Megi, an independent developer, documents PinePhone software work: kernel contributions, modem reverse engineering, the p-boot bootloader, and multi-distro demo images.
Commenters point to his demo image and p-boot as practical ways to try the PinePhone, and note he is an unpaid volunteer.
[topic of funding aside]
for the pinephone specifically, it feels like its ignoring what does exist?
https://xnux.eu/devices/pine64-pinephone.html there is a strong kernel which is upstreaming its changes.
Now, as a time-strapped developer, who gets told "if you wait, the fixes will appear, or you can double/triple your effort to manually patch things, and then undo that when those patches go mainline anyhow" like, I would personally be happy leaving my distro broken for 6+ months for that stuff to settle, cause elsewise you are going to be building apps to support APIs that might change completely between patch and mainline, because there isn't an abstraction layer like ios or android.
Its a new approach, drop hardware and specs, and embrace community passion, I thought it was a bad idea at the start, but I'm now sure I'm wrong.
A Kickstarter phone beginning around the same time, custom hardware and OS, even with a budget and price 3x what pine goes with, would have probably far less progress than what exists now with pine devices
I recently acquired a PinePhone, and Manjaro + KDE Plasma was installed out of the box. It was awful, utterly unusable. I brought it to its knees without even trying to, not even from poking and prodding with internals, just from trying to use the thing; I got it to crash outright once, and twice got its graphics stack basically bricked until manual restart, in two different ways, all in less than half an hour.
I have found postmarketOS + Phosh, Arch Linux ARM (dreemurrs) + Phosh, and Ubuntu Touch (all via https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/) to each be considerably more not-simply-broken; they’re merely—ah—“minimal”, that’s what I’ll call it. I haven’t yet tried KDE Plasma under a different distribution, but will eventually, because fairness demands it.
I know they said this stuff wasn’t ready to be a daily driver for any but serious enthusiasts, but I didn’t expect it to be quite as bad as I found it.
I’m still going to persist. I am discouraged, but not dissuaded.
Since this is a portable battery-powered device, rather than first pushing to open-source the DDR training blob, which is non-resident in memory after it's done it's job and a fairly small binary (less chance for hiding bugs), I'd say it's more important to get open-sourced the support in the BL31 Trusted Firmware for dynamic voltage and frequency scaling of DRAM, and support for maximum power savings in suspend mode.
Rockchip have not fully open-sourced the DRAM DVFS support in BL31, but it's key to achieving full run-time battery life on portable devices - see https://xnux.eu/log/083.html
And the system suspend implementation that Rockchip did open-source in upstream BL31 lacks some functionality compared to their binary BL31, mostly about powering off as many peripherals as possible to save power.
I'm not saying don't bother opening the DDR training, just that these two things are much more important for a portable battery-powered device.
It should be possible to alter the case to support a slide cover, like for graphing calculators: slide it off, put in on the back when in use. slide it off, put it on the front when not in use. It should be resistant to puncture damage to the screen and prevent keypresses.
For LTE modules, as long as you have USB, you are able to connect one. If you want 5G, check the Qualcomm SDX55 and SDX65 (submm wave + 5G SA) on Telit. The easiest way is to get a Telit EVB + a Cinterion module.
The only difficulty would be routing the audio pathways and maybe IMS registration for VoLTE, but you could use a Quectel EG25 like on the pinephone: the module can be controlled by AT commands and the existing work for audio routing could help you get started: check https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro and the audio part of https://xnux.eu/devices/pine64-pinephone.html like https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/audio-pp.html#toc-voice-call-audio-routing-setup
He laid out his reasons in his blog post and explained how people can get the source code from now on[1]. He is an unpaid volunteer so it is reasonable that he does not want to pay for an expensive server. There is also an update to the situation. He is trying out Codeberg [2]. I am grateful for the work he is doing. My Pinephone is much more usable than it was in 2020
[1] https://xnux.eu/log/094.html
[2] https://xnux.eu/log/096.html
Advice for anyone considering it:
* There are rough edges, but the basics are there: calling/SMS/4G/WiFi/audio/browsing/suspend.
* If you want to try it, put https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/ on an SD card and plug that into your PinePhone. That has a bunch of different distros and UIs on it.
* To keep up to date, follow https://www.pine64.org/blog/ and https://linmob.net/
I'm excited to use a community driven phone!