when we looked at the librium phone five 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 pine 64 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
workable state and what we have here is the community
edition uh i haven't actually like looked at this at all yet
so here we go uh
the box itself is pretty plain uh this is pine 64
mobian edition uh 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 2 800 milliamp hour battery
what's small it's pretty small
doesn't want to
like everything else in Linux you do it yourself right
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
nano send a micro sim adapter we've got a nice red
USB-C to a cable
and a usbc dock 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 uh yeah that's everything but
yeah it's really nice oh and it has a little uh
power input here as well so b
i wasn't expecting to have something like this in the
kind of box if you remember the libra phone
um part of the problem was that
not everything was fully touch capable
at the time so a dock 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 letting on and here
is the phone itself it is significantly less chunky
than the uh the librium 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
um 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 semi-jack tool and
i feel like it didn't have a jack 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 can get your thumb into
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 prime tool well i've been trying to do that oh that that is that is not pleasant
okay why was that so difficult clearly this phone has not been set up yet so
we're gonna go through the whole experience usually phones are set up prior to
hitting the ShortCircuit set now that i look at a little closer
there's a bunch of things here like there's an sd card slot
and a micro sd card slot here uh
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 librarian 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 the like the webcam
uh 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 uh
pre-applied screen protector so i'll just go ahead and peel that right off you ready to power
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months of unbounce today 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 you take now sim everything should
be using nano sim there's no reason to use sam or micro sim
this adapter is not very fun to use
there that's that's probably in
it's got a nice little power led look you can see me in the reflection
you are about to install mobian bullseye user interface flash
okay partitioning formatting 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 there's no keyboard there's no uh actually i've got
i have this type c doc uh hey johno can
i get you to like get me a keyboard
all right maybe that's what the reset
button is for uh i'm gonna 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
so without sudo what can i do
yeah i think probably what i'm gonna 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 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
do we still have the adapter
now i get to deal with this again this this adapter is not very nice
oh this 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 the 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 nope it is totally the camera app and oh
oh that is a camera that uh
doesn't work oh it works settings aren't
functional yet so i'm just going to go ahead and attempt to call myself
okay yep that 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 30 operating systems yeah you don't have to
run mobi and you can run whatever you want so i'll just quickly keep going through
mobi in here and see what else is in here will it play youtube
it's videos you're breathtaking have you
seen this 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 all-winner a64 quad-core soc
with a mali 400 mp2 GPU that is the mali
400 that's ancient isn't it uh 2 gigs of lpg r3 memory 5.9 inch lcd
1440x720 uh 16 gigabytes of emmc this
one is the community version which has 32 gigabytes of emmc
uh hd digital out usb type c
quacktel eg 25g with world five bands i
guess that's the modem uh wi-fi n bluetooth 4.0
it's got a vibrator
they call it a vibrator um okay
i'm going to find that app 2 megapixel
front facing camera and a 5 megapixel rear and a samsung j7
form factor battery so that's actually a relatively common battery you can buy
which is cool 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 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 okay it's no longer
decent this is 360 240p
oh it just keeps getting worse okay there's the multitasking
so i can uh 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 welcome to bluedo 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
let's try let's try 720p and see what happens
it's fine 1080p let's 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 can i can i
stop i don't okay i think that's enough of
that selfish os looks like it's promising
i would have liked to use it a little bit but it seems like it's
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 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 uh 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's got
a full Linux experience if you want it it's a lot better
than the librarian phone after having a little bit of time with this phone
i can tell you that the librarian 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 make sure you
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