For me, the killer feature is that pinephone runs mainline kernel.
According to https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices - that's a rather uncommon thing to have, and pretty much unobtainable for a recent device (other than pine64/librem5).
You can buy the used devices cheaper than Pinephone and play with them. Not perfect hardware support, but enough for hackable mobile device with privacy and low-distraction mode.
Admittedly, that's doubly concerning. Pine chooses the BoM; we don't.
And if they're choosing unsupported/unsupportable chips without doing the barest of legwork to get them functional (or hell, get docs public), then that's a huge problem.
Pine should be showing on their pages a hardware matrix showing what works and what doesn't. The Pinephone Pro doesn't qualify for the definition "phone".
The article doesn't mention the PinePhone, which I consider pretty shoddy journalism.
The PinePhone is a competing project with slightly lower specs, similarly good FOSS purity, that is slimmer, ships today and costs 1/5 of the price.
They clearly market it as being for tinkerers at this point and all the software support Pine64 is working on is getting the kernel running, leaving the rest up to the 5 (!) involved distribution communities.
>Beta Edition PinePhones are aimed solely at early adopters. More specifically, only intend for these units to find their way into the hands of users with extensive Linux experience.
The point still applies. Do you really expect Linaro or Bootlin to be working on completing mainline support for the PinePhone, Pinephone Pro and other Pine64 devices? That seems like it would be a job for the distros.
I've tried and tinkered with all but the newest pinephone release. I sucks vs a similarly priced android phone but its working way more than I ever expected it to work this early on.
Hopefully we can get some solid modern hardware support in a linux handheld eventually. It would be nice if Qualcomm could open up a few things and make it easier for open source phone hobbyists to get things going.
The Pine64 community has been steadily growing and at least gives me confidence in what they can do with the older hardware the pinephone is working with.
I never understood why the PinePhone does not ship with Mobian or PostmarketOS instead of Manjaro. Manjaro quickly felt buggy and fragile on the first minutes I tried it, while the two others felt more robust. I'd rather see the PinePhone ship with one of these distributions.
Why does Pine64 favor Manjaro so much? What do they gain by doing so?
[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
reply