As of mid 2020, I'm not able to stay on top of PinePhone developments due to other demands on my time, so my periodic updates are more or less stopped for now. For latest accurate info on the hardware, consult the Pine64 wiki, forum, and website, and for latest info on UBPorts on the PinePhone, consult other threads on this site, or Telegram, or the UBPorts website.

postmarketOS community edition now on preorder for late August, 2020 shipment with motherboard v. 1.2a with the USB fix and in two versions:

[2GB/16GB for $150 + shipping](https://store.pine64.org/product/pinephone-community-edition-postmarketos-limited-edition-linux-smartphone/)
or
[3GB/32GB + a USB dock with 2 x USB-A, digital video out, and 10/100 ethernet for $200 + shipping](https://store.pine64.org/product/pinephone-community-edition-postmarketos-with-convergence-package-limited-edition-linux-smartphone/)

Probable specifications of Phase 3 (the shipping phone) of PinePhone were posted by tllim and lukasz of @PINE64 on the #pinephone IRC channel on 2019-02-21. Subsequent details have come from the Pine64 forum, @thepine64 on Twitter, @PINE64 here on the UBPorts forum, and now the Pine64 wiki entry for Phase 3 of the PinePhone.

I haven't yet gotten the hang of text formatting on this forum so not sure how to add colored text, so I'm putting my annotations in bolded italics.

• Dimensions 160.5mm x 76.6mm x 9.2mm thick
• Weight between 180g and 200g
• Screen type: IPS capacitive, 16M colors
• Screen size: 5.95" 1440x720, 18:9 aspect ratio - At least one screen protector for the Iphone XS Max has been shown to fit this screen
• Screen surface still hardened glass, NOT plastic
• The LCD panel that will soon be delivered on the Phase 2 dev kits is the same as the PinePhone LCD panel but smaller (5.7" vs. 6.0").
• Modem: Quectel EC-25G with worldwide bands
• SIM size: micro
• Quad GSM: 850/900/1800/1900MHz bands 2, 3, 5, 8
• WCDMA bands 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 19
• LTE bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 25*, 26, 28, 38, 39, 40, 41. Per this post by tllim on the Pine64 forum, the modem will be soldered in place in order to keep the phone thin. *probable, per the Wiki and @PINE64's post below.
• VoLTE support obviously this depends on both software support (Ubuntu Touch does not currently support VoLTE) and carrier support (e.g., AT&T in the US currently restricts VoIP to a small list of devices, though rumors say they will open VoLTE to all BYO devices by then end of 2019).
• Wifi: 802.11 b/g/n, single-band, hotspot capable
• Bluetooth: 4.0, A2DP
• Chipset: Allwinner A64
• CPU: Quad-core 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex A-53
• GPU: MALI-400
• Memory: 2 or 3GB LDRR3 / 16 or 32GB eMMC
• micro SD supporting SDHC and SDXC. Bootable so you can test an OS build without erasing the eMMC (Source)
• Edited post to remove mention of a potential upgrade in specs. Let us see what happens and not put any pressure on Pine64 one way or another.
• USB: USB-C with USB host, 15W 5V 3A Quick Charge following USB PD specification, and alt-c 1080P DisplayPort
• Stereo headphone/mic jack (on bottom of phone) with serial console, same as Pinebook
• Vibrator
• RGB status LED
• No IR LED
• Camera position same as in the image below, but speaker position may change
• Main Camera: Single OV6540, 5MP, 1/4", LED Flash
• Selfie Camera: Single GC2035, 2MP, f/2.8, 1/5"
• Sensors: accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer, ambient light
• 3 external switches, up down and power
• The hardware privacy kill switches will be placed inside the case, meaning you'll need to peel off the back of the case to access. This prevents accidental switch off. this tweet refers to the case back as easily removable. tllim later posted on IRC "back case can peel off using finger nail."
• Kill switches: 6 in total, for LTE/GNSS, Wifi/BT, Microphone, rear camera, front camera, and headphone.
• Case is matte black finished plastic
• Phone structure is plastic
• Samsung J7 3000mAh battery - "they are reliable, relatively inexpensive and easily attainable in most places we checked ... they will also be around for quite some time." A higher capacity batter in the same form may be possible.
• Battery is easy to replace, so that user also can carry a spare battery.
• No glue - disassembleable with only a screwdriver.
• SIM and micro SD card slot also located inside phone
• GNSS: GPS, GPS-A, GLONASS EG25-G appears to have additional capabilities, but let us not count on them for now.
• No NFC
• No FM Radio
• No fingerprint reader
• Price: $150 for 2 GB/16 GB configuration
• $10 of each sale will be donated to partner Linux-on-Phone projects (e.g., UBPorts, Plasma Mobile, postmarketOS, etc.)
• Proceeds of sales of PinePhone cases will fund donations of original model PineBooks to needy causes.
• PinePhone prototypes ship to core Linux-on-Phone OS developers (not app developers) October-November 2019
• Open-to-all production run in 2019, ordering starting November 15, 2019 at 8:00AM (GMT+0), 3,000 phones will ship without an installed OS to “Brave Heart” enthusiasts capable of installing the OS themselves; these should ship in December 2019 and January 2020.
• Large scale production in March, 2020, by which time at least one OS is expected to be ready.
• Availability: at least 5 years

