claude0001

I own both an original Pro1 and a Pro1-X, so I'm in the lucky position to be able to compare the two devices side-by-side. Part of your criticism (which I partly share) applies to both phones, but some things are also regressions introduced with the Pro1-X only. I agree. In three years, I never dared trying to learn to open the Pro1 single-handedly, out of fear it would jump out of my hand in the process. I could never have afforded an N950 (😉) but even my N900's simple sliding keyboard mechanism was more practical from my point of view. I fully agree that this is a really anno

Thanks for sharing your experience. As you know, you shouldn't take people too seriously on the internet. Many trolls are actually nice people in everyday life, but somehow flip a switch when they sit down at a keyboard ... Are you actually able to place and receive calls through VoWiFi while connected to the LTE router? While I don't think I would ever settle for such a solution, technically, the portable hotspot is an interesting workaround.

Of course that would have been a tough decision to make. But, retrospectively, I think it would have been the right one, and a more experienced company would have gone that way. The Pro1-X crowdfunding campaign was never meant for hardware development. It was about making a "collector's edition" of the existing Pro1 with improved alternative-OS support. When the SD835 went EoL (something they should have seen coming btw.), they should have taken the chance to communicate that -- given these circumstances -- backers unfortunately cannot get the Pro1-X device they backed, but will be o

For completeness, one should mention that this news story is about a phone that was ordered on 11 November 2022 and delivered on 31 January 2023. I.e. the customer had her device in hand 2.5 months after placing the order, inspite of Christmas, CoViD, and war standing in the way. In my view, this rather illustrates that international commerce, against all odds, is indeed working. The delays F(x)tec and their customers are facing are of a different order of magnitude and probably caused by other (additional) factors.

As harsh as it sounds, in retrospect, F(x)tec’s biggest mistake was to keep up the effort of delivering all promised devices to their IGG backers. That they tried (and are still trying) to get a device to any one who invested in the Pro1-X crowdfunding campaign is honourable, but, from a business point of view, it was the wrong decision. When it became clear that the SD835 could no longer be delivered, they should have declared the IGG campaign a fail, taken the money, and invested it fully into development of a viable successor of the Pro1, without committing to delivering any devices be

I think "interpolation" is not quite the right word here. The idea with these 48 MP sensors is that they group equally-coloured pixels in bunches of four, and usually average over these four neighbors to yield a 12 MP image. This is called "pixel binning" and reduces noise through the averaging operation. Technically, in optimum light conditions, the camera could indeed record all pixels individually to yield a 48 MP image. But, seemingly, the Pro1X's drivers do not support that mode. As @EskeRahn and @daniele606 point out, CPU-Z is wrong. Other apps correctly identify the SoC as

Well, as the timestamp updates, I do not see how the hash could stay identical, even if there are no functional changes. That said, there probably is a reason why LOS recovery does not allow downgrading via sideload ...

Yes, normal users need to fastboot-flash the boot.img only once, and can then sideload-away for years to come. But I believe @EskeRahn specifically wants to backup previous Lineage versions, to be able to jump back to them in case regressions were to be introduced in the OTAs. In such a scenario, he would indeed have to first flash the boot.img matching the timestamp of the *.zip. This is because, to my knowledge, Lineage recovery does not allow downgrading itself via sideload (at least in 16.0 it didn't). So my only point was that it is not necessary for him to figure out a scheme

Well, it is really easy for those who have a lineage build environment up and running anyway. Extracting some previous payload.bin is a required step in making your own ROM. For those who are not running on Linux (and thus have no preinstalled Python), people have made stand-alone extractor programs (like this one or that one). Please note that I haven't tested those, and think twice before running your phone's boot partition through some random tool from the internet.

Seemed to work without this on my Bullseye. Thanks anyway for the hint.

As the Pro1 and Pro1-X are A/B devices, the images are inside "payload.bin". The official LineageOS tool to extract them is extract.py, but there are others ...

The sideloadable *.zip actually contains all images, including boot.img, dtbo.img, and vbmeta.img. That the latter are offered as separate downloads is just for greater convenience. For the purpose of "archiving" an old build, it is enough to just store away the *.zip. In case of need, the matching recovery image could be easily extracted from there ...

that's the spirit. 👍

You've probably thought about this, but just in case: The Pro1X has connection issues with LTE and GSM (calls). We do not know why, but we believe it is either: a problem in the hardware (yikes!) - or - a fault in the stock Android drivers and firmwares, which also SFOS is using. The latter (if existing) might be fixed in a future OTA from F(x)tec (that, eventually, also SFOS would pick up, I guess), but we do not know for sure. There are many (many!) people reporting missed calls and general mobile connection issues in, both, stock Android and Lineage. I'm one of them, as you might

