GTA15/PyraPhone

[CommanderB]

Nikolas kind of officially announced the PyraPhone on the mailing list:

http://lists.goldelico.com/pipermail/community/2019-January/001935.html

Since he has not started a thread on the boards yet, I thought that it is time to create one!

What do you think about the PyraPhone? I can imagine that there are a lot of synergy effects with the Pyra and I see only the case as a challenge. The PyraPhone could be a nice alternative to the Librem5 and even use the same userspace!

Nikolaus has written that if enough people show interest in the project devices will be produced. But it is not clear to me how to do this. Will there be an official preorder or some kind of list? At the moment only the general donation to the Tinkerphones project is available.

 

[ClockworkCoder]

I definitely want an open source phone, and definitely want a Pyra. Not sure yet about having both as I'd probably go for a cheap 'dumb' phone instead after getting a Pyra.

 

[pmprog]

I'd be interested, as I'm not sure how well the Pyra will actually suit being used as a phone.
Shame the notification LEDs on the Pyra wan wasn't an 8x4 matrix that you could make scroll text on

That said, the amount of ports he's talking of supporting seems a bit overkill for a phone IMO. Don't really see a use for two external micro SD card slots. How secure would they be from the cards popping out whilst being carried and holding?

 

[CommanderB]

I'd be interested, as I'm not sure how well the Pyra will actually suit being used as a phone.
Shame the notification LEDs on the Pyra wan wasn't an 8x4 matrix that you could make scroll text on

That said, the amount of ports he's talking of supporting seems a bit overkill for a phone IMO. Don't really see a use for two external micro SD card slots. How secure would they be from the cards popping out whilst being carried and holding?

I don't think that this will be a problem. Old Sony Ericsson and Nokia phones had external card slots and as long as the mechanism was intact, the cards stayed in place.

I think that a nice case with a good form factor could make the PyraPhone a nice extension of the Pyra. Especially because all of Pyra's software will run on it.

 

[Eight Bit]

Oh, this is nice! I've been looking at that librem 5 phone that's due this year but this appeals to me more.
One thing though @hns ... I don't see any mention of a camera? It would be great if there's one with a really good sensor in there.
Another thing I'd like is something like a docking station that would fit both the phone and the Pyra.

Oh well, one can dream can't he

 

[elw3]

It is just taking the Pyra hardware design, removing the keyboard and nub and the display
hinge and cable, changing the battery, adding some phone features (earpiece) and Kill-Switches,
but keeping everything else and make a new PCB layout in a smartphone portrait format.

This is a pyra without keyboard. Why buy two?
I dont like touch screen typing so a no go for me, but nice option anyway.

 

[Binky]

One thing though @hns ... I don't see any mention of a camera? It would be great if there's one with a really good sensor in there.

On the occasions I've had the misfortune to use a modern smartphone camera, I've been frustrated by:

• Low light performance. A tiny lens simply can't gather enough light to give a satisfactory SNR
• Ergonomics: The camera is too thin to hold, aim and control properly. The lens is always where I want to put my fingers, and the touchscreen controls are awkward to hit reliably
  
• Zoom range: There doesn't seem to be any! You just get the option to crop the sides off the already-poor image.
• Software: Everything is so automated that I can't make it do what I'd like. Why can't I focus/expose manually?

The first of those are near-unavoidable. You can't have better optics or better controls without adding substantial bulk to the device - but the software should be fixable. I'd also suggest going for a low-resolution sensor, if any. You don't really need to waste disk space or processing power on recording noise and lens defects!

 

[Eight Bit]

@Binky I don't use my camera to make beautiful pictures. Often I make pictures of stuff I need to remember or of situations I run into at work that I need to share with colleagues.

I still have and use my 2013 HTC One M7, though its camera got a lot of criticism because of the (larger) low res sensor (4 Megapixels), it performs pretty good under low light circumstances. Way better than my wife's 13 Mega Pixel phone camera anyway. I never use the flash, except as a flash light(!) tbh. Some times I wish my phone camera had more mega pixels so I can zoom in a little without the picture becoming too gritty but I've been using it for 6 years already so it's not that big of an issue.

Most important for me is low light, no flash performance and decent contrast/colors.
A front camera for video chat or selfies is not something I'd use but I wouldn't complain if it's on there.

So yeah, a LED flashlight would be nice too!

It would be great if it could be a sturdy padded bounce phone, with loads of stuff on it that's handy to have in your pocket.
It does not have to be super thin either. (I'm a technician, can you tell?)

 

[levi]

Late last year I bought a relatively cheap Nokia (read HMD) 8110 4G (the bananaphone - but in black) which runs KaiOS which is a fork of Firefox OS which was at one point at least open source.

It doesn't have a touchscreen and the camera is decidedly pants, and I've not yet found a way to remove the google cruft that was preinstalled (but I'm hoping that if I never start it and leave cellular data off almost all the time it won't be able to phone home), but I can at least mount the filestore on my linux laptop using gio mount and put mp3s on there to listen to on the go.

Since I still kind of have the new phone feeling, I won't be rushing to buy a pyraphone. I'm also not sure what hardware synergy there'll be between the big pyra and this, because on the photo the presumably CPU board (marked out for two extra μSD cards) seems to be a lot smaller. Software-wise, this will probably deliver a decent phone stack that can run on the Pyra though, which is nice.

