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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

Low budget alternative: The Pinephone by Pine64, also with 4 ARM Cortex-A53 cores.

https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

I'm extremely excited for the Pinephone and intend to order one as soon as it becomes available. I may resurrect Hellaphone on it (edit: oops fix link https://bitbucket.org/floren/inferno/wiki/Home) or at the very least start building my own library of no-bullshit phone tools, free from modern phone crap.

The link is dead (404), do you have another one?

Sorry, I was typing it from memory and forgot that the repo was named "inferno" not "hellaphone". Fixed.

I definitely intend to pick up a PinePhone. At 200$ I'm not going to be annoyed if the software isn't 100% or it can't replace all functions of my current Android device. For 200$ email, SMS, calling and VoIP are pretty much enough. The $650 Librem are asking, I'm sure is well justified, but is a much harder pill to swallow for something that I am well aware will not be able to replace my current device immediately.

Cool, I want to get one of those also, but they're not selling it and I don't see any links about when we can buy it, for how much, and when it will ship.

I can't find the info for the price, but I remember seeing it before and it was very low, like $200, which would make this a very exciting entry into the notAndroidOrIOS market. The Librem 5 was cool at first, until they started delaying it indefinitely and the price is too high for mass adoption. By having a very low price on the Pinephone they are courting a lot more tinkerers to get one and help develop the OS versus the Librem which people would kind of (rightly) expect to be fully-formed at launch.

    As things stand today, we expect a fully functional prototype in August

https://www.pine64.org/2019/06/06/june-2019-news-pinephone-p...

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Project_Don't_be_evil

The Allwinner A64 platform has numerous developers working on it compared to the iMX8, which has really fleshed out fully featured hardware support over the last few years. Running most Linux distros should be a breeze on the Pinephone!

That's a bit of an overstatement. It has some interested and active developers, but support is far from fleshed out, especially for the poratble device use.

There are lots of patches floating around, that you can apply to the mainline linux tree, to get CPU DVFS, thermal management, to improve I2S support, etc. Suspend to RAM is nowhere to be seen, leaving you with always ON SoC, which will drain the battery in half a day doing nothing.

It's all fixable, but let's not pretend A64 has fully fleshed out HW support in the mainline Linux kernel.

OTOH, there's a great potential, because Quectel EC25 broadband module also runs Linux and has some potential for being hackable:

https://projects.osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/wiki

So there's definitely a lot of fun to be had with the future PinePhone. You'll be able to log in to your broadband module and perhaps modify it:

https://projects.osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/wiki/EC...

Thank you! I will keep an eye on this.

Probably by the end of the year. Early prototypes should ship next month, but who knows.

The pinephone only has a wifi radio and lacks any cell radios, thus it is incapable of connecting to cellular networks. It's basically an 'internet tablet' and not a phone (at least in the 'traditional' sense) like the name suggests.

Then why does it say this:

    we also settled on the number, and the implementation of, privacy switches on the phone – there will be 4 switches in total: for the i) BT/Wifi module, ii) the modem, iii) cameras (front/back) and iv) lastly for the microphone.

and right on the pinephone page it says it has this chip:

https://www.quectel.com/product/eg25g.htm

    Key Benefits

    ● LTE Cat 4 module optimized for M2M and IoT applications
    ● Worldwide LTE, UMTS/HSPA+ and GSM/GPRS/EDGE coverage
    ● Multi-constellation GNSS receiver available for applications requiring fast and accurate fixes in any environment
    ● Feature refinements: supports DFOTA*, eCall and DTMF*
    ● MIMO technology meets demands for data rate and link reliability in modem wireless communication systems

Sounds like a cell radio to me.

I think you are talking about the Necunos device. The pinephone is ... a phone. See https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ where they list the modem being a "Quectel EG-25G with worldwide bands".

Oops, yea I was thinking of the Necunos.

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