Reproduction
An
/e/ phone in 2020
One
of the projects I have been watching with curiosity over the past
year is /e/ (formerly
Eelo), a mobile operating system that is based on Android, but
with the pieces associated with Google's software and services
removed. The project is described as follows:
/e/
is a complete, fully 'unGoogled', mobile ecosystem.
We
could have just focused on an OS, but apps and on-line services
are critical components of a smartphone experience, too.
/e/
consists in a mobile operating system (OS) and carefully selected
applications, together forming a privacy-enabled internal
environment for mobile phones.
Combined with on-line
services, such as a search engine, e-mail, storage and other
on-line tools, it creates a unique environment: privacy-in,
privacy-out.
One
of the big challenges any open source mobile platform faces these
days is competing with the vast application stores of Android and
iOS. The /e/ operating system side-steps this issue by providing
what is essentially the Android operating system, but with open
source technologies replacing Google apps and services. This
allows /e/ to run most Android apps and therefore benefit from the
Android ecosystem while providing a more open platform, less
dependent on advertisements and data harvesting for revenue.
The
/e/ Foundation was kind enough to send me a demo phone which
arrived in a nondescript brown box. Inside the box was the
product's box itself which declares brightly on the front: "your
data is your data". The back of the box lets us know
it contains a smart phone with a one-year warranty that has been
unlocked and is compatible with Android apps.
Inside
the box I found a little booklet which explains how to set up the
phone. (Charge it, insert the SIM card and follow on-screen
instructions.) The directions, while brief, are printed in five
languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
The
/e/ phones, while they can be run anywhere in the world, are sold
only in Europe presently.
The
box also contains the phone, a Samsung Galaxy S9 in my case, a set
of earphones, a European outlet-to-USB adaptor, a USB cable, and a
little pin that can be used to pop open the Samsung's SIM port.
For
people who do not live in Europe, you can buy a supported model of
Android phone, download /e/ and flash it to your device. In the
future, the /e/ Foundation plans to make a service available where
people can mail in their devices and /e/ will install their
operating system on it and ship back the phone.
Getting
set up
In the booklet which came with the /e/ phone there is
a recommendation for visiting a website to sign up for an /e/
account. This account gives us 5GB of on-line storage (with the
option to upgrade), an e-mail account, and the ability to
automatically synchronize files, settings, tasks, and contacts
from our phone. The on-line account appears to mostly be
implemented using Nextcloud and I will talk about that later. For
now I will say the on-line registration process worked smoothly
and I was up and running with a new account quickly.
The
phone I received arrived mostly charged and I let it sit plugged
in for a while to top it off. I like that there is a light on the
phone that changes colour, depending on whether it is charging,
fully charged, or has a notification waiting to be read. This
makes it easier to check the device's status without activating
the display.
There are four buttons on the phone I
received. Volume Up, Volume Down, Power, and one which does not
appear to do anything. Turning on the phone brings up a mostly
white logo screen. We are then walked through a few configuration
steps, beginning with selecting our preferred language from a
list. Before moving onto the next screen, a warning popped up and
told me "calendar has stopped". This was perhaps the
only error I saw during my trial, but its timing (at the beginning
of the test run) was not a great early impression.
The
phone's wizard continues to walk us through selecting our time
zone, optionally connecting to a wi-fi network, and (again
optionally) enabling location services for permitted apps. We can
then choose to enable fingerprint unlocking and protecting the
phone with a PIN. Finally, we have the option of putting in our
on-line /e/ account credentials to synchronize the phone with our
cloud account. So far things were going fairly smoothly.
First
impressions
Once the setup process was complete,
/e/ displays a user interface that is made up of two screens and
we can use a swipe gesture to move between them. The main screen
has launcher icons for installed applications. Toward the bottom
of this screen are four icons set aside (fixed in place) which
provide access to the Phone app, a texting application, the
camera, and the web browser. The second screen featured two
widgets, one showing the local weather and another which showed
recommended (typically recently used) applications I might want to
launch again. Along the top of both screens is a status bar that
can be pulled down to see notifications and access some settings.
