No camera on 10 V: another perspective

General
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I started daily driving my 10 V because of problems with my C2. This was a few months ago.

I thought I could live without a working camera.

Now, however, I am beginning to regard it as a feature. There is so much stuff I would like to share, and now I can’t easily do so. It makes me think again, shrug, and just don’t share and don’t care. And if I really really really wanna share a picture, I can make it with another device.
I used to have so much fun tinkering with my server. Having it run immich finally gave me the tools to organise the heap of photos I have. Now I realise how much fun I have not tinkering with my server. Of course I have valuable pictures: our wedding, our vacation to Japan, birth of our 1st kid, and our 2nd kid, … But these kind of pictures I could easily plan for. Wedding pictures are made by someone else, and for the other events, getting another camera in advance or asking someone else is an easy solution.
Recently, not being able to make pictures of a large 3d-printing project to share with friends, made me wrapping everything in bubblewrap and just take it with me when we gathered together on a wednesday evening.

This is not sarcasm. I’m actually beginning like not having a camera on my phone.

I understand this might be a hot take, and a camera might be essential for others. Maybe this post ends up being just clutter. But I wanted to share me perspective nonetheless.

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I hear you. I spent a year and a half on a flip phone. It could take pictures, but they were of such poor quality it wasn’t worth bothering with. Even though I now have a Fairphone 5 with a perfectly decent camera, I don’t use it much. Maybe it got me out of the habit . . . :thinking:

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Many of my acquaintances and I take professional DSLR cameras on trips. These people own flagship smartphones like the latest Google Pixel devices and still say that you can see the difference compared to professional cameras. The cameras all have Wi-Fi, or you can upgrade them like I did with a Wi-Fi-enabled SD card and download the pictures to your Sailfish phone using well-known APIs. It’s not rocket science! The smartphone cameras are good for snapshots, but nothing more.

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I don´t know why your post is hidden. I was able to read your comment in my e-mail. I think it was a bit snarky, but really good reply.

I think you misunderstood my post, however, not by much. I wanted to share my positive experiences with not having a camera on me. I am not saying it is better to not have a camera, although I understand if you would have thought I did. However, I do think that a lot, maybe most people would benefit from a break from having a camera (or internet, of a phone) with them, but that’s another topic. Here, I just wanted to share a positive perspective.

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The same reasoning applies to many (most) other aspects of modern technology: if you’ve had it for a while and suddenly you don’t, it’s frustrating, but after a while you notice that you were actually more frustrated when you still had it. Social media are an obvious example that the world would be better off without, but also in general, so many things are made to be addictive. Even a fully working up-to-date browser has the downside that it causes you to spend more time on your phone that you could have spent doing something more interesting. Having hundreds of messaging apps (I suppose you could also classify them as social media) to talk to everyone all the time means you’ve already said everything you were going to say online and have less of a reason to meet up in real life anymore - just look at how children these days often interact, even when they’re together they’re still all on their phones and not really talking with each other because everyone already heard the latest news, already discussed the latest topics, already saw the latest videos, already heard the latest music, … Not all of it is those apps’ fault, either, humans are just very social so they’ll grab any opportunity to be social as soon as it presents itself, and considering the messaging apps are always there and their friends are always online, it’s only logical that we choose the path of least resistance. Our brains haven’t yet evolved from the “this could be the last time we’re able to speak with each other” times.

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Well, same way I could express my positive experiences of not having not just camera, but the entire phone with me. No disturbing calls or messages, no time wasted on browsing social media or web pages, peace of mind. So maybe we don’t need not just the camera on the 10 V but actually the 10 V (or any other model) in general :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: But who’d need SFOS in such case?

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Everything in moderation. But yeah, sometimes it is good to leave the phone at home. Back when I was using android for 2 months, I quickly went to leaving my phone at home almost every day. Nowadays, I like having my phone with me. But detoxing still is good sometimes.

Everyone not having a 10V.

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I meant, as per my positive experience of not having a phone in general with me. Not just the camera. So it’s definitely not limited to 10 V. I get the very same undisturbed peace of mind no matter if I forget to take with me the 10 V, or the 10 III, or even the recently bought 1 IV :slight_smile:

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I got that. Yesterday night I was a bit too tired to comprehensively tell some kind of joke that I am still not able to tell, and I’m not sure it’s that funny. But I tried anyway. So never mind.

