Pine64: Introducing the PinePhone Pro

For me the main pain point of the current PinePhone is not its performance, it's the driver and firmware issues. Mainline Linux does not work well with the current PinePhone and various patches are not upstreamed or not even written yet to fix the remaining bugs. The cameras don't work with most software, the out-of-tree WiFi driver has stability issues to the point where I rather use LTE or USB, the USB-C firmware is flunky, the modem firmware crashes and needs a lot of workarounds.

I hoped they chose components for the PinePhone Pro that work out of the box in terms of firmware and having no downstream Linux patches in the near future, but it seems quite similar to the current PinePhone, only slight improvements. The camera OV5640 is the same (hopefully someone came up with better v4l2 integration since the second camera is different?), the modem EG25-G is the same, no info on the used USB-C chip, but at least there is a better WiFi chip.

"Tasks such as opening applications, browsing the internet, interacting with the user interface or watching videos are on par with recent mid-range Android smartphones."

If this holds true, I'm truly excited

More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28877955

Link to the pre-order page: https://www.pine64.org/pinephonepro/