Pine64
Yesterday, Pine64 announced the end of the PinePhone UBPorts Community Edition campaign, but more importantly, the company declared the start of the postmarketOS Community Edition campaign. The base version of the new version of PinePhones shares the same price of $ 149 and the same basic technical specifications as the original developer edition, but there is also a new updated “Convergence Package” available at $ 199.
Before anyone gets too excited, we must make one thing clear: These devices, while attractively priced, should be considered beta devices for experimenters to experiment and play. They are no However, fully functional phones, and in their current state of development, are unlikely to be anyone’s full-time, everyday smartphone. The apps still don’t work, including calls, and the battery life still leaves a lot to be desired.
Convergence package
In June, post-market Martijn Braam demonstrated the new PinePhone dock.
The convergence pack raises the PinePhone’s specs from 2GiB RAM to 3GIB while internal storage jumps from 16GB eMMC to 32GB eMMC. The package also adds a USB-C cradle to the phone; the base can charge the phone and offer two USB2 ports, a 100Mbps Ethernet port and an HDMI port.
There’s nothing slick about this cradle – it connects to the phone via a simple cable instead of a cradle connector, its old-school 100Mbps Ethernet port, and its USB Type-A ports are just USB2. That said, it is an interesting step towards true convergence, allowing a mostly portable pocket device to transform into a reasonable “desktop” approach with a single connection.
The functionality of the external monitor seems very limited in the postmarket developer Martijn Braam demo video for June, but everything is still under heavy development. We hope to have a PinePhone with a Convergence Package in our hands sometime in August, and then we’ll update it with the current state of affairs.
PinePhone operating systems
If you’re not fully up-to-date with alternative phone operating systems, UBPorts maintains and continues to develop the Ubuntu Touch operating system that Canonical abandoned in 2017. The original PinePhone developer edition Ron reviewed in January required users to display their own systems. operational, but the subsequent community edition featured Ubuntu Touch pre-run, and all proceeds from the sales of that CE were donated to the UBPorts foundation to help fund ongoing maintenance and development.
The new edition of the postmarketOS community comes similarly with postmarketOS, a beta smartphone operating system that aims to look and feel like “a true Linux distribution.” Another major claim to fame for postmarketOS is its modular design: Most smartphone operating systems rely on separate monolithic images for each device they can run on, but postmarketOS instead uses a universal operating system image, with (ideally) a single device package that meets the specific hardware needs of a given phone.
If neither Ubuntu Touch nor postmarketOS floats your ship, you may want to keep an eye on GloDroid, an AOSP (Android Open Source Project) operating system that targets Allwinner-based devices like PinePhone, PineTab, and Raspberry Pi 4. For now, This is also a beta project, although precompiled system images for various devices (including the PinePhone) are available, still labeled Work In Progress, and not yet production ready.
One of the nice things about PinePhone is that its boot process has been designed from the start for distributors: PinePhone users don’t need to wipe internal storage every time they change the operating system, since the system supports booting directly from micro SD card. This makes it easy to experiment with the wide variety of software out there without the pressure of removing any job or success you’ve had with the last thing you tried, or just jumping back and forth for fun.
Reminder: beta projects are beta
We already said this, but it bears repeating: The PinePhone is not a mass market product. It is a fun and inexpensive experimental platform for manufacturers and developers. If you want to see the current state of alternative mobile operating systems, it’s hard to imagine a better purchase than the PinePhone: it’s cheap, widely supported, and supports easy multi-booting from microSD cards without the need to constantly wipe internal Storage.
But none of the available OS options should be considered “production ready” yet, and by mass-market consumer standards, neither should the phone itself. As an example, Pine64 warns users that while screen dead pixels are relatively rare, it does not consider 1-3 of them to warrant replacement. Instead, it asks users to demand a replacement or refund for that reason that they simply don’t buy the phone.
The Pine64 store is closed for maintenance at press time, apparently overwhelmed by incoming orders (one of which was ours). Shipping of the new series of phones is expected to begin in late August.