 

[ThinkPad]

Somehow everything that he touches end up with all of the following:

- delayed
- with outdated hardware
- unusable
- EXPENSIVE AS HELL

I even don't want to point out KILLER FEATURES like "* 5 inch resistive touch display" on a phone in 2019...

For me Librem 5 is the way to go.

 

[Xcl4m4t10n]

I was going to post it two or three days ago but I was working at that moment and forgot to post it here. Thank you for bringing it but I am with ThinkPad (with last phrase) I am watching Librem 5, Fairphone 3 and another one that I don't remember now.

Anyway I think the PyraPhone is more feasible and is not going to have the (majority of) downsides that Thinkpad say, because it have some advantages that the other Nikolas projects didn't have (some work already done, a community behind it and not a one-man only project, funds...).

 

[CommanderB]

Somehow everything that he touches end up with all of the following:

- delayed
- with outdated hardware
- unusable
- EXPENSIVE AS HELL

I even don't want to point out KILLER FEATURES like "* 5 inch resistive touch display" on a phone in 2019...

For me Librem 5 is the way to go.

Do you mean Nikolaus?

I strongly disagree with you. The delays are real, yes. But especially the resistive display is a huge plus for me (and maybe for others in the community). Also I expect a PyraPhone to be much more durable and repairable than the librem5 which is hardware-wise quite boring imho. The librem5 is more or less a standard phone in terms of hardware features

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Are you really saying the Pyra is going to be unusable? That's kind of hyperbolic, don't you think?

 

[ThinkPad]

Do you mean Nikolaus?

I strongly disagree with you. The delays are real, yes. But especially the resistive display is a huge plus for me (and maybe for others in the community). Also I expect a PyraPhone to be much more durable and repairable than the librem5 which is hardware-wise quite boring imho. The librem5 is more or less a standard phone in terms of hardware features

The resistive display is a good choice for a clamshell device like Pyra, and horrible choice for a device like a phone... but wait, I don't even care, instead I prefer to take the reality pill which is the Librem 5.
[doublepost=1546799993,1546799517][/doublepost]

Are you really saying the Pyra is going to be unusable? That's kind of hyperbolic, don't you think?

Unfortunately I am unable to tell how usable Pyra is BECAUSE IT STILL DO NOT EXIST AS FINISHED PRODUCT AT THIS MOMENT.

P.S. I still didn't cancel my pre-order. Call it masochism.

 

[pmprog]

I prefer to take the reality pill which is the Librem 5.

Unfortunately I am unable to tell how usable Pyra is BECAUSE IT STILL DO NOT EXIST AS FINISHED PRODUCT AT THIS MOMENT.

Maybe I'm missing something, but as far as I can tell, the librem 5 doesn't exist in a meaningful state either yet, so i don't get why you're talking about them so differently

 

[AnimatedFreak]

Looks pretty interesting. From the images it looks to be a pretty nice small low powered smart phone. Something I could totally go for. Just wish it had a slide out qwerty keyboard like the Nokia N900 had.
I'll post the pics here for those who are to lazy to look at the attachments of the email.

Wish you good luck Nikolaus!

 

[CommanderB]

Looks pretty interesting. From the images it looks to be a pretty nice small low powered smart phone. Something I could totally go for. Just wish it had a slide out qwerty keyboard like the Nokia N900 had.
I'll post the pics here for those who are to lazy to look at the attachments of the email.

Wish you good luck Nikolaus!

I agree, a slide-out keyboard would be awesome but at the same time it could be a mechanical complexity nightmare. I fear that it would be way to complex for a small side project like the PyraPhone

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Unfortunately I am unable to tell how usable Pyra is BECAUSE IT STILL DO NOT EXIST AS FINISHED PRODUCT AT THIS MOMENT.

P.S. I still didn't cancel my pre-order. Call it masochism.

Well yeah, but I think based on the prototype videos it looks fine, and I trust ED when he talks about what it can run.

 

[kuru]

I'd also want to see a slide out keyboard, somewhat of an n900 successor.
But I haven't seen a resistive screen come even close to the perfection of the n900's for drawing.
I've all but given up on having a good open source drawing pad in my pocket.

 

[elw3]

Low light performance. A tiny lens simply can't gather enough light to give a satisfactory SNR

Quite the opposite, this lenses are extremely bright for photographic standards.
Its rather that the sensor is too small with too many pixels on that tiny space giving too much noise.
I think most phones have an iso 50 sensor, normal dslrs have iso 200. That means on comparable noise level the dslr shot is 4 times brighter.
So you either need a sensor with little pixel count which i doubt exist as current gen sensor or need a bigger one which will make the lens a few times more expensive and probably wont fit anyway.

I rather propose a different approach: A black/white sensor, you get more pixels, less noise, a sharper image and still pay less for its production.
And then you add a color filter turret to shoot color anyway, thats how the 20.000€ pro cameras work.
Downside is obvious: Color only works for still images with little movement in them.
Unless you construct a spinning filter wheel with like 40rps which would be awesome...