It has problems with VoLTE where the loudness setting of the handheld is ignored. For me, the VoLTE connection would also stall often while roaming - not sure is this is related to the Pro1 or to my carrier. However, I am in the comfortable position that German carriers will support GSM (ie. non-VoLTE) calls for years to come, so I just disabled VoLTE. Haven't had any call issues since. Regarding @sequestris saying the Pro1 is stuck on Android 9: This is true for the vendor-supplied ROM. There are very mature LineageOS ports from 16.0 (Android 9) all the way up to 20.0 (Android 13) i

... but it does provide relief sometimes. 🙂 I'm afraid many will just consider this a lesson learned, walk away, and get themselves another phone. Last year, my wife bought a vendor-refurbished FP3+ (as the FP4 did not have a Lineage port yet), and its flawlessness makes F(x)tec look really disappointing. That neat device now serves me as an example that also smaller and think-outside-the-box companies can make competitive phones in today's market environment. As I wrote above, I do not regret getting my Pro1. But I must admit that, at significantly higher price, it can't eve

I think I've seen it switch between bands 1 and 3 without loosing connection. Also, band 20 does not work for me even if it is the first frequency the modem tries after a "reset". Then again, my amount of testing has been really limited. I wouldn't dare jumping to any conclusions based on that. All-in-all, I believe these things are almost impossible to diagnose systematically in the wild. That really should have happened under laboratory conditions as part of QA ... Sadly, I guess they are simply out of money and thus cannot afford the required diagnostic tests and fixes to the a

I'm on German O2 (cannot recommend), and mobile communication is horrible. Unfortunately I couldn't get the LTE-Discovery app to work on LineageOS. What is that "No LTE cycle"-mode actually doing? Meanwhile I have found Rx Monitor, which at least allows me to see what radio frequencies the modem is using, though that app (to my knowledge) cannot influence the modem behaviour. Contrary to what others observe, my Pro1-X works when it manages to connect on band 3 or band 1. It seems to fail when forced to use band 20, the "long-range" LTE frequency (800 MHz). Unfortunately, both, my Pro

It is important to understand that there are two F(x)tec phones: the Pro1 from late 2019 and the Pro1-X that is currently shipping (slowly). I own both of them. My original Pro1 has its flaws: its camera is not really good, the LTE and WiFi connectivity are ok-ish but not stellar, and even the keyboard -- the one distinctive feature of the phone -- has never been much fun to use. That being said, the Pro1 has served me reliably for almost three years as my only phone. I use it with a custom LineageOS ROM which I have configured to double as a miniature GNU/Linux palmtop. The latter functi

I've uploaded my latest build of LineageOS 16.0 for (SD835-) Pro1. At https://findus.zwergenschaenke.net/~puma/linux.html#lineagepro1 fetch the ROM dated 20230223. It includes backported ASB fixes up to patchlevel "5 February 2023". As noted above, these backports are no longer receiving upstream code-review. All I can report is that the build runs fine on my own device. This ROM includes a new local patch, disabling the infuriating "double-shift = caps-lock" behaviour of the HW keyboard while preserving the useful "sticky-modifier" and "long-press for special-character" feature

Right now, issues related to mobile network connectivity are reported from practically all over the world (I heard of: USA, Europe, Asia, Australia), though not by all users. There is no really clear picture yet, but, as F(x)tec acknowledged in their latest update, there may be a correlation with specific LTE bands and there may be a firmware fix at some point ...

OK. Indeed, according to the wiki, the RAM requirements seem to be significantly higher for building lineage-18.1 and later. Then again, even for lineage-16, I fall short of the recommended 16 GB by far. Of course the building probably takes longer, as the system might be forced to swap every now and then, but I wonder why it should fail altogether ... Anyway, good luck with your new box! 🙂

Are you sure about that? I am building my lineage-16 ROMs on a VM with 6 GB of RAM and never went out of memory. Could it be that you rather ran out of disk space? You need at least 250 GB, much more if you enable CCACHE.

Unfortunately the long paragraph on cellular connectivity sounds like they have no clue what the problem is, let alone how to solve it. 😞

Yes it is exactly that. The difference being that, unlike originally planned, the Pro1-X does not ship with Lineage preinstalled. It comes with Android and you have to flash Lineage yourself. While several Pro1-X owners (including myself) have installed the Lineage port and use it successfully (as far as the phones binary blobs allow), note that it is still unofficial and that bugs are to be expected. Sooner or later, it should appear in the list of officially supported ports at lineageos.org -- hopefully then also based on more mature closed-source drivers. I can only second that