I used a Linux phone for 30 days

this right here is the Google pixel 3A and there's something special about this phone this is the only phone that is listed to be 100 compatible with Ubuntu touch arguably the very best and most feature-rich Linux mobile operating system available today and when I say everything works I mean it says just about everything they actually have a very nice page here to list out a bunch of different phones that are supported and all the things that should and shouldn't work with them and when it comes to all the hardware features on this everything does have a green check and that includes the camera the Bluetooth sending and receiving picture messages the fingerprint reader here on the back the flashlight really just about everything and I have been using this as my primary cell phone for just over two weeks so this video is going to be reporting to you guys on is actually using a Linux mobile device feasible today and is this phone that is supposedly 100 really 100 so before we dive into my actual experience using this thing we need to talk about the actual specifications and Ubuntu touch itself now don't let the price of this thing fool you this is the perfect example of why you really don't need to spend twelve hundred dollars to get a decent cell phone it features a Snapdragon 670 a 1080p by 2160 display it's made of polycarbonate instead of plastic or fragile glass like we see on a lot of the really expensive smartphones like we saw the fingerprint reader here is almost perfect placement I still wish they were right there 3 700 milliamp battery and paired with these specifications of this phone you easily can get a full day and that is also true with Ubuntu touch on this phone overall this phone was extremely well received when it was released back in 2019 and the price since then has fallen significantly these Google pixel 3as you could probably find for around 80 to 150 depending on exactly what you're looking for this one is the XL version so it's going to cost a little bit more and I did have have to find a very specific model on eBay to make sure that it went ahead and actually worked with what we're going to be doing today because I did originally buy this phone on back market and it said it was completely unlocked they meant carrier unlocked and not OEM unlocked which is very important so if you are considering trying this out and running this experiment for yourself do make sure that the listing you buy this from specifies that it is OEM unlocked so with that we are going to go ahead and move into talking about Ubuntu touch as a project Ubuntu touch was announced by Mark shuttleworth the current CEO of canonical even though he wasn't at the time of announcement in 2011 where you wrote a blog post talking about how he envisioned Ubuntu as a convergent platform powering smartphones computers smart TVs just about everything all thanks to Unity which was announced just a year prior and he said he expected all of this to happen by Ubuntu 14.04 a Bluetooth touch 1.0 did publish before deadline in Ubuntu 13.10 however only a few phones were supported such as the Nexus 4 and to address this Ubuntu launched the fundraiser to create their very own phone the Ubuntu Edge the goal for this project was uh quite ambiguous it was a 32 million dollars in a single month and there are even some large donations from some big companies such as Bloomberg donating a hundred thousand dollars one month later 12.7 million dollars was raised and unfortunately due to them not actually meeting the goal all the money was returned granted at the time it was the most money ever raised on Indiegogo so that's something interesting and during the development of unity 8 beta that is when he announced the decision to completely stop funding for the unity project as well as the phone and the convergent shell the project was picked up by the community UB ports and the same year they created a foundation to support the project from a legal perspective and they are very active on this project the very last Ubuntu touch OTA is from June and there's actually going to be some major updates coming in the future that we will be covering on this channel as they're going to be going from Ubuntu version 16 to some later LTS versions such as 22. the support for Ubuntu touch devices is growing with Linux backed options such as the Pine phone and porting commercial phones which brings us to this pixel 3A which by the way the SIM card in this phone is a mint Mobile SIM card and they're the ones that have partnered up with us and made this video possible you've probably seen those funny low budget commercials with a Ryan Reynolds here on YouTube but let me quickly tell you how awesome their service is MIP mobile offers premium wireless coverage for as low as 15 a month and you do not have to sacrifice coverage data or speed they're built on the same network as T-Mobile which is what I've been using prior absolutely no speed difference between these two phones and to keep costs low they sell directly to you online cutting out retail stores and sales people you can keep your same device you can keep your same phone number and easily switch services using either esim or if your phone is not compatible with that they'll go ahead and ship you a SIM card free of charge comes in a little card like this you just pop it out and you're good to go I went ahead and popped the mint Mobile SIM card in this Ubuntu touch phone and with some very light customization it was working including LTE calls texts picture messages everything all plans include unlimited talk text 5G hotspot and of course there are family plan options so stop paying more than you need to on your wireless bill and start saving big with mint Mobile use my link down in the description to get premium Wireless starting at 15 a month or go ahead and head over to mintmobile.com forward slash Tech Hut now here we are on the device now this is the lock screen and before we get too far on opinions and all that I am just going to show you the general user experience and UI no calls made today this is the lock screen so to unlock we're just going to go ahead and swipe over here I could input my password or I could go into use the little fingerprint reader on the back works very good very quick and then this is your home screen now with no applications open you actually get the home screen but as soon as you start opening things you're just going to be shuffling back and forth between those applications here is our dock with our most frequently used applications on the side and you could customize this as you see fit hit this little Ubuntu button it's going to open up all of our applications so for example if we go ahead and open up a couple of them let's open up messaging here and then in this application if we swipe up it really doesn't do much except for open up a launcher option here now here within messages for example if we swipe up like you'd expect on Android to go home it's not going to do that in this case for this application it's going to go ahead and try to compose a new message if we swipe over this way it's going to open up that app launcher and then we could get into our full launcher this way or swipe