PinePhone Pro Linux smartphone to feature a power-optimized Rockchip RK3399S processor
Pine64 has now announced the PinePhone Pro Linux smartphone with a Rockchip RK3399S hexa-core processor clocked at 1.5 GHz, that's a power-optimized version of the popular Rockchip RK3399 processor. It will provide a noticeable upgrade to the PinePhone Linux smartphones launched in November 2019, which, by today's standards, is quite underpowered.
Besides the faster processor, PinePhone Pro also comes with 4GB RAM and 128 GB storage which should make it a better candidate at mobile desktop convergence, as well as a 5.95-inch display with 1440×720 resolution, a 13MP rear camera, a 5MP front-facing camera, and more.
[...] Pine64 collaborated with Rockchip to fine-tune the RK3399 SoC's performance so that it meets the necessary thermal and battery-consumption envelopes, as and as a result, RK3399S was born. Pine64 also explained Rockchip helped a great deal in enabling the PinePhone Pro's suspend state, which allows the smartphone to receive calls and SMS messages while preserving the battery.
[...] Just like most Pine64 products, the PinePhone Pro will rely on work from the community for software support, and the first PinePhone Pro devkit is up for pre-order for $399 plus shipping and eventual import taxes now with a clear focus on developers and established contributors, although newcomers with an established development record can also pre-order. Tech enthusiasts without a developer background are asked to wait a couple of more months for the second batch of PinePhone Pro "Explorer Edition" that is scheduled to be manufactured before the end of the year, and ship in early 2022. Additional information may also be found on the product page.
Also at Phoronix.
Previously: PinePhone Linux Smartphone Priced at $149 to Arrive This Year
How PINE64 is Creating a Device-Design Community to Compete with Raspberry Pi
PinePhone Braveheart Linux Smartphone Begins Shipping
Another Opportunity to Purchase a PinePhone
Related Stories
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
Smartphone users are usually torn between the two choice — Android or iOS. Their dominance is such that other competing OS like Windows, BlackBerry OS, or Symbian have almost been abandoned.Those who don't want either of them can opt for Pine64's Linux phone dubbed the PinePhone which offers good hardware and software at an affordable rate of $149.
The phone's specs aren't great, but it does include a headphone jack (I wonder if it's capable of using the JACK audio system?) and the article notes that it may provide physical switches for disabling various components. The company behind it, Pine64, also produce the PineBook Linux laptop, which also use an ARM processor.
Source: https://fossbytes.com/pinephone-linux-smartphone-149/
Related: Kickstarter: Pine A64, Cheaper and More Powerful than Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
Developers: How PINE64 is creating a community to compete with Raspberry Pi's
One of the consequences of the explosive popularity of the Raspberry Pi is the flourishing of competing ecosystems of single-board computers (SBCs). Aside from the accessibility a $35 price tag offers, the foremost benefit of the Raspberry Pi is the community—the proliferation of projects and integrations that center around the Raspberry Pi, and the ease-of-use that creates, makes competing products that look better on spec sheets a disappointment when taken out of the box.
PINE64 has attempted to head this off by fostering an involved community; the PINE64 website explains their philosophy as "the community gets to actively shape the devices, as well as the social platform, of PINE64 from the ground up. The goal is to deliver ARM64 devices that you really wish to engage with and a platform that you want to be a part of." The first-generation Pinebook was available in an 11.6" or 14" configuration, with a quad-core Allwinner A64, 2GB RAM, 16GB eMMC, and 1366x768 display for $99, beating Nicolas Negroponte's OLPC XO-1, a decade after that project sputtered.
PINE64 is differentiating itself by building not just SBCs, but notebooks, tablets, and phones with community input and feedback. Ahead of the release of the Pinebook Pro this summer, a Rockchip RK3399-based ARM laptop with 4GB LPDDR4 RAM, 64GB eMMC, and a 14" 1080p display, TechRepublic interviewed PINE64 community manager Lukasz Erecinski about the Pinebook Pro, and the PINE64 community philosophy.
Previously: Kickstarter: Pine A64, Cheaper and More Powerful than Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
PinePhone Linux Smartphone Priced at $149 to Arrive This Year
Pinebook Pro Update: The $199 Linux Laptop is Almost Ready to Go
The GNU/Linux-based smartphone, PinePhone, has begun shipping. It uses the same Quad-Core ARM Cortex A53 64-Bit System on a Chip (SOC) as the the Pine64 Single Board Computer (SBC) and thus it also runs mainstream GNU/Linux. The goal is to provide a hardware platform for a wider variety of Linux-on-Phone projects. Hardware availability is expected to be five years.
Lilliputing: PinePhone Braveheart Linux smartphone begins shipping January 17th
The PinePhone is an inexpensive smartphone designed to run Linux-based operating systems. Developed by the folks at Pine64, the $150 smartphone was first announced about a year ago — and this week the first units will ship.
