The first developer units of its PinePhone Pro and PineNote have shipped.

The PinePhone Pro was announced earlier this year as a successor to the free and open OS-friendly PinePhone that went on sale in 2019. The PineNote is also designed to run free and open source software, but instead of a phone it’s an E Ink tablet with a 10.3 inch display and support for pen input.

The PinePhone Pro is priced at $399 and boasts modest specs including a Rockchip RK3399S processor, 5.95 inch 1440 x 720 pixel IPS LCD display, and a single 13MP rear-facing camera.

What makes the PinePhone Pro a compelling offering — beyond its focus on openness — are features like a swappable Samsung J-type battery and DIP switches that enable and disable components like the cameras and microphones at a hardware level.

It’s also significantly more powerful than the original PinePhone, which has an Allwinner A64 quad-core processor, up to 3GB of RAM, and up to 32GB of storage. It continues to sell for $150 to $200.

The PineNote Pro is a very different device that’s designed for reading eBooks and taking digital notes. It has a 10.3 inch, 14040 x 1872 pixel E Ink display and a Wacom digitizer with support for pressure-sensitive pen input.

Powered by a quad-core Rockchip RK3566 SoC, the PineNote features 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 128GB of eMMC storage. It offers WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5 connectivity and a generous 4000mAh battery should provide plenty of runtime.

PINE64 has only opened pre-orders of the PineNote to developers at this point, noting that “the first batch of the PineNote will be great to write software for, but not great to write notes on.

Those, presumably, are among the units that just shipped. PINE64 adds that you should “wait for a later batch with better preinstalled software if you just want to use the device as an e-reader, e-note, or your everyday computing device.”

Right now the priority is getting both devices into the hands of people who need to build and test apps ahead of broader availability.

Once you are able to order the PineNote, you can expect a retail price of $399.

Header image courtesy PINE64

via @thepine64

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Lee Mathews

Computer tech, blogger, husband, father, and avid MSI U100 user.

7 replies on “PinePhone Pro and PineNote now shipping to developers”

  1. Please before buying anything from Pine64 make a good check first!
    It reminds of NextThingCo (maker of 9$ C.H.I.P) and may follow the same fate.
    To be fair The Great Chip Shortage affects a small business harder than bigger one.
    (Almost) All of their “products” have hardware “gotchas”, and no-existing software,
    breaking revisions and component swaps, and (almost) no support at all.

    RK3399 is half decade old yet:
    – Power saving modes / Suspend-Resume will never work properly.
    – PineBOOK Pro does NOT boot any Linux distribution out-of-the-box! (Only some frankenstein builds)
    – Without drivers for ISP and Video Encoder cameras are no-go.

    PinePHONE vs PinePHONE Pro:
    2 boards, 1 Display assembly, 2 Cameras – not interchangeable
    Battery – interchangeable but even less adequate.
    Software: different platforms Allwinner vs Rockchip.

    I wish best of luck to Pine64 and all the developers involved!

    1. Thanks for the information. What about Pine Note? Do you consider it a good platform which develop for?

  2. An “edit” feature is needed on this site – desperately.

    Best,
    Steven B.

  3. Thanks for the update Brad…

    I’ve already decided to pick up a Pinephone Pro(and use it as a daily driver), but I’m not purchasing the dev version. I read on their site about another version that should be available soon for early adopters…I’ll pick one up one of those as soon as there available.

    I have to tell you…I couldn’t be more pleased that the SteamDeck and the PinePhone Pro are both using Manjaro. Combining these two items with my own Manjaro KDE Plasma desktop…I’ll have my own little version of convergence going on.

    Best Regards,
    Steven B.

    1. Oh, and the Steam Deck will run Steam OS, which is based on Arch, not Manjaro. They’re just recommending Manjaro for developers who want to test something similar before they can get their hands on the real thing.

  4. Can’t wait for the PineNote software to reach a useable state. But I guess it’ll be a year or two before it’ll be anything near useable. If we’re lucky.

    The new PinePhone though is already quite impressive though.

Comments are closed.