Android’s potential for customization was seemingly endless when it was introduced, thanks to its Linux kernel and open source nature. However, Google has introduced more restrictions in recent years in the name of privacy and security, making root changes and other deep changes difficult if not impossible. While I agree that most of the security changes in Android are necessary (I really don’t need the Facebook app to dig into my local files), that means you don’t have full control of your own device. .
It’s still possible to use custom ROMs like LineageOS and Paranoid Android, but they’re still limited by Android’s restrictions. Porting ROMs to new phones is a long and difficult process, they sometimes lack features compared to the stock software (like full camera quality), and some devices don’t allow bootloader unlocking at all. .
Fortunately, there is now an alternative to Android for enthusiasts who want full control over their phone: the PinePhone, a budget device developed by Pine64 and supported by the Linux community. Despite its many (many, many) limitations, the PinePhone is still the most interesting phone I have used in years.
Pine What?
The PinePhone is a smartphone developed by Pine64, a company that has been selling ARM-based Linux products since 2015. The company started with single-board computers like the Pine A64, similar to the Raspberry Pi, but has since grown into others. product categories. Pine64 now sells laptops, tablets, smartwatches, server clusters, and other products built around Linux and ARM hardware.
Project Anakin, the first development board for the PinePhone (Source: Pine64)
Pine64 went through various development kits and prototypes before the first publicly available version, dubbed “Braveheart”, started shipping in January 2020. Since then, Pine64 has released bundles of PinePhones “Community Edition”, which come with a some pre-installed Linux distribution. I bought the UBports edition, which came preloaded with Ubuntu Touch.
Since then, Pine64 has released another community edition with postmarketOS, which eventually includes more RAM and storage. All community editions are generally compatible with each other, so a Linux distro designed for one model will work on the others.
2008, meet 2020
The PinePhone’s hardware is a hybrid of the 2020 and 2008 smartphone design, combined with privacy tweaks I’ve never seen on a phone before. The exterior looks like most modern Android budget phones, with a plastic back cover and a large 18: 9 display. There is also a USB Type-C port at the bottom for charging / data transfer, and a plug. headphones on top for audio. On the back there is a speaker grille, a 5MP camera with LED flash and in my case the logo of the UBports project.
PinePhone (left) next to Galaxy S20 (right)
The PinePhone’s philosophy of owning your own device becomes more evident once you remove the back cover. There is a replaceable battery, compatible with batteries designed for older Samsung Galaxy J7 phones. It’s good to know that even if Pine64 were to die out overnight, you could still buy new batteries for around $ 10-15.
Next to the battery is the microSIM slot, so the PinePhone can actually function as a phone. Since it uses microSIM and not nanoSIM, you might need an adapter, but the UBTouch model I bought came with one in the box.
There is a microSD card slot above the SIM tray, which supports cards up to 2TB in size. Although it can be used as additional storage just like the SD slots on phones and tablets Android, it can also function as a bootable drive. If you write an operating system image to the SD card and place it in the PinePhone, the phone will boot from the SD card. This means that you can switch between operating systems on the PinePhone by simply swapping out microSD cards, which is unbelievable to try out new Linux distributions without erasing the data. Would it be great if Android phones could do this?
Finally, the interior of the PinePhone has six hardware shutdown switches that can be manipulated with a screwdriver. You can use them to turn off modem, Wi-Fi / Bluetooth, microphone, rear camera, front camera, and headphone jack. No need to put a sticker on the selfie camera if you’re concerned about malware – just flip the switch and forget about it.
If I had to complain about the PinePhone’s design, my main one would be that the screen doesn’t appear to have an oleophobic coating, so it smears fingerprints more easily than the majority of smartphones. Still, for a $ 150 phone produced in limited batches by a company with no prior experience in the smartphone industry, I’m impressed that it’s built as well as it is.
Linux in your hand
The main reason the PinePhone has gained so much attention is that it’s a Linux PC in the palm of your hand. There’s no locked boot loader, and you can switch between operating system distributions as easily as you would with bootable flash drives on a computer.
