The PinePhone and PinePhone Pro were great Linux-based phones, with an open hardware design and affordable hardware. Unfortunately, there’s still no follow-up model on the horizon, for a few different reasons.
The PinePhone was first released in January 2020, and at the time, there weren’t many other phones that could boot into regular Linux (no, Android doesn’t count) with open drivers. It was followed up by several Community Edition models, and eventually the PinePhone Pro was announced with upgraded hardware, which started shipping in 2022.
If you’re waiting for a PinePhone 2, you’ll be waiting a while. A community blog post from today explains, “Aside from the current chip shortage, PineStore has determined that it is too high of a financial risk to release another phone. This is because the interest of the mobile Linux community has shifted to porting cheaper and more powerful Android devices to mobile Linux projects such as Sailfish and PostmarketOS.”
It’s not a surprise that skyrocketing prices for flash memory would make a PinePhone sequel unlikely, since everything from Raspberry Pi boards to GPUs are also affected. The trend away from purpose-built Linux phones is interesting, though. Projects like postmarketOS have proved that modifying Android phones to run Linux can offer a similar experience to Linux-specific phones, and the devices are often widely available and more affordable. For example, the OnePlus 6T is one of the best-supported postmarketOS devices at the moment, and you can get one for around $100-200 on eBay.
The PinePhone isn’t the only Linux phone in town, though. The Purism Librem 5 is still available with similar hardware, at a price of $799, and the company’s Liberty Phone with some US-built components is $1,999. Several phones from Volla can dual-boot Linux or Ubuntu Touch, but they are not generally available in North America.
Unfortunately, stock is also running out of the existing PinePhone or PinePhone Pro. The company “doesn’t wish to increase the price of hardware significantly” from increased DRAM manufacturing costs, so once the current batch runs out, they won’t be restocked until pricing returns to normal or Pine64 changes its mind. The Pinetab2 and PineNote are also affected, but not the PineTime watch, PineBuds headphones, Pinecil, or PineVoice.
If a PinePhone 2 ever becomes a reality, though, there have been discussions about potential hardware components. The blog post mentioned the Rockchip RK3572/6 as a candidate for the phone’s System-on-a-Chip (SoC), which was primarily designed for TV boxes, replacing the RK3399S found in the PinePhone Pro. The phone could also use a RedCap 5G modem, since it has identical commands as the Quectel EG25-G modem in the PinePhone/Pro.
It would be great to see more Linux phones, but for the moment, you’re better off with one of several phones supported by postmarketOS, Mobian, or other distributions.
Source: Pine64 Blog
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
