Higher-Spec PinePhone Pro Appears as an Alternative To, Not Replacement For, the Original PinePhone
Higher-spec Rockchip RK3399S-based pocketable Linux computer will be sold alongside its predecessor for those who need more grunt.
Fans of the PinePhone as-open-as-possible smartphone platform have some good news from its creators this October: The announcement of the PinePhone Pro, a more powerful successor — up for pre-order now.
"It is a fast smartphone with premium features, built from the ground up to run mainline Linux operating systems," Pine's Lukasz Erecinski explains in the company's latest community update. "You could say that it denotes a shift from being ‘primarily development-focused’ to ‘technically-inclined end-users centered’. This isn’t the most elegant way of phrasing it, but you get the gist."
"With the PinePhone Pro we deliver hardware that will run current operating systems effortlessly and with some room to spare. But raw performance isn’t everything — attention has also been paid to the things that matter the most in a phone used daily: the screen, the camera, storage and RAM capacity, and the overall fit and finish were all central during the design phase."
The phone is based around a Rockchip RK3399S system-on-chip with two high-performance Arm Cortex-A72 cores and four lower-power Cortex-A53 cores, all running at 1.5GHz, and a quad-core Arm Mali T860 GPU at 500MHz. There's 4GB of LPDDR4 memory, 128GB of eMMC storage with microSD expansion, and a five megapixel OmniVision OV5640 front-facing camera along with a 13 megapixel Sony IMX258 main camera. The display, meanwhile, is an unnamed 6in 1440×720 in-cell in-plane switching (IPS) panel protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 4.
Connectivity is handled by a Quectel EG25-G modem with support for the global GSM and CDMA bands, GPS, GPS-A, and Glonass GNSS support, and an Ampak AP6255 Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.1 radio. A USB Type-C port on the base offers USB 3.0 data connectivity, power, and Display Port alternate mode for external displays. As with the original PinePhone, there are hardware privacy switches to disable the cameras, microphone, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio, LTE modem, and to switch the headphone socket to UART mode.
"The PinePhone Pro is not a second-generation PinePhone, but rather a higher-end PinePhone," Erecinski claims. "The original PinePhone isn’t going away anytime soon either — in fact, we have thousands of units in the pipeline.
"The PinePhone Pro is pogo-pin compatible with the original PinePhone, which means that peripherals, such as the keyboard and add-on back cases, will work with both devices. So if you are getting one of the add-ons for your PinePhone then don’t worry, they’ll work with the Pro if you decide to get one in the future."
More details can be found in the community update post, while the PinePhone Pro is now available to pre-order at $399 on the Pine64 store.