much slower than on the normal Pinephone, which although is woefully underpowered, it launched earlier and had a bigger support base. Pinephone Pro, while on paper being more powerful, stayed unusuable for rather long. I actually have both, and I haven’t checked recently to see if the Pro is any better these days. The normal one while having a much better compatibility (a lot of things worked with very little troubleshooting), RAM was seriously an Achilles heel, and you’d notice it the moment you opened Firefox or attempted to launch waydroid.
My phone has 3gb and it’s fine. Don’t leave 10,000 tabs open.
That looks amazing.
… For 2008.
Can I just send you five years worth of „we’re sorry we’re behind schedule” messages and then ghost you instead? If so send me $159
I will do it for $149, don’t be stupid and come to me!!!
My first thought: If this ever ships, I’ll eat an outboard motor.
one cylinder 5hp or eight cylinder 300hp? Or maybe an electric?
I see a lot of negativity in the comments. And yeah, this thing probably isn’t something I’m going to get, but at least they are trying something that isn’t a generic rectangle of glass like all the others. I miss the days of fun gadgets.
Fun useful gadgets. A gadget for the sake of a gadget is just another word for “e-waste”.
I like the generic rectangle block of glass.
Don’t understand why they insist on a physical keyboard.I much prefer physical keyboards and find it difficult to use touchscreen, so a mobile, qwerty keyboard sounds great to me.
What phones u guys been using for the last 15 years? I haven’t seen slide out keyboards for about that long
Nokia 105, Wish it had qwerty though.
I don’t mind it, but I also don’t hate that people are trying something new! Maybe it fails, but maybe it’s awesome!
A little worried that with swapping those components like that, it’s trying to be too many things for too many different groups of people instead of one exact thing.
I think all I really want is something shaped like this with a keyboard, like an old Blackberry that could be used as a terminal.
like the unihertz titan slim?
Very odd specs page: “256GB memory”, “Face ID”, “Advanced GPS”, etc, To me this does not look trustworthy at all.
its a standard android phone its marketed toward blackberry users who had no choice but to abandon the key2 as it just got too old to be in any way secure
yet an other hardware from 10+ years ago. here we have an ARM Cortex-A53 from what it seems to be 2012. Maybe it is actually compatible with OpenGL 3…
Our beloved consoles from the 80s and 90s were built with off the shelf parts, this is no different. Custom hardware in a niche market would lead nowhere.
I would pay more than 1000$ at this point for a modern high DPI open device with mobile internet compatibility and all drivers in mainline kernel. Just give me good hardware, I can handle the software on my on, tank you 🤭
If you want all drivers in the mainline kernel, you clearly cannot handle the software on your own. The reason why linux phones suck are the drivers that are either bad or don’t exist. The desktop (or palmtop I guess) environments are pretty usable if you run it on something with good drivers (like QEMU - my favorite phone).
Yea, I did not phrase it well enough 😂 I just don’t want to be supervised by these large phone OS giants, because they think it is more convenient
What do you mean with QEMU? Are you running a Linux VM on your android phone?
It was a joke about the fact that PostmarketOS considers only QEMU a “main” device. Every real phone is in the “community” section because they’re too buggy. So the only good device to run that OS on is a virtual one running inside your desktop.
😆I see
I think I would run Arch on such a device
I wonder who this is made for?
The article calls it a “smartphone sized pocket computer”, but that describes smartphones too; they already are pocket computers. And they’ve had decades of design and development behind them.
So… This device has a tiny touchscreen, and a keyboard, rather than having the whole thing being a touchscreen. So instead it has a modular bottom half… Which… Sounds like it’s trying to solve a problem that would’ve been a problem in like… The 90s, maybe, but has been solved by using… A touchscreen that can change the type of input it is flexibly, like smartphones do.
It can’t call, like a smartphone, despite being a smartphone sized device. It has USB A 2.0 sockets and an Ethernet socket… Which makes it once again sound incredibly out-dated, like a device found in a time capsule, because USB C is smaller and faster than USB A 2.0, and can potentially be used for damn near anything. Which includes connecting to the Internet.
