Pinephone is complete garbage. The limited apps and borderline-unusably-buggy OS I could work around.
But the thermal engineering - man, a Pinephone can literally cook itself on a warm day.
And the aftermarket support and parts availability is exactly what you'd expect of a scammy Chinese startup.
I'm surprised they charge so little. Why not charge more and fix it
Mine was part of a batch with Qualcomm modems that had actually failed QA. The modem used to freeze randomly. Various devs (not Pinephone staff) came up with a series of increasingly effective workarounds.
But the thermal issues are the real killer. Pinephone need to stop using laptop-spec chips in a mobile phone form factor.
Pinephone does hilarious things to shave a few cents per unit, and the rusted-on fans gaslight complainers by asking if we really want an open hardware phone or not?
I do, but it needs to do what the advertising says it does...
You can manage for instance firewall on that "garbage" anyway you want and many other things you can only dream.
My Pinephone power micro-switch failed within a month. I ordered a replacement from Pinephone, and after six weeks I received a parcel sent from a university dorm room in Shenzhen. The parcel was empty. Complaints went unanswered. Forum posts went ignored except by other customers.
If that's the service you dream of, buy a Pinephone.
