Boy I've been following this for a little bit and I'm not sure if they can reach that goal. $1400 is a huge amount for a phone, let alone one that is only WiFi 5, with no full prototype or software usability guarantee, from a company that's never gone to market. It's going to be a very hard sell
this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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Meh, I'm feeling like this whole concept is pretty flawed and it might be better by now to just run Graphene or Lineage out of the box. Maybe a niche Android phone manufacturer like Unihertz could find incentive to do something like that.
A fully FOSS dumbphone would possibly be of more interest than a smartphone, fwiw. Enough smartphone projects have failed that I'm unexcited about this latest one.
Wow yeah I was excited for this, cause if the specs are right I wouldn't Ind paying around flagship price for a Linux first phone. But at $2K that's over twice what I'd be willing to pay unfortunately.
Still, I wish them good luck because we desperately need Linux first mobile devices.
It does not matter how powerful the phone is as long as the drivers suck. The original Pinephone would have been fine if it had proper standby mode. If this makes it to production, it's going to be ewaste. Judging by the fact that they don't mention software challenges and only focus on privacy/foss buzzwords and le epic HW specs.
@AprilShowers The hardware surely is very nice, unfortunately I can't justify spending 3x what my laptop costs for a phone.
If I didn't have my deGoogled Android (CMF1 with /e/OS installed by Murena) I would be interested, despite having 2 PinePhones I never used as daily drivers.
Unfortunately... for now my current cheap compromise is good enough. Hopefully I'll want better in few months.
I won't be backing this but it has caught my interest. If/when this launches in a couple years, I may finally upgrade from my Librem 5.
2k$ is a little steep for mid-tier spec phone
Same processor as in the Orangepi 5b.
- Weird that they don't promote the 3core NPU it contains. The phone will be able to run a 8b model, or image/audio models quite okay. Larger models will be too slow.
- Another luxury-priced Linux phone. They have to cover their expenses, and there's a nice screen/cams, but the price difference from an Orangepi or similar sbc with an 3588s, to this product is way too big for my pocket. It's around 5* the price for the compute.
It should be possible to have a small portable touch-monitor as UX, and a small sbc/battery in a pocket. Or just stream a remote screen to the touch-monitor. Would prefer such a clunky solution to be honest.
This seems to be the higher end mainline linux phone. I am getting a flx1 which is cheaper, however if i had enough I would get this as a higher end device. It would let me use it as a desktop too. And in several years we might see the newer rockchip chips in phones too, giving us enough power for most high end desktop work. I do think there is room in the market for it and remember you pay higher because you arn't the product. You either pay for software with your data or wallet.