10 Facts About PinePhone

PinePhone is a smartphone developed by Hong Kong-based computer manufacturer Pine64, intended to allow the user to have full control over the device.

In February 2021, Pine64 announced the end of community edition devices, and that the default operating system for the production-ready PinePhone would be Manjaro using the KDE Plasma Mobile graphical environment.

PinePhone then introduced the PinePhone Beta Edition several weeks later.

PinePhone is often compared to other phones shipping with non-Android Linux distributions, especially the Librem 5, which released around the same time, and the WiFi-VoIP phone Necuno, which does not employ a cellular modem.

Original PinePhone used an Allwinner A64 processor, which has four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.

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PinePhone aims to be fully open source in its drivers and bootloader.

PinePhone relies completely on open-source operating systems developed by external communities, with only the flashing onto the phone done by Pine64 directly.

In January 2020, ZDNet called the PinePhone hardware "promising" and noted the six hardware kill switches.

In December 2019, Martins D Okoi of FossMint said that the first edition of the PinePhone is aimed at Linux-savvy users who would like to test beta operating system builds, but the version for general users should be available in March 2020.

In November 2019, Phillip Prado of Android Authority said that the PinePhone had the potential to "expand our imaginations into what mobile computing could look like", but he was not expecting it to replace everyone's Android device.