There are currently 17 operating systems available for the PinePhone, at various stages of development. Some are designed from the ground up for mobile, like Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish, while others are based on existing desktop Linux distributions, like Mobian (Debian), Fedora, and Arch Linux.
- postmarketOS
- Ubuntu Touch (UBports)
- Mobian
- SailfishOS
- PureOS
- Felt
- Arch Linux ARM
- Manjaro ARM
- Maemo Leste
- Nemo Mobile
- KDE Neon
- NixOS
- MoonOS
- Sxmo
- openSUSE
- AVMultiPhone
- GloDroid
Ubuntu Touch by UBports was preinstalled on my PinePhone, and while the gesture-based interface is the best I’ve tried among the distros available, there are quite a few broken features right now (no account syncing , no camera). There’s not a lot of app development either, given that general attention to Ubuntu Touch ended in 2017 when Canonical stopped working on the operating system. For better or for worse, the platform is now supported by the UBports community.
Ubuntu Touch
My favorite distro at the moment is Mobian, a port of Debian Linux with the Gnome based Phosh interface. There are still broken features, but you can technically install anything compiled for ARM from Debian repositories. I could log into my Google Account to sync my emails and contacts, use the full desktop Firefox browser, and even install LibreOffice. There are a surprising number of apps out there that scale well on phone-sized screens, in part thanks to the libhandy UI library developed by Purism (which sells its own Linux phone).
I also tried GloDroid which is one of the first ports of Android 10 to various ARM devices. There are even more of them here than on Linux-based distros, but it would be cool to have an Android phone one day that was almost entirely free of proprietary drivers.
The installation process varies greatly depending on the distribution. Some can be installed on both the microSD card and internal eMMC storage, while others only work from the SD card. Some only require writing a disk image to the SD card, while others (like postmarketOS and GloDroid) require running a setup script on a PC to compile all the required files.
However, there is one glaring issue in all PinePhone operating systems: performance. The Allwinner A64 SoC has only 4 processor cores and 2 GB of RAM is not quite sufficient for some distributions. Real-world performance in native apps is close to that of a low-end Android phone, and apps written in Electron and other non-native frameworks may be unusable.
There aren’t many benchmarks available on both Android and ARM Linux, but I’ve tried running Speedometer 2.0 on a few devices for comparison, which tests web app responsiveness. I ran it on my PinePhone using Firefox on Mobian, and on my LG Stylo 5 (a low-end phone from 2019) and Galaxy S20 with Firefox for Android. The Galaxy S20 got a 37.7, the Stylo 5 got a 7.02, and the PinePhone got a 5.09.
From left to right: Galaxy S20, LG Stylo 5, PinePhone on Mobian
Granted, this is a $ 150 phone, so flagship-level performance is out of the question. I’d love to see a future PinePhone with a more powerful SoC, but unfortunately most of the better choices won’t work with standard Linux or require too many proprietary blobs.
Work in progress
If you haven’t noticed it yet, the PinePhone is more like a hardware prototype than a complete product – it has already undergone several hardware revisions, with each release including minor specs and motherboard changes. Pine64 even has a warning on the product page regarding potential hardware faults:
A small number (1 to 3) of stuck or dead pixels is a characteristic of LCD screens. This is very rare, but normal and should not be considered a fault. When purchasing, please keep in mind that we are offering the PinePhone at this price as a community service at PINE64. […] communities. If you believe that a minor dissatisfaction, such as a dead pixel, will cause you to file a PayPal dispute, please do not purchase the PinePhone.
The idea is to put the PinePhone in the hands of enthusiasts and software developers, so that the software experience can be refined along with the hardware. After covering leaks and rumors about new smartphones on Android Police for nearly four years, it’s fascinating to see the PinePhone being developed and refined in public view.
I can’t wait to see what the community around the PinePhone can accomplish. I doubt we’ll see a phone running standard Linux on the shelves of AT&T or Verizon stores anytime soon, but for people who value privacy and have full control of their own device over everything else, the PinePhone is a very promising option. .