Last year, Pine64 gave us a smartphone running Linux rather than iOS or Android called the PinePhone. Now its successor has launched and a Developer Edition is available to pre-order.
The PinePhone Pro costs $399 plus whatever shipping and import taxes end up being applied for your country of residence. What you’ll receive is a phone sporting a 6-inch (1,440-by-720) in-cell IPS display protected by Gorilla Glass 4. It’s powered by a six-core Rockchip RK3399S 64bit SoC running at 1.5GHz and a four-core ARM Mali T860 GPU running at 500MHz. That’s complimented by 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 128GB of eMMC flash storage. Performance is rated to be on a par with mid-range Andoid handsets.
On the rear of this 4G LTE phone is a 13MP Sony IMX258 camera and on the front a 5MP selfie camera. Charging is via a USB-C port which includes support for 15W fast charging of the 3,000mAh Samsung battery. There’s also an optional micro SD card slot and a headphone port.
Pine64 is making it very clear this smartphone is not for everyone, with a note on the product page stating:
“If you depend on proprietary mainstream mobile messenger applications, banking applications, use loyalty or travel apps, consume DRM media, or play mobile video games on your fruit or Android smartphone, then the PinePhone Pro is likely not for you.”
Pine64 admits mobile Linux “isn’t in a state that could satisfy most mainstream electronics consumers,” but a market for the phone clearly exists based on sales and feedback regarding the previous model. There’s also no way the mobile Linux experience is going to improve unless there is hardware out there developers can experiment with and get excited about.
As we saw with the recent announcement of the Fairphone 4, the PinePhone Pro is designed to be user repairable and spare parts will be sold through the Pine Store. It’s a highly-configurable handset because it runs Linux, with the default operating system being Manjaro Linux combined with the KDE Plasma Mobile graphical environment. We can expect support for other distributions to appear just like they did for the original PinePhone, and it’s got a number of physical hardware kill switches included for extra peace of mind.
