💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20190314 captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38.
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For those of us concerned about data privacy and user control of technology, there's a fairly promising development on the horizon: the Pinephone, a US$150 linux phone. Its projected release date is sometime in the final quarter of 2019. Developer devices are already shipping. The Pinephone initial release will come pre-loaded with Ubuntu Touch (which is maintained by UBports). There are plans to shift the pre-loaded distribution with each batch of phones produced (possibly Plasma Mobile in the second wave), but users should be able to load any of the available distributions without trouble. I have to wonder if this is a better way forward for all of the groups involved in the Halium Project[1]. In addition to supporting open source software (and Pine64 has committed to contributing to the OS projects financially), the phone will also include a number of hardware switches under the back cover, so that users can manually (and selectively) turn off radios and peripherals. If you're interested and want to follow the Pinephone's development, here are the best sources of information I've located so far: There is a good Pinephone discussion thread at UBports[2]. You can also find a lot of interesting information and conversation about the phone in the Pine64 IRC channels. When you go to the page referenced below, there's a "Channels" dropdown menu near the top left. Select pinephone and then browse through the logs by date[3]. Finally, the Linux Lads podcast interviewed Pine64's community manager, __Lukasz, on March 4, and he revealed a great deal of information about the specs, OS plans, and potential accessories. There's even the possibility of an attachable sliding keyboard at some point in the future[4].