This $200 phone can do ANYTHING!!! - Pine64 Pinephone By ShortCircuit

- When we looked at the Librem phone 5, a lot of you were asking, why are you looking at this piece of trash? I mean, I'm not saying that it was trash. You guys were saying that it's trash. Obviously, it wasn't quite finished yet, and there was a whole bunch of other issues. And you're like, why haven't you taken a look at the Pine64, the Pine phone, you know, this thing here? And I'm like, because we are. Like, this has been on our radar since it was announced. This thing has taken a long time to get to a like a workable state.

And what we have here is the Community Edition. I haven't actually like looked at this at all yet, so, here we go. (chuckles) The box itself is pretty plain, this is Pine64 Mobian Edition. On the side here, package contents, user manual, quick start guide, Pine Phone, USB-C power cable, and USB-C dock. Really? Interesting.

Okay, nothing terribly interesting on the back, although it does say that it has a 2800 milliamp hour battery. - Is that small? - It's pretty small. (Jono chuckles) It doesn't want to... (box rattling) Like everything else in Linux, you do it yourself, right? - Haha, got'em! - Ah, all right. Tiny little user manual.

Anything in there? Before using this device, please read this manual carefully. Oh, back case removal, right, so this thing has a removable battery and stuff too. What's this? The operating system build you're receiving is more than a month old. So, following the initial setup of the device, you should update to the latest available release. So what's in the box? We got the phone itself, which, again, is not coming out.

Oh okay, a micro SIM, a nano and a micro SIM adapter. We've got a nice red USB-C to A cable, and a USB-C doc. Oh, that's actually really nice. It's solid, it's got an aluminum shell. It's got ethernet, probably gigabit, HDMI, and two USB type-A ports on here and yeah that's everything.

But yeah, it's really nice. Oh, and it has a little power input here as well. So, B, I wasn't to expecting to have something like this in the box. - Why would you have that kind of dock? - If you remember the Librem phone, part of the problem was that not everything was fully touch capable at the time, so a doc like this helps significantly with things that may or may not be fully compatible yet. Also, I mean this is just running Linux, this will get you a Linux desktop, like an actual Linux desktop, on your phone.

So, it's actually cooler than I'm letting on. And here is the phone itself. It is significantly less chunky than the Librem. In fact, it is, well it's not quite iPhone slimness, but it's like decent slimness. I don't see any hardware disconnects or anything like that on it, but it does have a camera, and I'm going to test to make sure that that works.

Do we have a SIM card? People asked us to like make sure that like calling actually worked on the previous phone. Should we make a call on this phone? Did that have a SIM eject tool in it? I feel it didn't have a SIM eject tool in it. I went to all the trouble to get a SIM eject tool but then I realized the back of this thing comes off, so it probably doesn't even need one. I don't know if you can see that, make it out, there's a little divot in here you get your thumb into, and you just pull it right off. Just like that.

How does this work? Okay, so the battery obviously just comes out, I think. Okay, either this is like glued in place or something, or I'm just stupid. Remove the battery using your fingernail or prying tool. Well, I've been trying to do that. Oh, that is not pleasant.

Mm, mm, okay. (Jono laughing) Why was that so difficult? Clearly this phone has not been set up yet, so we're going to go through the whole experience. Usually phones are set up prior to hitting the short circuit set. Now that I look at it a little closer, there is a bunch of things here, like there's an SD card slot and a micro SD card slot here. This module looks totally removable.

This reset switch, I'm not sure what that does. And these dip switches, what do these do? Well, these are like those hardware switches that were on the Librem phone. So, instead of having them on the outside, you need to pull the back off to get to them, but they'll actually physically disable like the webcam, well, not the webcam, the actual camera, the modem, Wi-fi, and Bluetooth, microphone, rear camera, front camera, and headphone jack. So you have much more control actually. So I guess you would use something like this spudger here to go in and just toggle it off like that.

Not as easy, but you get more of them. So, let's pop the battery in for the first time. Oh, this might need to be charged. Pop the back back on. And I'm noticing they even have this little pre-applied screen protector, so I'll just go ahead and peel that right off.

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Oh right, I was going to install a SIM card. I guess we're going back in. Does this take nano SIM? It doesn't look like it takes nano SIM. Everything should be using nano SIM, there's no reason to use SIM or micro SIM. This adapter is not very fun to use.

There, that's probably in. It's got a nice little power LED. Oh look, you can see me in the reflection. You are about to install Mobian Bullseye, user interface Phosh. Okay, partitioning, formatting, blah, blah, blah, running Mount operation, installation failed, no partitions are defined for mount to use.

Well, this is going to be a short one. Oh wow, it just like straight up dumped me out to a terminal. Yeah I got nothing. There's no keyboard, there's no... Actually I've got, I have this type-C doc.

Hey Jono, can I get you to like get me a keyboard? - Oh God, Really? (laughing ) - Oh no! (both laughing) - All right. Uh oh, maybe that's what the reset button is for. I'm going to try pulling the battery. Okay, it's booting, maybe. And it crashed again.

They really weren't kidding when they said that you needed to read the entire thing, huh? Power the pipeline on, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, without Sudo, what can I do? Yeah, I think probably what I'm going to have to do is flash an operating system onto an SD card, and come back to this. Well this seems to be a bit of a thing with my short circuits, isn't it? So, (chuckles) we talked to Pine, and they didn't really know what happened exactly, so we're just going to chalk it up to a, you know, bad firmware image from the factory. Thankfully, they actually do have some images you can download to an SD card, and I've got one of them right here that I'm going to throw in.

