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I can't find the info for the price, but I remember seeing it before and it was very low, like $200, which would make this a very exciting entry into the notAndroidOrIOS market. The Librem 5 was cool at first, until they started delaying it indefinitely and the price is too high for mass adoption. By having a very low price on the Pinephone they are courting a lot more tinkerers to get one and help develop the OS versus the Librem which people would kind of (rightly) expect to be fully-formed at launch.

    As things stand today, we expect a fully functional prototype in August

https://www.pine64.org/2019/06/06/june-2019-news-pinephone-p...

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Project_Don't_be_evil

discuss

allana|6 years ago

The Allwinner A64 platform has numerous developers working on it compared to the iMX8, which has really fleshed out fully featured hardware support over the last few years. Running most Linux distros should be a breeze on the Pinephone!

megous|6 years ago

That's a bit of an overstatement. It has some interested and active developers, but support is far from fleshed out, especially for the poratble device use.

There are lots of patches floating around, that you can apply to the mainline linux tree, to get CPU DVFS, thermal management, to improve I2S support, etc. Suspend to RAM is nowhere to be seen, leaving you with always ON SoC, which will drain the battery in half a day doing nothing.

It's all fixable, but let's not pretend A64 has fully fleshed out HW support in the mainline Linux kernel.

OTOH, there's a great potential, because Quectel EC25 broadband module also runs Linux and has some potential for being hackable:

https://projects.osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/wiki

So there's definitely a lot of fun to be had with the future PinePhone. You'll be able to log in to your broadband module and perhaps modify it:

https://projects.osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/wiki/EC...

RandomBacon|6 years ago

Thank you! I will keep an eye on this.