The PinePhone Pro is a Linux-friendly smartphone that launched in early 2022 as a higher-performance alternative to the original PinePhone. With a faster processor, more memory and storage, and a better camera, among other things, it was a significant upgrade… on paper, at least.
But with a $400 price tag, it was also twice as expensive as the original PinePhone and never generated as much interest from buyers or developers. And now Pine64 says it’s ceased production of the PinePhone Pro and has no plans to resume selling the phone. But the older, slower PinePhone? You can still buy one of those for $200, and Pine64 plans to continue offering that phone for at least two more years.
That actually makes sense, because while the PinePhone isn’t exactly a good smartphone by modern standards, it does have a few things going for it.
It was one of the first smartphones to ship as a hackable device aimed at open source software developers, enthusiasts, and early adopters. And while it wasn’t as powerful as Purism’s Librem 5 smartphone, it was a lot cheaper, making it an accessible option for folks looking to get started with mobile Linux.
And while it feels like things have slowed down a bit in recent years, the PinePhone got a lot of attention from independent developers and mobile Linux enthusiasts during the first few years that it was available.
The $400 PinePhone Pro was never as popular, and the hardware was never as well supported by developers. And since its release we’ve seen mobile Linux distros like postmarketOS ported to run well on a number of other phones like the Google pixel 3a, Fairphone 4, OnePlus 6, and Samsung Galaxy S9, reducing the need for a Pine64 phone with better-than-Pinephone specs.
It’s still a little sad to see one less option in the small category of smartphones that ship with out-of-the-box support for mainline Linux.
Update: While the PinePhone Pro is currently out of stock, the Pine64 store will be offering refurbished units for a limited time starting later in August, so there may be one more chance to snag one, if you’re interested. Unfortunately, with news that the phone has been discontinued, it’s unclear how much future software development there will be around the platform.
| PinePhone Pro | PinePhone | |
| Display | 6 inch 1440 x 720 pixel IPS LCD Gorilla Glass 4 | 5.95 inch 1440 x 720 pixel IPS LCD |
| SoC | Rockchip RK3399S 2 x ARM Cortex-A72 4 x ARM Cortex-A53 @ 1.5 GHz | Allwinner A64 4 x ARM Cortex-A53 @ 1.2 GHz |
| GPU | ARM Mali-T760 4-cores @ 500 MHz | ARM Mali-400MP2 |
| RAM | 4GB LPDDR4 @ 800 MHz | 2GB or 3GB LPDDR3 |
| Storage | 128GB eMMC | 16GB or 32GB eMMC |
| Camera (rear) | 13MP Sony IMX258 LED flash | 5MP Omnivision OV5640 LED flash |
| Camera (front) | 8MP Omnivision OV8858 | 2MP GC2035 |
| Modem | Quectel EG25-G with global GSM and CDMA 4G LTE GPS, A-GPS, GLONAS | Quectel EG25-G with global GSM and CDMA 4G LTE GPS, A-GPS, GLONAS |
| WiFi | Ampak AP6255 WiFi 5 | WiFi 4 |
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 4.1 | Bluetooth 4.0 |
| I/O | USB 3.0 Type-C (power, data, video) pogo pins 3.5mm headphone microSD card reader | USB 2.0 Type-C (power, data, video) pogo pins 3.5mm headphone microSD card reader |
| Sensors | Accelerometer Gyroscope Proximity Compass Ambient Light | Accelerator Gyroscope Proximity Compass Ambient Light Barometer |
| Buttons | Power Volume up/down | Power Volume up/down |
| Hardware kill switches | Cameras Microphone WiFi & BT LTE modem Headphones | Cameras Microphone WiFi & BT LTE modem Headphones |
| Battery | 3,000 mAh Samsung J7 form-factor | 3,000 mAh Samsung J7 form-factor |
| Charging | 5V/3A (15W) | 5V/3A (15W) |
| Dimensions | 160.8 x 76.6 x 11.1mm | 160.5 x 76.6 x 9.2mm |
| Weight | 215 grams | 180 – 200 grams |
| Price | $399 | $149 / $199 |
via Upgrade pi-top [3] and Pine64 Discord
@Brad Linder @Liliputing turns out there’s actually some pretty big RISC-V flavoured pivot news behind this, according to PINE64 Community’s post on Mastodon:
“As for the future of ARM products from the PineStore. It is not likely as the PineStore has moved focus onto RISC-V. This change can be seen looking at the recent product launches (Oz64, Star(/Pro)64 and Alpha One). There is also interest from the PineStore in being able to run LLMs locally on their SBCs with the Alpha One, powered by the StarPro64.
