Topics

You are not alone with the frustration. But you might look at it in a different way. It is a minor miracle that they even managed to send people something at all! It is amazing that they did not give up years ago and folded. They really deserved kudos for their fighting spirit. The Pro1X was indeed rushed, As they had to do almost a completely new phone. Originally it should have been a super easy task of them producing more of the existing Pro1, with tiny adjustments, and practically no (further) development costs. This should have earned them some money. Instead they got swindled and never got the CPUs they bought and could not get them anywhere, and could not even get the blueprints of the phone, so had to design a new device from what they could get, with what money left. And then add Covid... And then some of their devices was 'stolen' by the shipping partner to cover unpaid bills. I'm not saying that they did not make several mistakes along the line - in the wisdom of hindsight. But I'm amazed they are still standing. But frankly expecting them to do anything further is extremely optimistic. I highly doubt that there will be any software updates&fixes for neither the Pro1 nor the Pro1X. So we have to let do with what we got. Frankly I'm glad they still pay for this community to exist, so we can help each other here. Would I wish for a "Pro2", or something similar from another company? Sure I would love it!! Do I believe it will happen? Nope! I think this is very likely to be the very last mobile phone with a proper landscape keyboard integrated. UNLESS someone like Fairphone or similar want to make something modular, where a keyboard could be an option that could work over several generations, and thus the few of us that want keyboards should not bear the full development costs of an entire phone, but sharing it with others, and have a somewhat expensive keyboard option.

Nope, it isn't. My Pro1s (still on LineageOS 16 and located in Germany) generally indicate "LTE" or "LTE+", which are different variants of the LTE protocol. In areas where network coverage is bad, my phones drop to "EDGE" (2G, still available in Germany). You are supposed to be able to somewhat influence the protocol switching behaviour using the "Preferred network type" system setting, but I've never seen much effect while playing with this. For practical purposes, "4G", "LTE", and "LTE+" are pretty much equivalent, and indicate the Pro1 is operating at the fastest protocol family it is capable of. Note that even while being connected via a (theoretically) fast protocol, your effective data transfer speed may still be reduced for other reasons (weak or noisy signal, too many other users on the same tower, throttling by provider).  Note that pretty much any network protocol may be transmitted over any physical radio-frequency band. As older protocols are phased-out, their frequency bands become free for carrying new ones. Also, usage of frequency bands differs from country to country, as this is governed by national authorities. The same band that may be used for LTE in the US may still be occupied by 2G in Germany, or 3G in Scandinavia. EVDO is part of the 3G family of network protocols. I believe it was shortly (and deceptively?) marketed as "4G" by some US networks ages ago, but not in the rest of the world as far as I know. The RF hardware of even a fully functional Pro1 is far from stellar. Using any App able to display the actual signal power of the radios, you'll see that the latter is rarely above -100 dBm, even if all bars are displayed in the screen corner. If your data transfer speeds are OK and your VoLTE works without interruptions, be happy and done with it. Sadly, there just isn't much safety margin in the radios for f(x)tec phones. When I'm on the move (Germany) LTE network interruptions are common with all three of my Pro1s. If your connection used to be better at the same location, I'd just assume they changed something on the antenna towers. As @EskeRahn suggests, they might have fully or partly (via DSS) repurposed some RF bands from LTE to 5G. As a result, your Pro1 effectively would not be able to use those frequencies any more, and be forced to revert to one of the remaining LTE ones (which might have lower signal-to-noise). Not much you can do about that. The actual antenna is the (segmented!) metal back of the phone itself. Depending on the carrier frequency, RF signals are picked-up from (or injected into) it at various locations via spring connector electrodes. The latter are distributed over three so-called "antenna" PCBs, named "main", "diversity" and "wifi/gps". The first two work in tandem to provide mobile-network connectivity. See the corresponding patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170117614A1/en for technical details.

Oh btw if you haven't received your additional parts bundle yet, send email to their info email about it. I had not gotten mine and they sent it immediately my way after they processed my message. Never got a reply to it and the tracking on the package did not work but it did arrive a few weeks later.

Lineage-21.0-202412014-nightly-pro1-signed.zip on December 1 (2024) security patch, installed smoothly using OTA

(lineage-21.0-20241214-nightly-pro1-signed.zip on December 1 security patch installed smoothly using adb sideload and MindTheGapps-14.0.0-arm64-20240925_175633) And we still can only select one keyboard layout, so no easy layout switching, for multilingual usage.