title:The PinePhone Works
date: 2022-02-01 10:40
tags: PinePhone
summary: The PinePhone works fairly well.
---
I have had my PinePhone for about three months now, and it has been a fairly
pleasant experience. I decided to use Mobian and Purism&rsquo;s gnome shell &ldquo;phosh&rdquo;,
which seems to be the most popular interface for the PinePhone.  It is nice to
see that I can apply updates almost daily.  I am glad that the Mobian devs are
working hard to diligently update the phone&rsquo;s software.

I am using Tello and [jmp.chat](https://jmp.chat) as my service providers. Tello is a traditional
cellular provider, and jmp.chat is a free software cellular provider using XMPP.
My Tello number works pretty much anywhere, and jmp.chat works whenever I have
wifi. Tello costs me $8 per month (no data plan), and jmp.chat costs me $3 per
month. An $11 bill per month with two numbers is not so bad!

The default texting application &ldquo;chatty&rdquo;, works really well (also developed by
Purism). It will crash once every three weeks or so, but that&rsquo;s not that bad. It
shows me my SMS messages and my JMP.chat XMPP messages. I personally have not
tried to switch to another SMS/XMPP application, because I do not believe there
is any other application that is as well polished as chatty. However, I am
running into the annoying issue, that my JMP.chat number is getting a ton of
span from Russian bots. And it seems that chatty does not support blocking
numbers. So I have to use another program to block random XMPP accounts.

I am noticing some weird (and to be expected) issues with the PinePhone. Namely,
the wifi is a bit wonky. Sometimes I have to reboot to get the wifi to work.
Luckily, there is some work on reverse engineering the wifi linux module. I am
not currently using that kernel module, but it is out there in the wild.

The battery does not seem to last as long as I would expect. If I am browsing
the internet, then I can almost see the internet drain as I use the phone. I am
also finding out that I do not receive SMS messages that are sent when my phone
is off.  That is *mildly* annoying.

But hey, the phone works! If work did not require me to have a phone, then I
would NOT have one. BUT I am greatful that I do not have to suffer in silence
and use Android or a dumb phone. So if you want a &ldquo;smart/dumb phone&rdquo;, and you
are ok with the occassional instability, then the PinePhone might be for you!
