Episode: 3483
Title: HPR3483: Pinephone64 review
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3483/hpr3483.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 00:15:24

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This is Haka Public Radio Episode 3483 for Wednesday 8th of December 2021, today's show
is entitled, I'm Phone 64 Remew, it is the 50th show of Sigflub, and is about I'm
in it's long, and carries a clean flag. The summer is Sigflub, Gotter Python, and wants to talk about it.
Greetings, nerds. This is another edition of Haka Public Radio. My name is Sigflub,
and in this riveting edition, I'm going to talk about the Pine Phone 64, which is a Linux phone that was gifted to me some while ago.
I ordered it in September, and it came in November, so it took a while, but it's been fun using it and whatnot.
The first thing that you realize, once you have it, once you get it, is that the back comes off to expose the battery and whatnot.
Let me just take the back off here. There's a place to put your SIM card, there's a place to put your SD card, it's kind of in the same place,
but then you have these dip switches in back, and those switches are enabled or disabled different aspects of the phone,
like having the camera on or the wireless on and whatnot, which is a really convenient thing to be able to disable things
hardware-wise instead of just software. So the very first thing you do is you take the battery out, because the battery has a piece of plastic
separating the pins to the phone so the battery doesn't discharge while it's in stock or whatever, so yeah, the first thing you do is take the battery out,
and take that little thing out, and pop back on like that, and it's very serviceable. You'll notice there's a lot of just sort of regular screws,
like Phillips screws and whatnot, which is good. The boot, so you boot it, and it boots into this weird version of plasma over Menjaro,
the distribution in it is Menjaro, and so it was me learning Pac-Man, right, which is the application manager, I guess, for Menjaro, which I really like Pac-Man.
It's kind of cool, but it does come with, I'll tell you what it comes with in the box, it comes with a USB-C to USB-A cable, which is convenient,
and then this little docky thing, not a docky thing, this whole thing that plugs in with the USB-C to your phone, has either nuts, HDMI, and two USB-A plugs,
and that thing is how that's really useful, and so it comes with that, I can't believe it comes with that. This whole thing is $200.
So it's not prohibitively expensive, which is good. So I put it up, I believe it's up plasma slash Menjaro, and then I connect to it by the ethernet using that adapter that I was talking about,
and from there, and Pac-Man, and whatnot, and I didn't have a SIM card for this yet.
So I was like, well, what can I get running on this? So I eventually got GDM running Ice Window Manager, which is pretty cool.
Kind of been practical, it's not like a phone, it's more like a desktop, right?
And so I searched around for things that are more phone things, and I found Ubuntu Touch, which is very, very pretty.
I got a SIM card for it, and I downloaded Ubuntu Touch. I should comment in the boot sequence. It does have an SD card slot.
What happens is, it first boots the phone, the memory phone, the phone, if there is no SD card, and if there's no external USB drive.
If there's an external USB drive, it boots that first, and if that's not there, it boots the SD card, which is convenient, because you can have an SD card that doesn't exist.
The SD card that doesn't overwrite what's on the phone, so things go terribly, terribly wrong. You can boot from the phone, from the phone memory.
Yeah, so I got Ubuntu Touch, which is, again, very pretty, and Tupata doesn't work. It makes phones phone calls sometimes, and receives and sends text sometimes, which is very inconvenient for a phone.
I switched back to Minjaro, because I have a SIM card now, so I was going to see how that handles the calls.
And it's pretty well. It has a pretty well. It's very laggy, but the thing is when I call someone, when I call my other phone, the audio is awful.
It's like unsigned audio, on a signed carrier. Like, it's just, and so that's pretty bad.
And so, yeah, calling on its sucks. I found, eventually found Fosh, which I believe is Phone Show, over Mobian, this distribution of Debian, called Mobian, which is pretty good.
So, I flashed that to a card, or DD'd it to a card, rather, to put in the phone. And the very first thing you want to do is run an APT upgrade to upgrade everything to its current state.
And that takes so while. So, but you can call, like, once that was done, I can make calls that can receive calls. It was not flaky, like Ubuntu Touch, and whatnot.
And some like, I don't like the default ringtones. There is no, there's no settings in the settings for a ringtone. So, I had to change that manually.
I believe the location of the ringtone is user share.
Something, something, user shares, it's, it's, it's, if you Google for it, you'll find it. It's just a director, which has Ogmorbis files for all the, the audio that's, that plugging in, plugging out, getting a call, getting a text, that kind of audio.
So, you can just replace those with whatever you want.
Overall, it's, it's pretty good. It charges really fast, but it also discharges really fast. So, I have to, I have to charge it every day.
I don't really use it too much, but I have in my pocket. And by the end of the day, it's, it's completely drained. I have to charge it every, every night.
And the thing with the wash over Mobyum is, let me open the phone here.
If you go to settings, you go to display, displays, you can change the resolution or the scale rather of the phone from 100% to 200%.
Excuse me, to 200%. The native resolution on the phone is 720 by 1440. So, the 200% is pretty good. And it's not, it's, it looks like it's scale, not scale. It looks like it's interpolated.
What I believe is the, the changing of the resolution or the scale rather, changes the wavelength and overweld is axorg. So, everything looks nice.
It doesn't look really pixelated or anything like that, which is, which is pretty good. And let's see here.
What else to have to talk about this, this phone? Here, how about this? Call me. My code number is 952-564.
And that's my, that's my Linux phone. So, thank you everyone for listening and take care. Bye-bye.
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