…
There are products in the pipeline that don’t have anything to do with AI at all. Devices like the home assistant speaker (PineVox/PineVoice) and another product that is not currently public yet.
The Alpha One is the only device that is focused on AI as of writing and I can confidently say that those devices will not be the focus of every product release going forward. Business as usual except with RISC-V chips instead.”
I bought a pinephone64 and it didn’t work. At first the screen was unreadable when I turned it on but before long it didn’t work at all. These days I can not even turn it on. I bought a new charger another battery and some other items but the phone would not work. I made inquires at some repair centers and they can’t repair the phone. It seems that I wasted a lot of money on junk and think I should convince as many people as possible to give doing any business with Pine64.
Hard lesson I’ve personally learned just recently – neither de-googled Android nor Linux are ready for my personal usage, not because of themselves, but because some essential apps I need have tie ins deep into Google security crap. It’s bank and government stuff, so it’s basically the most important stuff I need my phone for. And the way it’s setup, you have zero alternatives. It’s either Android phone non rooted with Google Play running, or iPhone. And the worst thing about this is that you cannot live without the app. Both banks and government decided to create their own in-app 2FA authentication system, so you need it for everything – even to use the service via a standard webpage portal.
It’s just too bad. I’ve submitted formal complaints about this and am waiting to see if it gives any results, but I highly doubt anyone will even read it. If there are few people looking at alternatives to the Google/Apple duopoly globally and in countries like US, here in mine the percentage of people looking at this is so small it might as well be zero. Even in the eventually of my complaint actually reaching someone in the development team, I still have high doubts if they’ll even understand what I mean talking about PlaySecure and whatnot.
It’s both impressive and appalling how much these companies extended their tentacles to take hold of their respective monopolies and won’t let go of it no matter what. It’s not only the visible layers that most of us know about, it’s all the way down disguised as security and privacy APIs that most people never heard and never will hear about.
For banks, I could even try switching banks until I find one that doesn’t put deep tie ins into the system for usage… but government related stuff I simply have no choice.
Murena phones are deGoogled but still allow you to install whatever app you want, which of course negates having a deGoogled device, but the option is there. I can see it still being handy because their os has a lot of built in privacy oriented features that let you know exactly who is trying to track you, they automatically block everything but let you adjust the settings to allow specific apps to have permissions.
I have a refurbished Google Pixel phone with e/os on it through Murena that I use for everything except for 2FA and banking. I was using an open source 2FA for awhile until Microsoft made it to where you HAVE to use their authenticator at work, so I just keep my old smartphone at work and turn it on only to use 2FA the once every other month it is needed.
And that concludes my monthly shilling of Murena products.
I just checked, Microsoft doesn’t actually require you to use their authenticatior. They act like they do, but I can still click “I want to use a different authenticatior app”. Your admins might have forbidden it for some reason (I’ve never seen a setting for that), or Microsoft might only enforce it for certain licenses. I can still use Yubico Authenticator.
My memory is a little fuzzy at this point, they definitely let me work around it for awhile by using my Aegis authenticator, but then they (Microsoft) started giving me warnings, I can’t remember what exactly the warning said, but something along the line of “you have (insert amount of time) before you have to use the Microsoft authenticator”. And that day finally came, and it no longer allowed me to bypass. My work uses the complete microsoft office package it seems, from Outlook, to Word, to Teams.
I don’t doubt that there’s still some sort of work around but I was trying to balance how much more I wanted to bother IT vs just using my old phone that already had the microsoft authenticator on it and was laying around not being used for anything else.