And they also have an image that lets you just plug your phone in with USB, and transfer a new image that way to the internal storage. They call that jump drive. So, it's pretty hard to break one of these things, so if that ever happens to you, just get a micro SD card and flash one of their images. It's getting easier over time. Wait, do we still have have the adapter? (box rattling) Now I get to deal with this again, this adapter is not very nice.

Oh, this SIM card tray is the worst. There we go. Okay, cool yeah, it is booting off of the SD card, I'm not sure if you can read that, but it says resizing file system during initial boot. That's because the image is only like three gigs in size, but it'll actually just expand out to whatever size SD card you have, that way you're not losing any space. Oh okay, so we've got a lock screen.

It's kind of slow. It's obviously not hardware accelerated, and if I were to open Files, for example, it just kind of closes the app drawer and I'm not seeing anything, until eventually it'll come up. Yeah, there you go. And what I'm presuming is a camera app called Megapixels. It may not be a camera app.

No, it is totally the camera app, and it, ho, ho, oh, that is a camera. That... - Does it work? - Oh, it works. Settings aren't functional yet. So, I'm just going to go ahead and attempt to call myself.

Okay, yep, the calling seems to be working just fine. I mean it's a little scratchy. It's not terrible call quality. I've got another SD card here with three operating systems. Yeah, You don't have to run Mobian, you can run whatever you want.

So, I'll just quickly keep going through Mobian here and see what else is in here. Will it play YouTube videos? (soft music) - That is breathtaking. - You're breathtaking. - Have you seen this Andy? - So we can't blame that on the SD card. The reason why this thing is not performing particularly well is because it's running an Allwinner A64 quad-core SOC with a MALI-400MP2 GPU.

That is, the MALI-400, that's ancient isn't it? Two gigs of LPDDR3 memory, 5.9 inch LCD, 1440x720, 16 gigabytes of eMMC, This one is the community version which has 32 gigabytes of eMMC, HD digital out, USB type C, Quectel EG25-G with worldwide bands, I guess that's the modem. WI-FI, N, Bluetooth 4.0, it's got a vibrator. (laughs) They call it a vibrator. Okay, I'm going to find that app. Two megapixel front facing camera and a five megapixel rear, and a Samsung J7 form-factor battery.

So, that's actually a relatively common battery you can buy, which is cool. And it's got a headphone jack, right. Did I mention that before? It's got a headphone jack, it's right there. Flashlight, is that just literally? Oh, it actually does work. Ooh, even just running the task manager is basically spiking a core.

I'm trying to be charitable here. Let's shut this down. So let's try Manjaro Plasma and see what that's like. So this is KDE touch. It looks like a lot more like Android, but I feel like something is wrong.

I'm only getting half the screen. Oh, hey, great, so this is a lot more like Android. I kind of like the look and feel of KDE touch a lot better than GNOME and it has automatic rotation, unlike the other one, but it's, okay, it's no longer decent. This is 360, 240p. (laughs) Oh, it just keeps getting worse.

Oh okay, there's the multitasking. So I can open up the Calendar. Wow, that took like 20 seconds for this Calendar app to load. Wait, YouTube is running in the background? No, don't do that. That's why that took so long.

Kind of need to work on the app suspend. Let's just quickly look into Ubuntu touch and see what it looks like. Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu, now I don't remember how to actually say it. Welcome to Ubuntu touch, get started. Oh, it's actually kind of a slick interface.

Does it auto rotate? It does and it's smooth! And the playback looks actually okay too. What's it running at? 360P, okay. Let's try, lets try 720p and see what happens. It's fine.1080p, let's just keep cranking it. Yeah no, we're in slow motion territory now.

Okay, so it can do it. It's just, none of the other operating systems has a browser that's capable of actually running it, and closing an app is just like that, cool! Ubuntu touch is a lot more like Android. This might actually be the best experience so far. Let's try something else. I just want to see what Sailfish OS is all about.

This is Home showing your minimized apps. We've accessed events. Can I stop? I don't... Okay, I think that's enough of that. Sailfish OS, looks like it's promising.

I would have liked to use it a little bit, but it seems like its decided that it doesn't really want to go any further from here. But, the idea behind this phone is great. It's a privacy oriented phone that you can open up, take the battery out of, add an SD card storage, and adjust what actual devices you want to be running at any given time. You can change the operating system. You can develop your own operating system if you really had a mind to.

It's not powerful, but at the same time, at $200, it doesn't really have to be, in my opinion. This is a very low volume product. Also, it comes with this here, USB hub, which is great. I don't know, I really like the idea of having a phone that doesn't cost a whole lot of money, that you can use for whatever you need to use it for. Like you can run, like automation scripts, you can hook into pretty much anything you want to hook into.

You can set up a Raspberry Pi and have this interface directly with it with no weird software that's, you know, standing in between it. It's got a full Linux experience if you want it. It's a lot better than the Librem phone. After having a little bit of time with this phone, I can tell you that the Librem was kind of trash. This is so much better.

It's still not great. You don't want it if you want to like have a primary phone, or if you're like, oh I don't want to go to Android, and I don't want to go to IOS, so I guess I'll go to Linux. That's not kind of what this is for. This is for people who are either already Linux enthusiasts, or who just want to play with something, and I think that's great. Thanks for watching guys.

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Source : ShortCircuit