The Pine64 open source community has announced that it is discontinuing production and sales of the PinePhone Pro smartphone. Spare parts for the PinePhone Pro will continue to be produced for about two years. The reason cited for the project's demise is low demand, which is insufficient to continue production.
There are no plans to create new smartphone models yet, but the first PinePhone model, released since 2020, will remain on sale. The PineNote e-book reader and the PineTab2 tablet, built on the Rockchip RK3566 SoC with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor (1.8 GHz) and an ARM Mali-G52 EE GPU, will also remain on sale. In the future, the Pine64 community intends to focus on creating boards and devices based on the RISC-V architecture, in addition to the already released Oz64, STAR64, StarPro64 and Alpha One.
The PinePhone Pro smartphone was positioned as a device for enthusiasts who were tired of Android and iOS, and want to get a fully controlled and secure environment based on alternative open Linux-platforms. The device was built on the RK3399S SoC, developed jointly with Rockchip (two ARM Cortex-A72 cores, four ARM Cortex-A53 1.5GHz cores, and a Mali T860 500MHz GPU). It allowed hardware-level disabling of LTE/GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, cameras, and microphone. Expansion modules could be installed in place of the back cover.
When connected to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, the PinePhone Pro could be used as a portable workstation, capable of watching 1080p video. The main firmware was based on Manjaro. Linux with the KDE Plasma Mobile user environment and postmarketOS, but additional builds based on Mobian, Nemo Mobile, Fedora, and Arch were also provided. Linux, Gentoo, GloDroid (LineageOS port), LuneOS (webOS), NixOS, FreeBSD and Ubuntu Touch.
Source: opennet.ru