Herald Writer: The PinePhone begins delivery—a Linux-powered smartphone for $150
The PinePhone is powered through an Allwinner A64 SoC, which options 4 Cortex A53 CPUs at 1.2GHz, constructed on an attractive historical 40nm procedure. This is similar chip the corporate makes use of at the PINE A64 unmarried board pc, a Raspberry Pi competitor. There are 2GB of RAM, a Mali-400 GPU, 16GB of garage, and a 2750mAh battery. The rear digicam is 5MP, the entrance digicam is 2MP, the show is a 1440×720 IPS LCD, and the battery is detachable. There is a headphone jack, a USB-C port, and strengthen for a MicroSD slot, which you'll if truth be told boot running techniques off of. The mobile modem is a big separate chip this is soldered onto the motherboard: a Quectel EG25-G.
Earlier on SN:
PinePhone Linux Smartphone Priced at $149 to Arrive This Year (2019)
Librem 5 Backers Have Begun Receiving Their Linux Phones (2019)
If you missed out on the last pre-order for the BraveHeart release of the PinePhone that shipped last January, you have another opportunity to buy now. What is it? According to their Wiki:
The PinePhone is a smartphone created by Pine64, capable of running mainline Linux and supported by many partner projects. The "BraveHeart" edition was the first publicly-available version of the phone, though it came without a fully functional OS (factory test image) and was geared specifically towards tinkerers and hackers. People looking for a stable consumer-grade phone should wait for the final release...
The "Community Edition: UBports" Limited Edition PinePhone is aimed primarily at UBports community members, willing to run their OS on a mainline Linux and provide feedback to UBports developers.
The "Community Edition: UBports" Edition PinePhone comes with UBports OS build installed. Please note that the OS build is still in a beta stage, and while most core functionality (phone calls, SMS messages, LTE, GPS and GPU acceleration) works, some elements remain a work-in-progress.
The phone seems to be the same hardware as the Braveheart and the same price $149.99 + shipping. Pine will donate $10 to the UBPorts Foundation for every phone purchased.
It comes pre-installed with UBPorts, but there is nothing keeping you from re-flashing to whichever OS you want. Currently there are several ports in progress like, Debian, PostmarketOS, SailfishOS, Maemo Leste, etc. Some of these can even make phone calls and sms texts already :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @05:31AM (5 children)
Their RockPro64 with more or less RK3399 innards sells for under a hundred bucks. This is a phone for true believers only. Global chip shortage inflating prices doesn't justify doubling the price over the regular version phone.
On the plus side, the next story on CNX states that they've achieved ARM certification w.r.t. UEFI
Windows 11 on this phone is only a matter of time!
(Score: 2) by tekk on Saturday October 16 2021, @05:40AM (4 children)
To be fair to them it's got a lot more than innards. You need the battery, the screen, the cameras, the cellular module, plus all the certification nonsense around selling a phone.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @05:50AM (3 children)
To an extent but the rest of the phone uses most of the same components from the one they sell for $199.
RK3399 debuted half a decade ago on Chromebooks and here they've underclocked a few.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @08:42AM
The original pinephones only had softstrapping from within the OS, right? So are these new physical switches hard switches that cut power to each component they are tied to? If so that might make the price tag of these new phones worth it compared to the regular Pinephones. If they're really just softstraps like the previous phones however, then it's kind of pointless, yet again. Can someone with the engineering background verify if the schematics are up yet?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @06:58PM (1 child)
> To an extent but the rest of the phone uses most of the same components from the one they sell for $199.
That isn't true.
This phone has a new Sony 15MP rear facing camera that already has good linux support.
Devs have already worked out the issues for the old phone's 5MP rear facing camera, so are using that as the front facing camera in this phone.
It has more and faster RAM
It has more and faster flash
It has a larger battery
They had to pay for new tooling to mold the midframe.
The modem is the same, and after all the efforts to reverse engineer it, and create a (mostly) free firmware for it, it makes sense to keep it. Folks are now running their own linux kernels (that they can trust to not be back-doored) on the pinephone modem now.
Agreed, though, the price is higher than I would like, and higher than the upgraded components seems to justify. For me, it is in the territory where it *needs* to be a daily driver to justify it. But, they have already secured components and factory space, so they know how much this thing is going to cost to make. So far, Pine64 seems to try to keep things as affordable as they can, so I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt, and assume that this *is* the cost differential in the current environment of shortages.
The announcement states they have enabled a sleep mode in the rk3999 used in this phone (no rk3999 board to date has supported sleep). And, they are underclocking it a bit (maybe undervolting too?). So, there is hope. But, the concern I have is for battery life. The rk3999 is pretty power hungry for a small battery powered device.
I have a pinephone. But, will wait until I hear how power consumption/battery life is working out before buying this one. If battery life is OK-ish (i.e., don't need to charge in the middle of the day with normal usage), then I want one. The main issue I have with the current pinephone is that the camera isn't good enough, so I have to carry a dedicated camera when I think I might want to take photos.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 16 2021, @07:23PM
Sounds like it is undervolted and underclocked, compared to other RK3399 devices.