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Not having a camera on my 10 IV made me get a mirrorless camera, made me write the FishEye app, and got me into a new hobby :smiling_face_with_tear:

But let’s be real here: no support for the camera module trivially turns a lot of newcomers away. I don’t think that’s something we would truly want.

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Oh, no. We want a working camera. But I don’t care anymore.

Even though I already have too many hobbys.

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I don’t care anymore, either, ever since I bought the fantastic 1 IV. One person, the author of that community port for the Nagara platform, was able to do much more within much shorter period of time for the 1 IV and 5 IV than the entire Jolla during the last 1,5 years for the 10 V. So… f**k the 10 V, long live the 1 IV :smiling_face:

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That’s a little bit unfair. All ports rely on the work done by Jolla before.

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One doesn’t contradict the other. I only said that what rinigus did within less than a year specifically for the 1 IV (that also including him porting LineageOS 21 to that device as the needed base for the port) was much more than what whole Jolla did in 1,5 years specifically for the 10 IV & V.

Which absolutely doesn’t negate or in any way diminish the whole rest of Jolla’s 13 years of existence and achievements. They’ve been doing a fantastic job in general, but not much when it comes to 10 IV & V. Once again, one doesn’t contradict the other.

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The Rinigus ports are of high quality, without a doubt. I still have a Sony XZ2 Compact as a backup device on hand.

Jolla certainly had different expectations regarding the Sony Xperia 10 IV and V. All the issues with the blobs, etc. They surely have their reasons for not using LineageOS as a base and sticking with it. Perhaps someone could explain this technically, it would be interesting.

When the Jolla C2 and the availability of the 10 IV and V were announced, I suspected, based on the experiences of some users in the forum regarding the 10 III, that it would be difficult and take a long time for a stable release to come out. The extent of the delays was something that, in my opinion, no one could have anticipated. That’s why I opted for the Jolla C2, and in my view, they did a great job; it has become my daily driver since the beginning of the Jolla C2-Release in November 2024. I wish Jolla success in achieving the same or even faster results with the J2.

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I’m happy for you. I wish I had the same experiences. My C2 is completely unusable. The gyroscope doesn’t pass the hardware test, bluetooth and wifi very frequently disconnecting (sometimes stable for hours, sometimes only seconds), with or without the OS knowing it. Reflashing didn’t help.

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That difference between LineageOS (degoogled Android) and proper Linux like SFOS was discussed many times.

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Well, I can’t say much about their reasoning, especially legal aspects on international level. But if others can use LOS as base for their OS or distros (and some have been doing it for years) then it must be legally doable. At least, after all these years, I haven’t heard of any legal problems of either the community behind LOS itself, or the foundation behind /e/OS, or the GrapheneOS community, actually anyone.

All I know is that using LOS base is a completely different quality level than those damned Sony AOSP blobs. Shortly speaking, everything just works, power consumption is on the stock Android level (and not 5x that), etc. Sitting inside my home, far from window, I enable GPS and get fix within 10 seconds, I do not lose audio after doing so, everything just works.

As for the C2, it came with its own problems, too, and some of them persist until very today. So does it really differ much from e.g. the 10 III in this regard? IMO not much, it actually doesn’t differ much from Xperias (i.e. C2 also being some other company’s phone, just Jolla branded unlike the Sonys) where Jolla must also get some blobs or drivers from the manufacturer, and we don’t really know how much more than Sony the Reeder (or whatever it’s called) company is willing to cooperate with them. Maybe just like Sony, they provided (sold?) Jolla some initial support and now Jolla is on their own, trying to reverse engineer it to fix issues, or being asked to pay extra. All I see is that there are still many people who consider the C2 unusable even now, after such a long time since release.

IMO, Jolla always tries to go the easy way, with usually turns out to be the hard one.

But, as I wrote, after waiting for 1,5 years I no longer care. I’m glad eventually I decided to buy the 1 IV and within minutes, thanks to Rinigus’ hard work, I got a SFOS device light years ahead of the 10 V in terms of stability, functionality, etc. So I no longer have to analyze what prevents Jolla from using LOS as base, because - fortunately - others can and do, resulting in great working SFOS phones.

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You must have misunderstood something. It wasn’t about differences between LOS and SFOS, but about using LOS as base for SFOS instead of flawed and buggy Sony blobs, which is what the best existing SFOS community ports (e.g. for Tama and Nagara platforms) have been doing for years with fantastic results. Absolutely nothing to do with “degoogled Android” vs. “proper Linux”.