At the very bottom of the display are three buttons which should
be familiar to Android users, the Back, Home, and Open Windows
buttons. The default wallpaper for /e/ is bright and mostly
orange, which reminds me of a close-up view of the Firefox logo.
Included software
The /e/ phone
arrived with several apps already installed for me. The line-up
included a calculator, calendar, the Chromium browser (re-branded
as the /e/ browser). The device also features a clock, file
manager, photo gallery, camera, mail client, music player, and
note taking app. There is an audio recorder, a task tracker, the
Magic Earth GPS/maps application, and a weather application. There
is also a phone call making application and texting app to round
out the experience.
Playing around with the included
software, I generally found things worked well and as expected. It
has been about three years since I last used an Android phone for
any extended period of time, but it was fairly easy for me to get
back into the habit of using the Android-style applications. The
phone running /e/ was very responsive and I liked how snappy it
was and how smoothly the user interface performed.
One
of the few problems I had when using the Samsung phone was getting
accurate location information. For instance, when I was using the
Maps app, at first my perceived location was off by several
kilometres. After a reboot, the GPS managed to place my position
closer, but still off by several blocks. I tried the Maps app a
few times and it never got more accurate than a few blocks away
from my actual position. If I manually entered my current
location, the GPS functions would work and provide directions to
where I wanted to go, but it did require that I tell the phone
where it was and prepare to slightly adjust my expectations of the
directions given.
The
other GPS-related quirk I ran into came from the Weather app.
There is a default widget on the second screen which shows the
current weather forecast and, as far as I could tell, it
accurately displayed both my location and the local weather.
Tapping the weather widget opened the full Weather app. By default
the Weather app showed my position as being in London, England
rather than Canada. I went into the app's settings and tried to
enable location data, but this failed with an error reporting I
needed to grant the app permission to access the GPS data. This
seemed like a good idea, but it was not immediately clear if I
could do this from within the app. I found that clicking the app's
Update Location button did bring up a prompt to get access to
location data, but the lookup failed. I had to close the app and
re-open it before it would update its position. Then it did show
weather data for a town in my province in Canada, just not the
town I was in. I chalked this up to being "close enough"
for all practical purposes.
Hardware
specifications
Though the phone's hardware was not my focus during my
trial, the platform always plays a role in how well an operating
system works. The detailed
specifications of the Samsung device list it has having an
octa-core CPU running at up to 3GHz. My device shipped with 64GB
of storage, 8.3GB of which was used for the operating system. The
phone offered 3.5GB of RAM and I generally used about 1.9GB of
memory when the phone first booted.
The Samsung offers
two cameras, a 12 megapixel camera in the back and an 8 megapixel
view in the front. The interface was very responsive and smooth
during my trial. Apps opened quickly and gestures responded
immediately to my touch.
The phone's hardware all
worked smoothly, including wireless networking, the microphone,
camera, and (with some quirks) GPS. I did not have any cause to
test Bluetooth connections, but the phone enables Bluetooth by
default.
Adding
new apps
Downloading new applications on /e/ is quite straight
forward. There is an icon labelled Apps on the main screen and
tapping it opens the phone's software centre. The centre is
arranged much the same way as the Google Play store or the Linux
Mint software centre. The front page of the store shows
popular items we can scroll through and new programs can be
installed with the tap of a button. Tabs at the bottom of the
store's page allow us to browse through categories of software or
search for apps by name. The store can also handle updates to
programs we have already installed.
My
experience with the Apps store was entirely painless and I found
it easy to navigate. The interface was snappy and smooth. If I had
any complaint it might be that the store's main page looks a
little crowded on the Samsung's screen, but it is a small concern.
Functionally and visually the store is quite good and I had no
problems hunting down new applications.
I went looking
for quite a few programs and found lots of popular Android apps,
including Spotify, Firefox, Telegram, WhatsApp Messenger, the
F-Droid open software centre, Facebook, Plants vs Zombies 2, KDE
Connect, and so on. In short, there seems to be no shortage of
applications. However, not all programs available in Google's Play
store are available through the /e/ store. If you need an
application which is currently missing there is an option in the
Apps store to request the app be added.