Video: UBPorts on the PinePhone Dev Kit

Updated render:

Tentative motherboard layout:

Prototype motherboard and daughterboard:

Prototype phone with back removed and battery inserted:

Links to the Dev kits on the Pine64 Wiki:

Project Anakin - Phase 1 Dev Kit

Project Don't be Evil - Phase 2 Dev Kit

PinePhone - Phase 3, the shipping phone.

Lukasz Erecinski's comprehensive 2019-09-05 update on PinePhone status:

https://www.pine64.org/2019/09/05/september-update-the-pinephone-is-real-shipping-soon/

Lukasz' November update, chock full of PinePhone info:

https://www.pine64.org/2019/11/05/brave-heart-edition-pinephones/

UBPorts' PinePhone dedicated gitlab repository

PinePhone User Manual, v. 1.3

It seems our friends at @PINE64 are working on yet another FOSS-friendly device in yet another form factor, this one to go on your wrist.

Dimensions:

• 37.5mm (wide?)
• 40mm (tall?)
• 11mm thick
• 20mm straps (appears to use standard springbars)
• 38g (watch head only, it seems)

Construction:

• Plastic and zinc alloy
• Water resistance of 1m (IP67) on final watch, not prototypes - (Watch people: note that water resistance ratings for electronic and traditional watches are defined differently and are not directly equivalent.)

Hardware:

• 1.3" IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 240x240, 65K colors (about 260 dpi if my math is right)
• NORDIC Semiconductor nRF52832 SoC (final product may use nRF52840)
• 64MHz ARM Cortex-M4F CPU
• 512KB Flash, 64KB DRAM on SoC
• Additional 8MB Flash (final product may use 16MB Flash)
• Bluetooth 5 (including Low Energy)
• Accelerometer
• Heart rate sensor
• Vibrator motor for notifications
• 170-180mAh lithium polymer battery, hoping to provide ten day battery life, minimum of one week
• USB A charger

Potential open source real time operating systems:

• FreeRTOS (Wikipedia)
• Mbed (Wikipedia)
• Mynetw (? I'm not finding any info about this one)
• NuttX (Wikipedia)
• Zephyr Project (under the Linux Foundation umbrella) (Wikipedia)

Pricing and availability:

• Expected price with charger of $23
• Straps to be offered from $2 and up
• Possible to manufacture as early as January, 2020, but availability will wait until OSes are ready for it and PinePhone OSes are ready to work with it.
• Availability lifespan 5+ years
• Dev kits shipped to developers in October, 2019
• Dev kits may be opened up for general order, though as of Pine64's November update, that hasn't been decided yet

General:

• Brainchild of Pine64's Lukasz Erecinski (Thank you, Lukasz!)
• A side project of Pine64, with no particular deadlines, and lower priority than PinePhone, PineBooks, etc. Its development will not interfere with those other projects
• Core functionality hoped to be Pebble-like
• Intended as a companion for Linux smartphones for notifications, etc., not a smartphone replacement (as evinced by the hardware specs, the latter wouldn't be realistic)

Relevant links:

Pine64 forum thread
Pine64 wiki page
Pine64 wiki comparison of PineTime OSes
Pine64 October, 2019 update
Pine64 November, 2019 update

Prototype on wrist:

It's a real watch already, less than a month after the development kits shipped! Here seen running TinyGo:

Prototype USB charger:

My PinePhone arrived!

Have gone further on the PinePhone and copied all of the writable data into a new luks-encrypted partition.

I now have a shell script in my home directory as initially booted that will:

1. check to see if cryptsetup is installed and if not kick off an install script
2. turn off swap so we don't end up with encryption keys in swap
3. unlock the encrypted partition
4. cd to /tmp (because not doing so was tripping me up in the next step)
5. force umount /userdata using "umount -l"
6. remount the encrypted partition on it
7. in sequence force umount each userdata-mounted writeable part of the filesystem using "umount -l" then bind mount it back on the new, encrypted userdata (the bind mounts for your system can be found with findmnt)
8. turn swap back on using a new swap file in the encrypted partition with the same -1 setting that the original swap had (a larger swap file, in my case)
9. force-reload lightdm

Is anything aside from updates writen to permanent storage other than to bind mounts on /userdata? I didn't find anything, but there's always the possibility that I missed something.

