The Pine64 community, dedicated to creating open devices, has announced the discontinuation and cessation of sales of the PinePhone Pro smartphones. Spare parts for the PinePhone Pro will continue to be manufactured for about two more years. The reason for winding down the project is cited as low demand, insufficient to continue production.
Currently, there are no plans to develop new smartphone models, but the original PinePhone model, released in 2020, remains available for sale. The PineNote e-reader and the PineTab2 tablet, built on the Rockchip RK3566 SoC with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor (1.8 GHz) and ARM Mali-G52 EE GPU, will also continue to be sold. In the future, the Pine64 community intends to focus primarily on creating boards and devices based on the RISC-V architecture, in addition to those 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 wanted a fully controlled and secure environment based on alternative open Linux platforms. The device was built on a specially developed SoC RK3399S (two ARM Cortex-A72 cores, four ARM Cortex-A53 cores at 1.5 GHz, and a Mali T860 GPU at 500 MHz) in partnership with Rockchip, enabling hardware-level shutdowns of LTE/GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, cameras, and microphone. It supported the connection of expansion modules instead of a rear cover.
When connected to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, the PinePhone Pro could be used as a portable workstation capable of playing videos in 1080p quality. The main firmware was based on Manjaro Linux with KDE Plasma Mobile as the user environment and postmarketOS, but additional builds were provided based on Mobian, Nemo Mobile, Fedora, Arch Linux, Gentoo, GloDroid (a LineageOS port), LuneOS (webOS), NixOS, FreeBSD, and Ubuntu Touch.
Source: opennet.ru