The one issue
I did have was at one point the /e/ phone popped up a notification
that let me know there was an app update waiting to be installed.
Tapping the notification opened the Apps store and I tapped the
Updates tab. The Updates tab showed there were no new downloads
available. The next day I checked back and there was one update
listed (for KDE Connect), which updated without any problems.
On-line services
Earlier I
mentioned signing up for an account which provides on-line storage
and synchronization options. There is an on-line portal we can
sign into that is basically Nextcloud with modules set up for
handling e-mail, contacts, tasks, and a calendar. The web-based
service is quite useful and I think its ability to sync data,
especially calendar appointments and contacts, will do nicely to
fill in for Google's equivalents. The only problem I potentially
see is sharing these features with other users. I know several
families who coordinate through Google Calendar and I don't think
most people are going to be prepared to switch or coordinate with
someone who insists on using the Nextcloud calendar instead.
That
being said, the on-line storage works very well. Photos,
appointments, and contacts all sync automatically when we enable
our account on the /e/ phone. Sometimes it takes a while for items
to sync and it looks like the on-line Documents folder does not
sync down to the phone, but the other folders do sync in both
directions and it all works transparently.
Observations
and other features
The /e/ phone allows users to
apply permissions or restrictions dealing with a wide variety of
access for each app. We can adjust access to contacts, our
calendar, local storage, the microphone, and so on. Things tend to
be pretty locked down by default. This is good for security,
though sometimes inconvenient. For example, I had to grant the web
browser permission to save files to my phone, then grant
permission to open the file I had just saved. This sort of
fine-grained permission is a careful balancing act between
providing safe defaults and not inadvertently training the user to
simply tap through permission prompts. For the most part I think
/e/ does a good job in this arena, keeping things locked down, but
usually not too much.
It took me a while to find
software updates for the base operating system. These updates can
be found in the Settings panel, under the "About phone"
screen. Specifically, the item we need to look at is called
"LineageOS Updates". When I began using the phone there
were two updates available. I installed the latest, which rebooted
my phone, installed the update cleanly and caused the older update
to be hidden. The update, which was 719MB in size, went smoothly.
However, when I installed the update, I discovered
vibration feedback (when typing) was turned on. I had disabled
vibration feedback when I first started using the phone. The
setting was still off under the vibrations and notifications
settings so I had to spend a while hunting down where else I had
to disable the physical feedback. I eventually found it tucked
away under Settings->System->Languages & Input->
Keyboard & Inputs->Virtual Keyboard. It was a long dig
down, but it allowed me to keep my phone from vibrating whenever I
was typing.
Earlier
I mentioned updates to the /e/ operating system can be found under
a section of the Settings panel under the heading of LineageOS
Updates. This highlights an interesting issue of identification I
kept seeing. On the surface everything is branded as "e"
or "/e/".
But scratch the surface and we see the phone
refer to itself as being "Powered by Android", or as
running LineageOS, or running Linux. For example, the "About
phone" screen identifies the phone as Android 8.1.0 and
LineageOS 0.7, running Linux 4.9.133 with SELinux enabled. The
on-line cloud storage, on the surface, refers to itself as "e"
and copyrighted by the "e Foundation", but digging into
some screens causes the portal to refer to itself as Nextcloud.
For people who never peek beneath the surface, these
quirks of identity probably don't matter. However, it is one of
those little things that can confuse people when they are poking
around or trying to get support. Hopefully the rebranding will
become more complete over time.
On a separate topic, I
could not get my desktop computer, running GNU/Linux, to talk over
USB with the /e/ phone. Even after confirming the phone's MTP
protocol was enabled, and after trying multiple file managers on
the desktop (including Dolphin and Thunar) I was unable to
directly access pictures or files on the phone from my desktop.
Luckily, the /e/ phone's software centre includes the
KDE Connect
service. This allows the phone to share files, notifications, and
some other features with a desktop computer. KDE Connect is
probably the one important tool I miss when I'm not running
Android on my phone, and it was nice to see this service is
available.