All of this adds a couple of minutes to getting the phone ready for use, of course, and there may be things I've not yet discovered which will turn out to be broken.

Given how much is not yet working in the PinePhone, I should probably replicate this on an Android-based UBPorts device like the OnePlus One or the Nexus 5 for further testing. I'm thinking it should probably work with a large container in /userdata, skipping the umount of /userdata and mounting the decrypted block file (and the consequent bind mounts) on a file within /userdata, but this isn't testing I plan to pursue for now, as other tests take priority.

I am not posting my script here because it only applies to how I have set up my PinePhone. There are a few choices I made which would break completely for someone who made different setup choices. Anyone capable of getting this working on their device will need to understand what is meant by each step above so should be able to develop a process that works for them. If anyone who does want to try this and does know what they're doing hits a snag and has a question, I'll try to answer it.

Standard caveat applies: this could break everything on your phone, and UBPorts developers will not support this or help you fix it. Proceed at your own risk.

Librem 5 vs Android — Which boots faster?

The tl;dw is that the Librem 5 booted in 13 seconds including PIN entry, and the Android phone in about 45 seconds. Of note, they used an 6 year old, carrier-crippled Android phone (Verizon HTC One) for their comparison, somewhat damning their own cause.

For further comparison, I just timed these phones, with PIN unless otherwise indicated:

• Iphone 7 (3 years old) running IOS 12.3 w/encryption (file encryption, as I understand it): 18 seconds
• Pixel 3a (just released) running stock Pie w/file encryption: 16 seconds without PIN (not set up yet), probably about 19 seconds with.
• 1st gen. Pixel (3 years old) running LineageOS/MicroG Pie w/file encryption: 29 seconds
• OnePlus One (6 years old) running LineageOS/MicroG Pie, no encryption: 28 seconds without PIN, probably about 31 seconds with.
• OnePlus One (6 years old) running OTA9, no encryption: 35 seconds with password instead of PIN, probably about 32 seconds with a PIN instead.
• Nexus 5 (6.5 years old) running OTA 9, no encryption: 48 seconds
• Nexus 5 (6.5 years old) running LineageOS/MicroG Oreo, with "full disk" (actually only data partition) encryption: 66 seconds

The 3a is a mid-range phone. The Pixel and Iphone 7 were flagships of their day. The OpO and Nexus 5 were upper midrange phones.

I don't know if PureOS is running with any sort of encryption in this test. From the video it would appear that if they are, they are using some form of file-based encryption.

Hard to draw any firm conclusions except that the comparison was severely stacked to make the Librem five look as competitive as possible. It wouldn't sound as impressive to say that it beat a three year old Iphone by five seconds.

Congratulations and thanks to all of the developers.

And the best is yet to come!

OP updated with info that popped up on the PinePhone Wiki today:

• Dimensions now 160.5mm x 76.6mm x 9.2mm (up from 157mm x 56mm x 8.9mm)
• Base model fixed at 2 GB RAM, 16 GB eMMC, with a strong hint of a 3 GB / 64 GB version (@PINE64, can you confirm?)
• BT included by the WiFi kill switch, addition of camera kill switch, demise of speaker and USB OTG kill switches. (Those who were looking forward to the OTG kill switch for chrarging at public USB chargers might look into USB power-only filters instead.)
• $150 base price clarified to refer to 2 GB / 16 GB model.

Of note, the PinePhone will support microSD, so even the base model should have access to greatly expanded (if slow) bulk storage on SD.

OnePlus One has the advantage of strong custom Android support if you decide Ubuntu Touch isn't yet mature enough for your needs or is simply not to your tastes. The initial build list for LineageOS 16 indicates the OpO will be a supported devices on LOS 16 from Day 1 (whenever that release day arrives).

The Nexus 5 has good developer support across the board, though a persistent bluetooth headset bug has kept it from getting official support on LOS 15 or (presumably) 16. Notably, it's among the best supported devices by PostmarketOS, who have it running on the mainline kernel and have most major features either working or close to working.

I like these two devices because they have plenty of alternative options, but it doesn't hurt that they're both old enough to be inexpensive, to be easy to work on, and to have plenty of dirt-cheap parts on Ebay. Of my four OnePlus Ones and four (currently) Nexus 5s, 3 of the OpOs and at least 3 of the Nexus 5s were built by combining parts from various broken examples (my brother and I have combined to kill at least four Nexus 5s, hence why I qualify the number I have in hand now with the word "currently" ).

