The Pine64 community, which creates open-source devices, has announced that it is accepting pre-orders for the PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition smartphone. Pre-orders submitted by January 18th are expected to ship in late January or early February. For orders after January 18th, delivery will be delayed until the end of the Chinese New Year holiday. The device costs $399, which is more than twice as expensive as the first PinePhone model, but the price increase is justified by a significant upgrade in hardware.
The PinePhone Pro continues to be positioned as a device for enthusiasts who are tired of Android and iOS and want a fully controlled and secure environment based on alternative open Linux platforms. The smartphone is built on the Rockchip RK3399S SoC with two ARM Cortex-A72 cores and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores operating at 1.5GHz, as well as a quad-core ARM Mali T860 (500MHz) GPU. The RK3399S chip was implemented specifically for PinePhone Pro together with Rockchip engineers and includes additional energy-saving mechanisms and a special sleep mode that allows you to receive calls and SMS.
The device is equipped with 4 GB of RAM, 128GB eMMC (internal) and two cameras (5 Mpx OmniVision OV5640 and 13Mpx Sony IMX258). In comparison, the first PinePhone came with 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB eMMC and 2 and 5Mpx cameras. As in the previous model, a 6-inch IPS screen with a resolution of 1440 Γ 720 is used, but it is better protected thanks to the use of Gorilla Glass 4. PinePhone Pro is fully compatible with add-ons that plug in instead of the back cover previously released for the first model and PinePhone are almost indistinguishable).
From the filling of PinePhone Pro, one can also note Micro SD (with support for booting from an SD card), a USB-C port with USB 3.0 and a combined video output for connecting a monitor, Wi-Fi 802.11 ac, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, GPS-A, GLONASS, UART (via headphone jack), 3000mAh battery (fast charge at 15W) . As in the first model, the new device allows you to turn off LTE / GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, cameras and a microphone at the hardware level. Size 160.8 x 76.6 x 11.1mm (2mm thinner than the first PinePhone). Weight 215 gr.
The performance of the PinePhone Pro is comparable to today's mid-range Android smartphones and about 20% slower than the Pinebook Pro laptop. By connecting a keyboard, mouse and monitor, PinePhone Pro can be used as a portable workstation suitable for watching 1080p video and performing tasks such as photo editing and office suite.
By default, PinePhone Pro comes with the Manjaro Linux distribution and the KDE Plasma Mobile user environment. The firmware uses the regular Linux kernel (the patches necessary to support the hardware are included in the main kernel) and open drivers. In parallel, alternative assemblies with firmware based on platforms such as postmarketOS, UBports, Maemo Leste, Manjaro, LuneOS, Nemo Mobile, Arch Linux, NixOS, Sailfish, OpenMandriva, Mobian and DanctNIX, which can be installed or loaded from an SD card, are being developed.
The Manjaro distribution is based on the Arch Linux package base and uses its own BoxIt toolkit, designed in the image of Git. The repository is maintained on the principle of continuous inclusion of updates (rolling), but new versions go through an additional stage of stabilization. The KDE Plasma Mobile user environment is based on the Plasma 5 mobile desktop edition, the KDE Frameworks 5 libraries, the Ofono phone stack, and the Telepathy communications framework. Qt, the Mauikit component set, and the Kirigami framework are used to create the application interface. The kwin_wayland composite server is used to display graphics. PulseAudio is used for sound processing.
Includes apps such as KDE Connect to pair your phone with your desktop, Okular document viewer, VVave music player, Koko and Pix image viewers, buho note taking system, calindori calendar planner, Index file manager, Discover app manager, sending SMS Spacebar, plasma-phonebook address book, plasma-dialer phone call interface, plasma-angelfish browser and Spectral messenger.
Source: opennet.ru