Conclusions
One of the tricky aspects of evaluating /e/,
especially at this early stage, was trying to decide on what my
perspective should be going into this review. Should I view /e/
from the point of view of a UBports
user looking at alternatives? A former Android user interested in
an un-Googled alternative? A relative novice to technology looking
at phone options and comparing /e/ against iOS and Android? A
privacy enthusiastic looking for a more locked down device? A
person can try to wear a lot of different hats when looking at a
new piece of technology and I was not sure the best angle to use
when approaching /e/.
For the most part I tried to
view /e/ through two lenses: 1. Would it function as a good
alternative for me personally when compared to UBports? 2. Could I
hand this phone over to non-technology enthusiasts (like a parent
or friend) and have them use it instead of iOS or Android?
Looking at /e/ as an alternative to UBports, I see
some immediate benefits to /e/. It has a much larger and more
mainstream application ecosystem. The /e/ platform runs more
programs other people are likely to be using and this makes it
easier to coordinate with other people. The /e/ phone has more
settings and fine-tuning options. This makes for a much more
cluttered Settings panel, but it also offers more control. Perhaps
the best feature though is the on-line storage and sync options.
UBports doesn't really have a competitor to Google services, like
calendar and contact synchronization, and it is a feature I miss.
The Nextcloud web interface is quite good and I see it as not only
better than anything in the UBports ecosystem, I'd argue that it
beats Google's services in terms of friendliness and
accessibility. The only problem is getting people you coordinate
with on-line to use Nextcloud instead of Google Calendar or Google
Docs.
Personally, I think UBports does have a few
benefits. It offers a full GNU/Linux platform, compared to
Android's (or /e/'s) somewhat bare bones underpinnings. UBports
also streamlines its settings more and has a much more flexible
and powerful status bar compared to /e/.
On the whole,
I feel UBports provides the better base operating system while /e/
is providing a better and more powerful ecosystem around the
phone. The apps and services /e/ offers are far and away richer
than anything UBports supplies, but I like the UBports interface
and low-level features better.
As to whether I could
hand this phone over to a non-technical user, I experimented by
doing just that. I met with a current iOS/iPhone user and asked
her to play around with my new phone. She had no trouble setting
up tasks, appointments, browsing the web, and installing and
accessing Spotify. While the interface was slightly unfamiliar, as
it was from the Android family rather than the Apple family of
operating systems, she had no trouble getting used to the
experience. In fact, since she was accustomed to tapping buttons
instead of swiping (which is the common interaction on UBports)
she adjusted faster to the new phone than I did.
The
/e/ phone does not offer all the apps Android does, and it might
not be entirely polished yet in the re-branding experience.
However, it does provide a very solid, mostly Android compatible
experience without the Google bits. The /e/ team offers a wider
range of hardware support than most other iOS and Android
competitors, it offers most of the popular Android apps people
will probably want to use (I only discovered a few missing items I
wanted), and the on-line cloud services are better than those of
any other phone I've used (including Ubuntu One and Google).
I'd
certainly recommend /e/ for more technical users who can work
around minor rough edges and who won't get confused by the unusual
branding and semi-frequent permission prompts. I'm not sure if I'd
hand one of these phones over to an Android power-user who uses a
lot of niche apps, but this phone would certainly do well in the
hands of, for instance, my parents or other users who tend to
interact with their phones for texting, phone calls, and the
calendar without using many exotic applications.
This
phone feels like a good first version from the /e/ team and, as
the web portal firms up and more Android apps are imported into
the project's software centre, I feel I will be comfortable
recommending this platform to just about anyone who doesn't
specifically need (or want) Google services.
1.
Sometimes the phone identified itself as a Galaxy S8, though
usually as an S9, depending on the screen or service I was using.
Memory was also reported differently in various areas. The command
line reports 3.5GB of RAM, the "About phone" screen
lists 3.3GB, and the on-line specifications claim the phone offers
4GB of RAM. There is no practical difference in either case, but I
find the little variations interesting.
As I still
have the /e/ phone and am continuing to play with it, I will be
happy to answer questions about the device's software and
services. Should you have a question about the /e/ phone, please
leave a comment
below or e-mail me. I
will publish my answers in a future issue of DistroWatch Weekly. |