it away now to get to our multitasking we could just go ahead and swipe from this side and now you can see the only thing open is messages and I could go in between applications and if I want to close this out I would just swipe up and here we are with nothing open looking up here on the top we have our time our battery volume the L stands for we are getting an LTE connection at the moment we have our bars location data and the green means we have a new notification if I go ahead and swipe down like you'd expect on most phones you can see over here we have notifications I have a new voicemail as well as a new message if we go over to rotation we have rotation lock we have keyboard layout files right here so if you're actively downloading or uploading anything you'll see that there under location you have location detection you can enable that there Bluetooth same deal Network we have a lot of options here including if you want cellular data Wi-Fi flight mode all that sound we have some sound settings battery we have our brightness so if I bump that up it's not going to do much that's one of the kind of hit or miss things we have our time and date with the calendar and all that and then last but not least system now one thing this is a lot of things to be spread out like this to try to go ahead and jump back and forth in between I do wish there was like a combined menu that was the default swipe down that may be included like notifications brightness and a couple other things built into one or at least quick toggles like we've seen in Android but this is definitely doing the trick for now just go ahead and swipe up to get rid of that and it will bring up our little thing over here now one thing I do need to note you probably noticed all the menus are dark and I did that with a customization if we go over to the UT or Ubuntu touch tweak tool that's where I went ahead and did this and now here you can see we have Unity 8 scaling usage mode launcher and a bunch of different settings system theme under experimental you can see I'm using the Dark theme the light theme is usually the default but I just prefer light themes in general for the rest of this video let's go ahead and switch it over to the default theme go back into actually enable that we're going to need to reboot our device so we go over here to system shutdown and restart so real quick I'm going to wait for that to finish and there we go that's the initial screen that we get since the device is unlocked there we go that's the initial screen we get since the actual bootloader is unlocked and then we see the Google screen because it's a pixel phone and then that takes us to our actual Ubuntu touch loading screen and now if I go into an application such as the UT tweak tool you can see it's all going to be a light theme now authenticate that and this doesn't come on the phone this is actually from the App Store so if we go over there and kind of show you what that looks like it's going to be right here if we go over here to actually see the name of it it is the open store so open up the open store give it a minute to load up and here you could see some of the applications all the applications have a kind of a rating system where it's Hearts smiley face no heart and Bug so for example if we go over to teleports which I believe this is a telegram client you can see lots of Hearts lots of Smileys some bug reports and some people who don't like it like everything else you get a rundown of what the application is about some reviews right here with what they rated it a nice change log and some more specifics in their GitHub page and all that now in the sake of time I'm not going to go through absolutely everything that's in here but you do have things like Deco which is a email client we have younav for navigation the most loved down here which is really nice so we have that tweak tool that I got peer Maps Webber document viewer a couple other things there's not a lot of applications but there are actually a lot of web apps so if I searched up like YouTube for example you can see there's a whole bunch of different YouTube clients which in turn are just basically web apps and for example I do have one so if I go over to my applications you can see YouTube there if I go ahead and open that up and I am signed in so if I go over to my channel you can see it's pretty Snappy the only really like native feature is down here if I touch this little play button we got reload back home trending and just some links to go ahead and quickly get to things but if I go ahead and play something here it works really good and if I go ahead and lower the volume here you can see all that works and if I full screen it give it a rotation everything's pretty Snappy and it doesn't really hold back on you and of course to get rid of this I could just swipe over to multitasking and then swipe up on YouTube and that will completely close out that application and now let's go ahead and dive into some of the applications I actually installed on this thing so for example there are some games I have Circle jump on here one I really like right here is a liner now there's not a lot of games but there is a few to kind of help you pass some time this one you just touch the screen to move and you kind of have to avoid obstacles so let's go up over all the way down and oh and that's how you die but pretty straightforward game it's actually pretty fun and as you go on the levels do get more challenging so whoop and go and keep going keep going keep going and we win so just an example now one thing you probably will be doing quite a bit since there's not much application availability is browsing the web so this is their web browser I'm just going to show you real quick kind of the responsiveness and all that let's go ahead and Google tech Hut and this should give us the option to go to the main Tech Hut website so if we open that up give it a second just to load there we go ahead to tap on it a little harder this is our website and if I open up our latest newsletter I do recommend you go subscribe to it lots of news every week for the most part and you can see it's very responsive go ahead and scroll there's not much stutter not much lag we can zoom in zoom out overall it's really no issue at all nothing worse than you'd expect on a normal browser on like an Android or even an iPhone and like let's go ahead and select this text here copy and all that works perfectly fine if we go hold down over here there's not a select all option which kind of sucks but we could go ahead and paste it and we're good to go now additionally speaking of web and web apps I do have a couple other ones on here other than YouTube for example Twitter here is one that I've been using off and on quite a bit and it tends to work fairly well so here we are going to give it just a minute to load and again it's not as responsive as like a native Android application but it will definitely do the trick so go over to Notifications here takes a sec just to load up and we can kind of see what's going on now let's check out some of the actual real non-web app applications for example podbird this is a really nice podcast application if you listen to podcasts on your phone this