this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Linux Phones
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Community about running GNU/Linux on phones. Projects like Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, PostmarketOS, Mobian etc. Either on former Android phones or hardware like the PinePhone.
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Yeah π A very large point of Linux mobile is to get away from vendor specific kernels and non-upstream drivers, so that devices can be run on mainline kernels easily.
It does sound like the situation with the Pinephone Pro is better in that regard, but why does it have to be so darn overpriced? π
Original PinePhone is also overpriced. For 200$ you can buy way more powerful Android device :( I think it's because the production volume is less than other large companies have and because Pine64 don't sell any data.
Sure, but at a 200$ price point you can pay a bit extra for a device to play around with.
A 600$+ device like the Pro, however should better be actually useful as a daily driver, which currently AFAIK it is not. Also the same company sells similar hardware for half the price, which is what makes it especially overpriced.
But Pro costs 400$. I have both PP and PPP. Maybe it depends on the person, but for me the PP is too slow, I can't use as my main phone. When I had the opportunity, I bought PPP and daily drive it now.
You mean that Pine64 sell PP and PPP? I wouldn't say "similar hardware" in this case. Pro have way faster CPU, better camera, faster emmc, better screen glass.
It doesn't cost 400$. That's the price before taxes, shipping and import duty. The official pine64eu store has the real price which is 592.50β¬
What I mean is that if they can sell the Pinebook Pro with the same SoC and a PP with a nearly identical hardware other than the SoC each for a bit more than 200$, then asking 600$ for the Pro is clearly overpriced.
If you using the official pine64eu store, then PP costs 339.00β¬. It's not "a bit more then 200$". I'm not from EU, so I used their global store (https://pine64.com). And it's 200$ and 400$. It's unfair to compare the price from the EU store for PPP with the price of PP from the global one. And the hardware is not nearly identical, I pointed it out just above. Also forgot to mention faster RAM (LPDDR4 vs LPDDR3 SDRAM) and 1 extra Gb.
Are these phone overpriced? Sure. But I disagree that PPP is more overpriced then PP. They have the same kind of overprice π I would even recommend PPP over PP. If I could go back in time, I wouldn't buy PP.
The PPP still costs nearly double of the PP, even when comparing the prices like that, which was my original point.
Are there maybe reasons for it? Sure, licensing expensive but pointless Gorrilla glass and other such non-sense does rise the price, but it doesn't change the fact that the PPP is vastly overpriced, while the PP was originally not (these days it is, but that's just because it still has the same price as half a decade ago).
I think the biggest reason is more powerful hardware. More expensive glass sure contributes to the price, but I don't think it's much.
Braveheart edition was released in 2020. In this year you could buy Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 for $140.00. It's so much better deal the PinePhone. GNU/Linux phones are always overpriced due to the reasons I mentioned above.
The modem is the same and the SoC is the same as in the Pinebook Pro, which costs much less. The only actually better part in the PPP that justifies a slightly higher price is the back camera.
I think Pine64 tried to get in some imagined premium market with the PPP and the PineNote, and at least for the Note they admitted it was a total failure.
@poVoq @Shatur The PBP doesn't include a modem (so no LTE antennas), has only 1 (cheap) camera, bigger display/form factor, no touchscreen, smaller eMMC, cheaper audio codec...
Also, the PPP's display is way better (and therefore costly) in both contrast and color-correctness to the OG PP one.
Comparing the PPP & PBP prices based only on the fact they use the same SoC really doesn't make any sense unless you look at *all* the differences, and even then, it's dubious...
Obviously I am comparing both the PP and the PBP with the PPP. The two cheaper devices show that it would have been perfectly possible to make a sub 300$ device that is a functional equivalent of the PPP.
More colors on a tiny low resolution mobile screen is another one of these useless premium features they added to justify the massive price hike.
Pine64eu is not an official store.
It is run by one of the core members of the Pine64 design team AFAIK. For all intends and purposes it is the official EU store of Pine64 even though you are right that legally speaking it is a separate entity.
I could handle an overpriced phone if the device were viable for day-to-day use. Unfortunately the battery life is so compromised that even if we had a totally flawless mobile OS running on it, it still wouldn't work out as a phone.
In this case it's better to think of it as a development platform.