Two days ago I unboxed my Pine64 PinePhone:

Some notes

Since unboxing the PinePhone, I played around with a few of the many software projects that already support the device by booting them from microSDHC/microSDXC cards, which, when bootable, are being used instead on the internal eMMC.

Generally, it seems, that this is still very much a device aimed at developers and enthusiasts—none of the software products I tried felt quite ready to be used as a daily driver.

As the UBports community edition has some slight differences in hardware to the earlier iterations of the PinePhone (namely the Developer batch and the Braveheart edition), this may have led to some of the issues that i experienced—it always takes some time to adjust in software to the improvements in revised hardware.

Therefore I will just note down what I really liked:

  • Sailfish OS feels quite responsive,
  • Phosh (developed by Purism) is pretty great already,
  • PostmarketOS (with phosh) is quite a bit quicker than Debian based Mobian,
  • UBports has certainly matured since I last tested it on a Nexus 4.