I am on the other side: I don’t use bank apps in my Android smartphones because they are not enough secure and I don’t trust a device can’t be updated after a lot of years or where there is malware on Play Store. I prefer to use a PC with really updated OS (some Linux or even Windows) and browser for that use.
I had the original PinePhone and hit’s attachable keyboard, I had a lot of hopes for it and did have some fun trying out different distros on it, but omg was it slow… I’m not sure what really held it back from being any faster while using any of the available distros, if it was the speed of the DDR3 ram, the very low amount of ram it had available for use, maybe the Linux distros for it weren’t optimized very well? Or maybe it was just the cpu that was incredibly slow. But I was actually planning on upgrading to the pro version of the phone just for the hopes that it could run any of the Linux distros available for it faster than the regular PinePhone. In the end I never did get the PinePhone Pro and sold my regular PinePhone and it’s accessories and just learned to live with a version of Android that’s slightly more cut down and a bit more privacy focused than regular stock Android.
I don’t think PinePhone are really slow, as some years ago we used PC with less memory and CPU power, but we ran professional apps on them. I think actual problem is a lot of Linux distros/GUI/etc are simply too much fat big and slow (of course it is easy to blame your hard).
I remember when a lot of years ago I switched from a version of Windows to other on same PC: the same task of opening a picture with default viewer for each OS version was much slower on new Windows version, same hard and a thing was fast became really slow because of bad/big/slow soft.
I have both a pinephone and a Librem 5. The Librem 5’s UI has always been noticeably more responsive and less laggy than the pinephone’s, with less time taken to load an app. I really need to re-check its video playback ability, that was one thing that kept happening on the pinephone, I could watch like five seconds of a video file and then it’d start skipping frames and going like 1 or less frames a second. It’s certainly possible that Mobian for pinephones is less optimized than pureOS for the phone that was made for it, but what distros the phone can use kind of becomes a characteristic of the experience of the phone.
Of course, with Pinephone you must add there are very few people working tuning softbfor it, and only in their spare time, while on Librem at least there were a team of professionals being paid for it (and you paid for that in its big price of course). Pinephone has worst sides: fat soft plus near no people working for it (and only in spare time).
BTW I think in Pinephone you have a better option with Sxmo console centered interface, at least I am more interested in. Really I don’t like nor I am interested in GUI for Linux phones are these have too much problems, so for that small display I prefer something like Smxo (using only Linux GUI for bigger screens).
It’s interesting that even Pine64 uses Discord! I wonder if there is some proper decentralized alternative to Discord yet..
With all of the crazy rumors about how Discord will be getting shittier in the near future, it’s about time for a serious successor to show up…
Before we can even talk about something that can replace large central services, we have to reconfigure the internet to favor smaller services hosted in someone’s house.
This will require so many fundamental changes, not just to the way infrastructure works (a complete switchover to ipv6 is one of them) but to people’s attitudes, that it’s safe to say, that whatever replaces discord, will be as centralized, profit focused, and malicious as discord itself is, and only able to get users when they manage to push something that’s still okay to complain about too far and trigger a mass exodus event to a platform that has gotten its timing perfect to have all the requisite features and infrastructure built RIGHT when it happens or they’re never paying off the debt it took to build in the first place and will vanish like everyone else.
they use everything, and have every protocol bridged to every other protocol. it’s the worst of all worlds.
@liliputing_ battery life is too short on #pinephonepro . It gets hot like a pancake.
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But how can you beat the production chain Apple or Samsung?
Better put Linux on those Phones
If I had the free time I wouldn’t mind trying to buckle down and put some actual effort into trying to get Linux on one of my OnePlus phones, I’m rather sick of Google and feel more and more ready to move on from them…
Simply you can’t put real Linux on that hardware: they are very closed (of course some hacking could be done, like with Apple M1 computer, but on smartphones they would be out of production in before achieving some goals on hacking), you don’t have Linux drivers and you must use Android drivers if you can, limiting Linux versions. And finally you don’t have real control of hard, as wireless modem are run on same SOC with higher priority to user OS.