is probably going to be your best friend you can see I have a lot of uh destination Linux would recommend and then some new stuff and if we go over here under downloads you can see I was using it a couple weeks ago for that stuff but if I go to and play one for example welcome welcome destination Linux is a video podcast from the Texas Disney's is a podcast perfect I think it's a mistake Google Plus or Google Circles or what it just overall works really good at least in my experience all the applications that are have good ratings and all that really are definitely worth using for example weather here everybody needs a good old weather application you could see how it looks Works overall it's really nice gives you a lot of data a lot of information I get really specific data on exactly what is going on on certain days just overall the entire experience of using this phone has been awesome now with that there are some cons I did mention initially that I do wish that these were a little more uh linked together instead of having all these different options across the uh what would be the notification panel additionally the one thing that isn't working is right over here under location it says it's working I've gotten it to work one time for like a minute and that is about it one of the high rated applications is right here pure Maps now the application itself is great but I've just not been able to get proper location data so if I go ahead search or let's do a directions you can see from current position and it's just going to be loading like that for just about ever the one time I did get it to work I kept it on this screen for about 10 minutes it eventually connected and then about a minute later it disconnected so not very good for turn by turn directions but you can still use this application as like a MapQuest like system you can see how responsive it is I mean it's a it's a good application zooming in here it loads data really fast it's good but it would be oh so much better if the turn by turn directions and all that would be able to work no matter what SIM card I have on this whether if it's T-Mobile mint mobile whatever it tends to like to disconnect and reconnect to the internet it always starts off with 2G and then eventually connects to LTE so it is just kind of annoying if you're actively browsing the web and it decides to drop connection and reconnect it takes it much longer than it should and again that's the fault of the operating system and not the service providers if we go over here we can wait a lot of the times if I go into flight mode and make it rethink about it then disable that a lot of times this will rapidly fix the issue but other than that there's really not much going wrong or bad with this phone it's very usable for just normal day-to-day calling texting looking up something on Google real quick you could see all the various settings here we have VPN we have the customization settings for background sounds Etc notifications some system stuff including updates and we could go to about and see some really specific information about this phone it's the pixel 3A and all of that now one thing that's really nice about this phone is the camera the camera on the phone itself is really good but I have not experienced any significant issues when it comes to actually using this camera so for example I'm going to zoom into that little mini PC I just recorded a video on it should be up you should go check it out snap a picture and good to go now if I switch over to video for example I can also start recording a video and right now what you're hearing is my audio behind the video and it's pretty good if we zoom in while we're recording of course it's going to get a little distorted not the best but for open source Linux phone this quality is pretty good and then from there if we open up the gallery application we can see some of what we've done so if I open up this picture zoom in you can see it's pretty good it's a little washed out but I do have a lot of lights on at the moment if I go back and go to that video and if I hit play it's going to open up the media player application and then play the video overall really good very responsive and I can just go boom boom to get rid of those applications so overall there's definitely a few cons but using this thing has been an absolute pleasure so with all that is this phone usable as a daily driver I do have to say yes you are going to be giving up a little bit though the problem is having both of these phones available to me at this desk here for example I would find myself reaching for the Android one to do things like posting a tweet or something like that but when I went ahead and took this one out and about it did a lot of the basic things that I needed it to do but of course going from something like an Android phone to this is a little difficult if you're just used to the availability of applications the speed the responsiveness if you do a lot of work from a Android or even an iPhone you might struggle using this day-to-day but I think probably one of the very best use cases for something like this is if you're looking to not use your phone as much there's kind of a trend of people who are switching over to these dumb phones or really bloating their phone and stripping features from it in order to be staring at the screen less and that's really a good thing it's good for your mental health it's there's a lot of positive aspects when doing that now the difference between using a dumb phone and something like a Linux phone that actually works somewhat decent is you actually do have more tools and things available to you and if you're somebody who's looking to get away from the Google ecosystem altogether and still have apps and some of that functionality that you would expect out of a smartphone today this is a really good option I do a lot of the work I do from my phone and unfortunately this is just not quite there yet for me as currently in my life I'm a little too mobile not to have all the applications and everything that I use day to day but if I needed to could I switch to using Ubuntu touch on this pixel yeah one suggestion I could make if you do want to try to switch to this is keep your current phone and get a cheap used pixel just like I did use both at the same time for a little while and then occasionally go ahead and leave your old phone home and see how well you do with this one again the big con at least that I've noticed granted it technically is supposed to work is GPS just does not update quick enough so I can't really use this for mapping or like real-time Direction you can use it kind of as like a MapQuest like system but that's not going to cut it for me unfortunately and of course things are updating all the time so I will definitely be taking a look at this again when some of those big updates come up in the future and uh with all that I do hope you enjoyed this video I do hope you have an absolutely beautiful day anything I mentioned will be linked down below and good bye

Channel: TechHut

Views: 610,345

Keywords: linux, linux tutorial, desktop enviorment

Id: qmlabKbpTGM

Length: 20min 37sec (1237 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 29 2022