I received my PinePhone last week. The model I ordered was the UBPorts Community Edition. My initial thoughts on the phone are that the build quality is actually very solid, but otherwise it behaves like a $150 phone. The performance isn’t great, but acceptable; the battery life, which is a known issue, is pretty terrible; and the software is in a pretty rough state (easily beta quality, maybe even late alpha quality). All of these were what was promised and what I expected so none of this should be considered criticism. I’m actually impressed by what the manufacturers and software creators managed to pull off so far.
However, after playing with UBPorts I wanted to try some other operating systems. This is where the PinePhone shines since it doesn’t lock you into any specific operating system. The next released of the Community Edition of the PinePhone will come with postmarketOS so I loaded postmarketOS onto an MicroSD card (you can also flash it to the internal eMMC chip) and booted it on the phone. postmarketOS has a utility that builds an image for you. That utility also allow you to customize a number of things including using full-disk encryption (which I haven’t played with yet since it’s experimental) and choosing your user interface. I chose Phosh for the user interface because I wanted to see what the Librem team has been working on. My experience with postmarketOS was similar to UBPorts. Performance was sluggish, but acceptable and the software is still in a rough state. However, postmarketOS makes it easy to install regular Linux desktop and command line applications so I installed and tried a few applications that I use regularly on the desktop. Unfortunately, most of the available graphical software doesn’t yet support screen scaling so applications are too big for the PinePhone’s screen. With that said, progress is being made in that direction and once more applications support screen scaling there should be a decent number of apps available.
Being able to boot up a different operating system on my phone is the way it should always have been. On my desktop and laptops computers I have always been able to choose what operating system to run, but my mobile devices have always been locked down. Some Android devices do allow you to unlock the boot loader and install a different Android image, but often doing so it’s officially supported by the manufacturer (so it’s often a pain in the ass). It’s nice to finally see a mobile phone that is designed for tinkerers and people who want to actually own their hardware.