PinePhone – Linux Smart Phone

The PinePhone is a phone from PINE64. They are know for making ARM based single board computers, tablets, phones, laptops, and watches. This phone can run a large variety of different ARM based operating systems giving users a lot of options.

• “Real” Linux system including package manager, terminal, Python, and more
• Could be used as both a phone and a desktop system
• Replaceable battery
• Sim card slot
• SD card slot
• Can boot a large number of different operating systems
• Physical switches for components ( Wifi, Camera, Mic, etc )
• Includes a dock with ethernet, USB ports, and HDMI

Unboxing and Testing ( Default Manjaro with Plasma )

The PinePhone I purchased came with Manjaro and Plasma installed. It was somewhat functional but far from being something that could be used in place of an Android or iOS phone.

Many of these issues are probably due to either Manjaro or Plasma specific

We were able to launch a working termina which worked pretty nicely. We were able to edit BASH and Python scripts using VIM. We were also able to launch those from the terminal.

Issues:

• Interesting but dissapointing
• Buggy non-responsive ( clicking things just didn’t work sometimes )
• Slow
• Mobile interface even when docked
• Display glitches
• Camera settings just show a message along the lines of “Settings not implemented yet”.
• Camera randomly switches between being able to display color and not. It doesn’t produce a good picture.