SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 $149.
The phone's specs aren't great, but it does include a headphone jack (I wonder if it's capable of using the JACK audio system?) and the article notes that it may provide physical switches for disabling various components. The company behind it, Pine64, also produce the PineBook Linux laptop, which also use an ARM processor.
Source: https://fossbytes.com/pinephone-linux-smartphone-149/
Related: Kickstarter: Pine A64, Cheaper and More Powerful than Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @01:02PM
They sell the "compute module" for 30$ 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.