claude0001

Of course. There is a lot of frustration resonating in that message, wherever it came from.

It does confirm what I wrote above almost to the letter, even including the words "out of control" and "mess". And I have no behind-the-scenes insight. So, yes, I think this is a quite realistic picture of the situation. Maybe it could be classified a pyramid scheme in the sense that IGG earn their income from companies running their campaigns through them, with many of these campaigns failing, backers and/or companies loosing their money, and with only IGG themselves making profit in the end.

Even though they communicate much more openly since a few days ago (which is good), their "careful" phrasing still leaves room for speculation about what is happening, of course. However that post from "Project owner" I quoted already above seems pretty clear to me: "[...] shops have obtained stock from our warehouse without our permission or knowledge. This action was taken by our warehouse in an attempt to recover a some of the outstanding balance that they are due to paid by us." (emphasis mine) and later: "We are told that 300 devices were given(sold) to the Japanese sh

Reading down the IGG comments a bit further, I come to the impression that this is F(x)tec's last stand. They're completely out of money. Their devices sit in Hong Kong with no clearance to ship because F(x)tec are unable to pay the bill. Pro1-Xs "appearing" on the market are due to Expansys acquiring devices as a way to obtain their payment. Probably, F(x)tec are at the point where the few shipments actually taking place are being paid from employees' revenue. What a mess.

I am fully aware of that. Crowdfunding is shifting the risk from the company to the backers -- and that is precisely what F(x)tec should have taken advantage of! In January 2021, they should have declared that, with the SD835 unexpectedly impossible to source, the project had reached a dead-end, and that -- as much of the raised funds had already been spent -- backers could unfortunately NOT be refunded, but would be granted a discount on the Pro2, just entering development. Then they should have quietly sat down and designed a proper Pro2 -- reusing as many of the parts already purc

Actually, reading through the IGG comments, I find now that F(x)tec actually confirmed the "appropriation" theory! F(x)tec (@IGG): However, they also state that, as they have manufactured many more devices then needed, there are (still?) enough to deliver to all backers ...

I agree with some of the IGG comments that it would have been better to end the project when it became clear that the SD835 could no longer be acquired. I wonder if some of the Pro1-X's problems could have been avoided, had it not been developed under the pressure of having to deliver it to all backers ... I understand that it is easy to feel smart in hindsight, and that decisions made two years ago cannot be undone anyhow. But, in the IGG comments, you argue that continuing the project based on the new SD662 had literally been the only option, as the SoC change "only became apparent 1.5+

I also once had a theory along the lines of Expansys "appropriating" part of the stock . However, F(x)tec now explicitly state that at least all IGG-backed phones are "ready and in Hong Kong".

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