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
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @10:52PM (3 children)
My guess is they aren't guaranteeing open hardware/software, just that it runs linux and has physical switches.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by petecox on Saturday February 02 2019, @12:32AM (2 children)
Pine is providing a commodity phone based on similar Pine64 offerings with a mainline kernel. For userspace, they've engaged Plasma Mobile and Ubuntu Touch developers to port their offerings (and mention maemo-leste and postmarketos in their forum post).
Purism have a NIH approach of writing yet another foss phone UI based on Gnome.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @06:15PM (1 child)
whatever. i may like the gnome offering.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03 2019, @09:58AM
A phrase nobody has heard since 1997.