Its battery looks very weak. Its CPU looks very weak. It has a tiny amount of RAM, and a tiny amount of storage. It is outclassed by any affordable, midrange smartphone, at nearly the same price too (if you avoid big brand names).
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Tiny keyboards were a nightmare. There’s a reason why the Blackberry failed. You might like it, but then you’re part of a minority.
And they didn’t fail because of their keyboard…
Yeah they did. It was a pretty major factor. The moment touchscreen phones began to exist, Blackberry became past-tense.
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It was them sticking with proprietary software instead of going with Android. I’m sticking to those guns.
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For people who like a concept more than practicality. There’s maybe a handful use cases that this specific device fits in that isn’t covered better by existing tech, but I guarantee if that thing actually gets kickstarted and arrives severely delayed in several years, it’ll show up in a couple YouTube videos with people sort of uncertain what to use it for, and in the vast majority of cases it’ll end up in some drawers after having been used a few hours tops.
My thoughts exactly. I’ve seen several such devices already, probably the most expensive and over-designed one being the Apple VR, and it’s always the same story.
I’ll wait for retail if ever. I learnt my lesson about backing tech based kickstarters.
I’m still waiting on my Soundband headphones.
I enjoyed my Ouya back in the day.
I actually still have mine somewhere. I didn’t use it much, though.
Mine’s around somewhere, too. I didn’t do a lot of gaming on it, but it was a very solid media streaming box for the time.
3gb RAM? 32gb emmc? This feels a bit like a raspberry pi project. Up the specs at least 6gb to at least no[t look like yet another microdeck with emulators, please… I like the concept, but as is, it leaves plenty to be desired
Netbooks need to come back with modern hardware.
If I need an ultra-portable computer one in a usable form factor would be amazing.
this would have been really cool 15 years ago
Funny story. LG made something with a similar concept about 10 years ago and it never really took off. The LG G5 was a modular smart phone that was supposed to have a bunch of cool modules, but they never came to fruition.
I had one, but mostly because I loved having a swappable battery. Never had to charge my phone, I would just have a spare battery charging on my desk and I would swap it out before I left the house.
Jolla had similar concept too at 2013. I had one and back then it was really, really nice phone. Maybe not in a sense that flagship models from big vendors were, but I really enjoyed the UI and modular options was a huge selling point at least for myself. Then they started to work with a tablet which failed on pretty much all fronts and the whole company practically disappeared.
Motorola had a similar phone. It was cool at the time, but just never took off. It was the Moto Z series.
Sorry, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. If you can’t make this stuff at scale, no way you could sell it at $160 a unit.
They just use really low spec hardware…
I’m intrigued. And although I read the article, I’m not entirely sure who or what this is for. It’s cool, but… what?
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I’m thinking about crafting a phone out if a raspberry compute module (so I can upgrade my device easy with new computing modules released)
I want to add a battery, a modem, a touchscreen and a usb-PD port with video out compatibility
Maybe a little cam to scan documents as well…
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Something like this, I guess
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/using-4g-lte-wireless-modems-on-raspberry-pi
It looks cool and all, but its probably going to have like 400mb of ram and an rp2040 like every other linux handheld device.
It has a 3gb ram and an a53
Perfectly reasonable specs
Not for 2025, sorry.
My phone has 16 GB of RAM, 3 GB is ridiculous, especially with the modern web.
It’s a small indie company and $150. Be reasonable
Was your phone $150?
Would you buy one that is? (assume the specs that this thing has, also consider that your answer has to be valid when you eventually get it in 5 years or so)
I like the form factor, but seeing the issues with supply on hackberrypi and uconsole, im hoping they dont have the same issue. Lots of people like that form factor (including myself).
I like how Linux has been picking up lately. Finally.
It’s the year of Linux, just as it has been every year for the past thirty years!
I’ve been using Linux for about 7 year now and only last year and this year did I feel like it’s the actual year of linux
