Appreciated. The more things fill up with monetizing shit, the more I stay away. There's something beautiful in having higher purposes than grubbing for cash.
Dunno, I prefer to use as neutral or positive terminology even when I talk about things I don't like. I think it very easily comes off as juvenile ranting when you start throwing around terms with strong negative connotations.
Like a lot of pine64 products, it's reusing the case for an existing product. Producing case molds is one of the most expensive parts of production. Every product announcements there's people finding very similar looking devices, but then ignore that the boards in the products are fully pine64 custom.
I've also had the pinenote and the remarkable beside eachother and it's not the same case, the remarkable has the large edge at the bottom and is slightly thinner. The pen surface feels very similar though.
They may be people like me, where it's not about ignoring but rather that no one's ever told them how you reuse some sort of reference outsides yet put in very different insides, so they have no idea.
And I still don't know whether - speaking industry-wide - insides are generally quite different, or whether that varies greatly, and how a non-hardware-specialist might guess in a given instance.
The differentientation will be the software. I watched a couple Remarkable demos and the software is reasonably slick. Will Pine and the Pine community be able to match it?
Does it make any difference worth caring about going from 2G to 3G to 4G? I know extremely little about telecom, and only remember reading once that something oldish with a name like s7 (but that's apparently not it) was so bad.
You're thinking of SS7, which is how international voice carriers interconnect (can also do SMS). SS7 was architected around a limited number of trusted participants (national monopoly carriers), but now there are a huge number of participants but there's no structural protection against abuse (although some carriers are able to address some abuses through ad-hoc means)
4G (LTE) at least has mutual authentication between the carrier and the user, so that's a meaningful security improvement.
That's interesting to me because I've been seeing some people impatient for the PinePhone external keyboard, but I've felt strong doubts I'd use one much.
You might be right. Having also spent time with the Cosmo Communicator, I can vouch that a phone with a keyboard isn't the same thing as a phone-sized laptop. Apart from the hostile platform (which hopefully wouldn't be an issue on the PinePhone), two aspects that make the phone less practical for desktop software are the extremely high aspect ratio, and the lack of any sort of mouse input beyond poking at the screen. These things significantly compromise the desktop experience.
However, I will also say that a touch-type keyboard on a phone is still awesome, and I will certainly be buying a PinePhone+keyboard when it comes out. I live in forlorn hope for the day I can evict Android from my life entirely (the Micro PC does not, alas, make phone calls).
Yeah, the inherent fatness of fingers problem. And the lack of buttons on those fingers other-problem.
Looking at the resolutions, 1280x720 vs 1440x720, I would have just expected the phone experience not to feel terribly different. Of course it remains to be seen how much the PinePhone software adapts to landscape in wake of the keyboards coming.
