The Pine64 community, known for creating open devices, recently announced the discontinuation of the Pinephone Pro smartphone. Spare parts for the Pinephone Pro will still be produced for approximately two years. The decision to halt sales was made due to low demand, which did not justify continued production.
While there are no plans to develop new models of the smartphone at this time, the original Pinephone model, introduced in 2020, will continue to be available for purchase. Moving forward, Pine64 community will focus on creating boards and devices utilizing the RISC-V architecture.
The Pinephone Pro smartphone was targeted towards enthusiasts seeking an alternative to Android and iOS, offering a fully controlled environment with open Linux-Plappments. Powered by the RockChip SOC RK3399S (featuring two ARM Cortex-A72 cores, four ARM Cortex-A53 1.5ghz cores, and Mali T860 500MHz GPU), the device allowed users to disable LTE/GPS, WIFI, Bluetooth, cameras, and microphone at the hardware level. Additionally, it supported the connection of extension modules in place of the rear cover.
By connecting a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, the Pinephone Pro could function as a portable workstation capable of streaming 1080p videos. The primary firmware was based on Manjaro Linux with KDE Plasma Mobile and postmarketos, with alternate builds available from Mobian, Nemo Mobile, Fedora, Arch Linux, Gentoo, Glodroid (Port Lineageos), Luneos (Webos), Nixos, FreeBSD, and Ubuntu Touch.