Early adopter version Linux smartphone PinePhone will be released around New Year

Pine64 will start selling the PinePhone Brave Heart Edition from mid-November. It is an early version of the Linux smartphone, intended for early adopters. The phone will be delivered in December or January. Mass production will start in March.

According to Pine64, the Brave Heart Edition is almost the same as the definitive PinePhone, but there are still small optimizations, such as tweaking the 2g antennas. The housing, pcb, LCD, cooling and other components are already fixed. Pine64 does say that more changes may be made if problems with the hardware are discovered early. Therefore, the special edition is only intended for early adopters.

The PinePhone Brave Heart Edition can be ordered from November 15. The price has not yet been announced. Pine64 says the copies will be delivered in December or January. Prototypes of the smartphone have also been released to developers, and are currently shipping, with all units expected to ship by November 15, according to the company. The prototypes will then arrive at the developers within two weeks.

It is planned that mass production of the PinePhone will start at the beginning of March 2020. The final version of the smartphone should be available for everyone to order shortly afterwards. Pine64 has been working on the smartphone for a long time and faced delays and issues with the digitizer. Those problems have been resolved.

The PinePhone is equipped with an Allwinner A64-soc with four cores and is equipped with 2GB ram and 16GB emmc flash storage. The 5.95″ LCD has a resolution of 1440×720 pixels. The device runs on the mainline Linux kernel and it is relatively easy to make Linux distributions for the device. In addition, many parts of the device are easy to replace or replace. At the beginning of last month, tweaker Martijn Braam demonstrated a prototype of the PinePhone.