PinePhone Pro [GNU/Linux smartphone] has been discontinued

Good riddance.

That pile of garbage had crazy critical hardware faults they never fixed.

1. If the battery is discharged, then in order to recharge it, you have to take out the microsd and sim cards, press an SMT button, and plug in with battery.

2. If you bought the keyboard/battery, and you plug in USB on the phone, you fry the keyboard/battery. Shit burns up, haha screw you.

And if you say anything, you the user are at fault. You didn't read, or follow their discord, or whatever, because it is 'Your Fault' ™.

Pine's primary game here has been to paracitize off of FLOSS folks, pump out incompetent and/or broken hardware, and summarily blame FLOSS for their not-working. At minimum, they should be funding the projects they want to build on/paracitize. But they do none of the sort.

We would be better if Pine died as a company. Then they wouldn't be sucking the oxygen out of the FLOSS arena, and might get more respectable orgs here.

I do not understand why so many companies have that charging issue with Linux devices.

Anbernic has the same issue with the RG35XX series. If the battery reaches 0, you may need to pull it out just to get the charging to work. And if you accidentally connect the wrong kind of usb-c charger, it won't charge, so you may have it plugged into the wall for days and come back to it being dead and needing battery surgery.

Great devices for hacking because they are cheap though — cannot understand why an expensive phone would have that problem too.

Some of pre-HSDPA Nokia phones had the same issue. You needed a clip-on raw cell charger to revive them. It's manufacturer skill as well as a bit of cost issue.

> Good riddance.

Yes, we should be happy to have less options.../s

> Great devices for hacking because they are cheap though — cannot understand why an expensive phone would have that problem too.

Because the more I read about Pinephone, the more it seems like a grift.

Anbernic cheaped out when trying to support USB host mode, as a result the device will not work correctly with an electronically marked cable. You can fix this - but you lose host mode - https://www.wirehead.be/2024/10/21/anbernic-rg35xx-h-charge-... . The article is for the RG35XXH, but pretty much all the XX devices have the same flaw.

This is awesome info and I couldn't find it ANYWHERE I looked, thank you so much!

some options act like decoys - they take the pressure off and a proper alternative cannot arise.

I also had run ins with their Pine A64 LTS.

You can buy eMMC cards that fit on the board. Their documents say you can boot from them. Like 10x performance of a mSD card and less wear-out.

I use a USB device to make the drive mountable from a Linux box, and copy the firmware as prescribed. I then unmount and load in the A64, and.... NOTHING.

Supposedly there's a uboot command that maybe enables it. Or maybe its autodetect. Or maybe (5 other ideas, that all fail).

I returned that shit too because they make claims that it works these official ways, and it never does.

Pine is a parasite. Always has been, but they make-pretend that they're some great FLOSS company.

Thank you. That was exactly my point - they camped in a niche they had no intent to do properly.

Worse yet, they screamed at users to lean on the community (read: unpaid FLOSS as support). They refused to provide even baseband images to do the things they were selling, like Pinephone Pro as as, you know, a phone.

At one point, I thought they were just an upstart trying to get off the ground. But in reality, its a complete grift that ends up taking community resources and nothing to show for it.

I have their pinenote - as far as I can tell, the community has done a great job on the Linux image, but I ended up sticking with the android fw as I can't be bothered to reflash the Linux partition now in case I brick it.

I think it can be done this way, with the manufacturer taking care of hardware and the community taking care of software - but they should at least fund one or two people and some projects directly to make it work.

the pinenote is a great little ereader with the android fw.