I'd defer to someone with more experience to say if there are notably better performing devices than the OpO or the Nexus 5, but I'm content with these to start with. Both seem fast enough for the admittedly limited (thus far) use to which I've put them under UBPorts.

@dobey said in Ubuntu Touch On Librem 5 Important Update:

Now, if only I could convince people to give me a million dollars for something that's expected to fail.

My guess is most of the people who funded it expected it to succeed. It seemed like a moonshot to me, but they were the only people publicly touting a phone platform at that time that was not tied to a proprietary operating system in some form or another, so I gave them $600 (or whatever it was at the time) to see what they could do.

I backed the Ubuntu Edge too, FWIW. Got a refund for that. Have no idea what I'll get from Purism. I do hope they succeed, and I do hope I get a phone from them someday, but they're being the opposite of transparent at the moment, which is worrisome.

@PINE64 said in PinePhone:

Posted this month's news update https://www.pine64.org/2019/06/06/june-2019-news-pinephone-pinebook-pro-and-pinetab/

Fantastic update. Thank you for posting.

I updated the OP with the new render and the front motherboard layout. Also updated mention of the camera kill switch to include both front and back cameras, which I should have added earlier.

@ernest said in One method to encrypt /home/phablet:

Seems that lightdm doesn't restart with the latest OTA. Any tips ?

Hmm. I've not been testing lately so hadn't noticed. Will see what I can figure out when I next have some time, but that may be a while. What errors or symptoms occur?

@Flohack said in Best decive for porting UBports for long time support.:

Well longterm.... The nature of Android brings it that its not made to be longterm. You can use an older phone for a long time given that you dont drop it, and you could replace the battery. So actually try to look for a model which has still exchangeable batteries....

LG V20 was the highest speced - and last - mainstream phone to have a removable battery, I believe, but it only got Lineage 14.1 and 17.1, skipping both 15.1 and 16 (though ISTR semi-viable device trees for one and/or the other version). I see there is a port in progress for the US T-Mobile variant, but that port is based on 14.1. As utkb asked regarding Xiaomi, is a Halium port from Lineage 17.1 viable yet?

To the typewriter icon, I would suggest of adding more, but thinner, lines of text to the paper emerging from the top, and most or all of one color. As it is, I would never guess what the stuff above the keyboard was intended to represent had I not seen this thread. You don't want to make people ask themselves, "What are those three bars supposed to mean?"

I just had a look at a few Iphone and Android icons for text editors, and all in my small sample used either multiple thin lines (edit: I just noticed this is the case of the notes icon right above your own in some of the examples above) or very thin lines spanning the whole icon, the former to indicate typed text and the latter to indicate the ruled lines of a blank notebook page.

A Halium guru could correct me, but I believe going forward your best chance is to find a device that was supported by LienageOS 15.1 (for Halium 8.1) or is supported by LineageOS 16.0 (for Halium 9).

LineageOS support presupposes a bootloader than can be unlocked, but do note that many devices come in many varieties and that not all specific submodels of a given device will work with LineageOS.

For general developer-friendliness (not UBPorts or LineageOS specific), Google devices have in the Pixel era almost always been the best, as they have full AOSP code available, but since they are unfortunately not always popular with LineageOS developers, and since Halium relies to some degree on LineageOS code, you might have more of a struggle porting to them than to the other developer-popular brands like OnePlus and Xiaomi. (The first generation Pixel and Pixel XL do have LineageOS 16.)

If you have only looked a the officially supported devices so far, you might want look into some of the ongoing ports listed on https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/, as well as the devices listed on the porting wiki: https://github.com/ubports/porting-notes/wiki

@Giiba said in Pinephone (braveheart):

I'm curious if anybody knows whats what with the update channel selection? Why are all of the channels listed numerous times?

It's a bug. If you want to switch to the developer channel, it's usually the first one listed from the top down. I think Dalton said he had found a fix for it, so maybe it work soon.

BTW, I'm impressed by your bravery in taking the DD plunge so early with the PinePhone. Truly Pine64 sold a Brave Heart to the right person!

@AppLee said in I'm about to get a Linux phone, but I have a few questions.:

@trainailleur said in [I'm about to get a Linux phone, but I have
But IMHO the quality process will help a lot with the feeling of progress and stability.

It should help with the stability for sure.

