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posted by takyon on Friday February 01 2019, @10:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the pining-for-the-torvalds dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @10:16PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @10:16PM (#795206)

    Seems to me the components would cost more than $149. Am I missing something?

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Friday February 01 2019, @10:20PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday February 01 2019, @10:20PM (#795208) Journal

    Allwinner ARM chips are cheap as fuck, and the rest of the specs aren't really top of the line either.

    If Amazon can sell a 7-inch tablet for $50, $150 seems believable for this.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @10:52PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @10:52PM (#795224)

    Not at all. you can buy decent Chinese phones all day long for ~200 so 150 and cut the margin a bit, more than doable.

    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday February 02 2019, @04:23AM (3 children)

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday February 02 2019, @04:23AM (#795312) Homepage

      I will not buy this. I do not buy Chink shit, nor will I buy anything else.

      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @08:53AM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @08:53AM (#795337)

        Enjoy getting your privacy ass-raped by jews.

        Even if you don't have a fagdroid or a goyphone, everyone around you does, and these things are always listening. Either move to a cabin in the woods or plug in to the botnet along with everybody else.

        • (Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Saturday February 02 2019, @12:22PM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday February 02 2019, @12:22PM (#795368) Journal

          The Kaczynski Dilemma

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03 2019, @05:36AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03 2019, @05:36AM (#795600)

          so our choices are

          1. privacy ass-raped by jews (which phone or whatever do they have?)
          2. privacy ass-raped by microsoft (american? or can we now say that they are indian?)
          3. privacy ass-raped by chinese (huawie)
          4. privacy ass-raped by samsung (can we call this Korean? )
          5. privacy ass-raped by google (they seem to be panracial with a lean towards panethnicity heading towards indian dominated)

          what is common here is that it does not matter who is doing it
          you are doing to be violated any which way you go

          it is like voting with two evil candidates? choose the lesser evil?

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @03:49PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @03:49PM (#795413)

      You can get a LeEco Le 2 [lineageos.org] for $100 over at aliexpress if you're going to run LineageOS anyhow. It's $150-200 worth of hardware (Qualcomm SoC, good screen, good battery, fingerprint scanner, decent camera, QC3 over TypeC so no headphone jack though...) compared to everything else around but the company doesn't support their cellular products anymore (they cut back the entire division to focus on smart TVs a couple of years ago). it's a clearance sale prince in a sense so they're not making a whole lot of profits off of it. But don't kid yourself. They're still in the green selling them.

      So, yeah. It's entirely possible to make a cheap good phone. Free open software is the problem since the graphics and baseband are typically blobed. The baseband ends up bootstarted along or before the compute processors with a blob on it's own processor that linux talks with over a TTY and an analog(?) mic lane. The graphics are shimmed around a kernel module. There supposed to be basebands out there that don't require blobs. And by that we're not saying you get to know what they're running. Rather, that the default ROM they ship with has been in the market long enough for the manufacturer to update to a relatively bug free state. The graphics will never be truly free over the shit ton of IP and trade secret violation going on in the industry. So your only hope is the reversed graphics stack... And while those are making progress, they're mostly limited to older hardware.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @01:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @01:02PM (#795376)

    They sell the "compute module" for 30$ and the board for $15. Considering they've been in business successfully for years, they can get the parts cheap enough, and probably save by making the end-user assemble it, add the storage, and load the software. So add +50 to the price for a decent sized eMMC or just use microsd and there's the cost difference. Maybe they're going with user-supplied batteries like it looks from the dev kit, or they might just be trying to move backstock on the batteries they sell. You can get everything to assemble a (shitty slow, but mainline linux on arm64) laptop from them for a little less than $150, so a phone isn't unbelievable. I'd be a lot more excited if they had an rk3399 compute module though! Mainline AND decent specs would be pretty awesome.