by Joshua Branson — November 02, 2022
When I was using Mobian GNU/Linux, I had some issues with the PinePhone. Namely, my phone no longer received SMS text messages. I switched to PostMarketOS, and my issues seemed to have gone away, at least if I keep using the phone as a dumb phone. I have disabled wifi on the phone, because I really don’t use it.
It would be nice if I could get the PinePhone to work well with JMP.chat, but currently the texts from my desktop machine do NOT sync well with the phone. So if I use two devices, I end up in a weird situation with out of sync text messages, which is really confusing. Plus using the internet on the phone drains the battery. So I have just disabled the internet on the phone via the hardware kill switches.
Texting works flawlessly, but I cannot get SMS images. Also the phone volume for calls is pretty poor. And sometimes when I make phone calls, I cannot hear what the other person is saying. So that is a little odd.
I highly recommend installing the reversed engineered and nearly libre custom firmware for the PinePhone’s modem. It was actually super easy to do.
It might also not be a bad idea to edit the official PinePhone wiki and mention that Tello is a fairly cheap provider. I pay them $8 per month and I have no data and unlimited calling and texting texts. That’s pretty good.
That’s the main update for today!