I assume it leans on the A53 cores for the "suspend state". Maybe it only needs to use one of those cores while the screen is off.
SoCs built on modern nodes (~5nm vs 28nm) will dunk on it in the efficiency department, but the PinePhone Pro's lower clock speeds can mitigate battery life issues. It should be more responsive than a Raspberry Pi 4 for things like web browsing, especially with a more powerful and well-supported Mali GPU.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @07:06AM (6 children)
But I don't want 6 cores.
I want a phone that is a phone.
Trying to compete in the "mindless portable entertainment" market is doomed to failure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @07:14AM (2 children)
Do you want a smartphone or a feature phone.
6 and 8 cores are perfectly reasonable for smartphones because they use a mix of performance and efficiency clusters.
Mindless portable entertainment is the EASY part for the Pine phone. It is the voice calling and MMS that will probably suck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @08:48AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @10:10AM
Ok, I feel you.
They have a disclaimer that warns the phone experience could suck badly. But at least the work done on the original and other RK3399 products can apply to the Pro.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @11:54AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @08:38PM
You'd be shocked at how many deaf people own smart phones these days.
* pocketable computer
* instant messaging
That's exactly what they want. My mom got her first phone in her eighties, at the urging of all her friends.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 16 2021, @05:59PM
Calling what people carry around today "phones" is sort of like calling a 1980s home entertainment console with cassette, DVD, phono, radio, amplifier and speakers integrated a "phonograph player," but still missing the mark by another couple orders of magnitude.
If you want a "real phone," good luck getting an analog variety POTS working these days - most of the copper pair infrastructure is seriously degraded, especially for analog voice traffic in the unmodulated baseband.
If you want a "wireless phone," not some analog wireless that's tethered to within 100' of your base station, then you're on the cellular network, and you need significant processing power just to connect and stay connected.
Even if that's all that was provided, you'd need a SIM card reader and some interface to authenticate on the network once in a while.
What people carry around today are small screens with higher resolution than the best CAD workstations had 25 years ago, more processing power than "professional workstation" PCs had 15 years ago, multiple high resolution video cameras, microphones, speakers of shockingly high quality for their size and power, inertial navigation accelerometers, gyroscopes, usually magnetometers, sometimes baro-pressure sensors, always GPS, wireless (bluetooth) connection to various devices, oh - and it makes phone calls too.
What I find criminal is that the standard phone service quality is allowed to sink so low, when digital voice applications on the same device with the same connectivity are so much better.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 16 2021, @09:47AM (1 child)
The price seems a little high, but I'm interested anyway.
So, you shouldn't get one phone that runs great, and the next one a lemon. (Hello Intel and AMD)
Hmmm. 128 GB of storage. Not bad, not good. It would be nice to have a lot more . . . oh wiat! (SDCX up-to 2TB) Now, that's what I call storage! You can sneaker-net a lot of good things from home to school, from work to home, or whatever, all the while storing many gigs of music, videos, or whatever on your device.
Well, since I'm not a developer, I'll just hold off. See how the reviews go, and when the production run kicks off. Maybe then.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 16 2021, @06:02PM
To me, the PinePhone is a phone-form-factor desktop PC, that might also make phone calls, take pictures, etc. if they ever get the drivers figured out.
It's what Nokia should have made when they took over Qt. It's what Microsoft purchased and sank to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, then started digging. I suspect it's doomed to commercial failure, or at least dismal profitless purgatory for decades.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by HammeredGlass on Saturday October 16 2021, @12:48PM (3 children)
If that's the case, it's a total non-starter. Linux will never win over desktop/laptop life if a person EVER has to open a terminal to get basic things working.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @05:00PM (1 child)
Not unless you want to. There's plenty of friendly, easy to use Linux distributions where you don't have to touch the terminal unless you want to. And it's been this way for years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @08:42PM
You don't have to touch a terminal with Devuan (Debian without SystemD), even to install it unless you want to, these days.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @06:26PM
i poop on you. many poops!
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Sunday October 17 2021, @12:51PM (6 children)
Coincidentally pulled out the old Pinephone today to see where the software is at. Still no MMS but Ubuntu Touch gives me an error message that makes it look like it SHOULD be working and it's my fault that it isn't :/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 18 2021, @04:59AM (3 children)
Can it run Silence for SMS / MMS?
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Monday October 18 2021, @02:05PM (2 children)
Not sure - will look into it. Thanks for the suggestion.
Doesn't look like Silence is under active development though. Last commit was a year ago....
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Monday October 18 2021, @02:07PM (1 child)
Actually not an ideal solution as I need to be able to exchange MMS with people who are not going to want to run Silence just to communicate with me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 19 2021, @08:25AM
Silence falls back to normal SMS if you haven't exchanged keys with the recipient.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday October 19 2021, @02:36AM (1 child)
Let me wonder if purism has MMS.
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Sunday October 24 2021, @05:16AM
Great minds think alike.
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=45540&cid=1187994 [soylentnews.org]