Pretty exciting news for the Pinephone.
There will be an additional model with several hardware upgrades, making for substantial smoothness experience improvements for the Linux phone curious.
WiFi has been expanded to match the Pinebook Pro. No longer will users be limited to 2.4GHz. On the Pinephone pro both 2.4 and 5GHz WiFi is available.
GPU on the original Pinephone: Mali-400.
This has been upgraded to a Mali T860 4x cores GPU (500MHz)
The processor moves from the supportive A64 to an absolutely stunning RockChip RK3399S (1.5Ghz 4 x Cortex A53 and 2 x A72.
Memory/RAM in the original Pinephone: 2gb, 3gb option. The Pinephone Pro's 4gb should really speed things up on the new Rockchip processor.
Original back carried a 5 Megapixel camera. This one upgrades things to 13 Megapixels!
(Don't get too used to low res pictures)
The battery however, remains the same. Battery life improvement will likely be dependent on other pieces of the Pinephone puzzle.
(such as software refinement/keyboard coming with a 6,000mAh battery)
But the Pinephone has always been more a Linux pocket computer, with traditional phone behavior/capabilities.
Geared towards developers, tinkerers and Linux commandline users (plenty of great Linux GUI apps but I find these categories of people appreciate it most).
Pinephones were never designed to replace an Android/iPhone (includes Pinephone Pro).
But this option sure adds a new level of excitement to the future of the Pinephone Linux phone experience.
(Don't expect these major hardware upgrades to magically make things more 'user friendly' for you)
On the Pinephone Pro, privacy killswitches/pogo pins will remain (phew!):
Martijn Braam (PostmarketOS developer) created this fun comparison video:
See the Official video release from Pine64 here:
Exciting!
Related Links:
You can check out Pine64's Store here.
The Pinephone Community site is here.