(I should add that stability has already taken great leaps and bounds forward in the few weeks I have been testing my BH; I can barely imaging how it must have progressed since the time when the BH shipped. :astonished_face: )

@opino72 said in I'm about to get a Linux phone, but I have a few questions.:

A last update :
I considered all the options and I was convinced by the dev speed of the various distros for the Pinephone.
Yesterday I ordered the latest version of the Pinephone with the extra 1GB RAM (peace of mind) and the dock (yay convergence!)
I will probably test the Postmarket OS for a few days and then flash Ubuntu Touch on it as I need it to be my daily driver.

I too have been impressed with the development speed, especially on Ubuntu Touch which has one of the most complex software stacks of all of the OSes being ported to the PinePhone. I feel however that you should temper your expectations of how daily-drivable it will be. Marius was asked in the last Q&A how long it would be before the UT experience on PinePhone would be as smooth as on one of the existing devices (the Nexus 5, I believe), and he said "months."

So it may be a while before the PinePhone is well-rounded on Ubuntu Touch. Calls, data, and SMS work (though not MMS), as do many Ubuntu Touch apps, but GPS requires a lot of setup and is evidently still flaky (I've not tested it yet myself), Anbox doesn't work, Libertine doesn't work for GUI apps I'm told (per what one of the UT developers said on Telegram yesterday - again, it's not something I've tested), etc. There are frequent application crashes, recurring sound issues, speaker phone and mute in calls aren't working, and there is the occasional spontaneous reboot.

It will be a month and a half or more before the PMOS edition phones ship, and there could be a lot of progress in that time, but I'd be careful not to let your expectations get too high. Eventually these phones will be amazing, but right now the software for them is still very much in progress.

Updated the OP with links to the postmarket versions.

Question for @PINE64 : right now (2020-07-15 16:11 UTC), both versions say the packing contents include "USB-C Docking Bar – 2x USB Type A ports, digital video port, and 10/100Mbps Ethernet port" Does this mean that the board in both versions is 1.2a?

(Apologies if I've missed the monthly update. Right now all Pine64 sites seem to be deluged with traffic. )

Edit: from reading the Pine64 July update, it seems that both versions of the phone have the 1.2a board with the USB fix (hurrah!), but only the 3GB/32GB Convergence Package has the Docking Bar. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that.

Edit 2: the page in the store is now correct.

For those who are interested and are reckless enough to forgo developer support, I got full encryption of writable data working with an elaboration of the old "remount your filesystems" trick in the encryption thread.

It's still a terrible hack, of course, but it covers far more than just remounting an encrypted home did. The right way to do this entails a lot of genuine development in the OS, but it is nice to see what some quick and dirty shell scripting can do at times.

Should be noted that any bug you see arising while using a setup like this should be reproduced on a normal install before reporting. Please don't waste developer time reporting issues you're not sure didn't arise from a non-standard hack.

(Edit: though actually one nice thing about running your system this way is that you always have a normal system lurking only a reboot away.)

Have gone further on the PinePhone and copied all of the writable data into a new luks-encrypted partition.

I now have a shell script in my home directory as initially booted that will:

1. check to see if cryptsetup is installed and if not kick off an install script
2. turn off swap so we don't end up with encryption keys in swap
3. unlock the encrypted partition
4. cd to /tmp (because not doing so was tripping me up in the next step)
5. force umount /userdata using "umount -l"
6. remount the encrypted partition on it
7. in sequence force umount each userdata-mounted writeable part of the filesystem using "umount -l" then bind mount it back on the new, encrypted userdata (the bind mounts for your system can be found with findmnt)
8. turn swap back on using a new swap file in the encrypted partition with the same -1 setting that the original swap had (a larger swap file, in my case)
9. force-reload lightdm

Is anything aside from updates writen to permanent storage other than to bind mounts on /userdata? I didn't find anything, but there's always the possibility that I missed something.

All of this adds a couple of minutes to getting the phone ready for use, of course, and there may be things I've not yet discovered which will turn out to be broken.

Given how much is not yet working in the PinePhone, I should probably replicate this on an Android-based UBPorts device like the OnePlus One or the Nexus 5 for further testing. I'm thinking it should probably work with a large container in /userdata, skipping the umount of /userdata and mounting the decrypted block file (and the consequent bind mounts) on a file within /userdata, but this isn't testing I plan to pursue for now, as other tests take priority.

I am not posting my script here because it only applies to how I have set up my PinePhone. There are a few choices I made which would break completely for someone who made different setup choices. Anyone capable of getting this working on their device will need to understand what is meant by each step above so should be able to develop a process that works for them. If anyone who does want to try this and does know what they're doing hits a snag and has a question, I'll try to answer it.

Standard caveat applies: this could break everything on your phone, and UBPorts developers will not support this or help you fix it. Proceed at your own risk.