The non-community edition with Manjaro + Plasma Mobile.
Are they selling the Convergence edition with upgraded hardware exclusively bundled with a dock? Why?
I didn’t realize until after I bought my (KDE CE) phone that the convergence edition had better specs. I thought it was just the regular phone bundled with a dock.
Your not missing out. The 2GB model has faster eMMC speeds and you can most likely get higher overclocks out of the RAM.
Good to know then!
Fun fact, the eMMC of the 2GB pinephone is actually MUCH faster than the 3GB’s eMMC module. Further the 2GB ram chips for whatever reason are better overclockable with the A64.
Huh, the storage speed difference is opposite of what the theory suggests, which is weird. The RAM thing might make sense though, it’s 33% less circuitry for the clock to synchronize.
Well as i understand it the A64 can only access 2GBs of ram at one time because it uses asymmetric dual rank ram. Perhaps that has something to do with it as well.
Actually, I just thought of this: higher capacity nand is supposed to be faster assuming the NAND architecture is the same. However, what if the 2 GB model is using a lower cell density, like SLC or MLC as opposed to TLC? Lower density NAND is always faster, but has lower capacity per unit space.
Because it is the “convergence” edition? Convergence means that you can use it with a dock.
But IMHO the hardware difference isn’t big anyways and buying such a dock (normal USB-C) would costs around $30-40.
Why not sell the upgraded phone separately for people who don’t want the dock then? My main worry is that a 2 GB RAM phone will become unusable a lot faster as Linux mobile applications improve and become more complex. I’m pretty sure a low-mid range Android phone typically has 4 GB.
The idea is that this current pinephone will be low end to force developers to optimize for low powered hardware. That and it’s a phone… you only have one app open at a time… And with only a few tabs open in a mobile-oriented browser such as angelfish or morph you shouldn’t be anywhere near using up 2 GBs. Things are much lighter in Linux than android. As for games, the A64 is the bottleneck anyways. By the time an application will start eating up anywhere near the 3GBs of ram (or even 2GBs), the A64 will already be the main bottleneck to things running smoothly, not the ram.
The idea is that this current pinephone will be low end to force developers to optimize for low powered hardware.
Not really. It’s a nice side-effect, but it’s not the reason they made this phone low-end. It’s low-end because there really isn’t much hardware out there that can support a close-to mainline kernel and other requirements Pine64 has. They’ve chosen the A64 because it was already used in other products of them and their community was already working on mainlining it.
This. The extra RAM really only start making sense when you use the dock and run desktop applications on an external screen.
Plus: comparing the PinePhone to Android devices is apples to oranges anyways.
Yeah I had hoped that this beta release would see the extra RAM version become the norm, I don’t necessarily mind but would like to see it (device) sold by itself sometime soon.
Maybe they’re just clearing stock since the orders had to be out in place in advance or the like.
They actually only have a select number of those 3GB ram chips available. They are rare to find, and especially with the component shortages going on it likely wont get any better. So it’s possible that one day they wont even be able to offer the 3GB version anymore. That said i honestly don’t think it’s needed as mobile linux so far is pretty well optimized, with only more optimizations to come over time ideally. And infact the 2GB pinephone has much faster eMMC speeds than the convergence model, not to mention it seems there’s a much better chance of being able to overclock the DRAM of the 2GB model than the 3GB one and maintain stability. As for convergence… that’s kind of a pipe dream with the current hardware… it just isn’t up to par outputting to a 1080P or higher resolution (The A64 has a Mali 400 MP2 which was the first arm mobile GPU to have OpenGL ES 2.0 support back in 2008… And it’s weaker than a first gen iphone’s GPU). Not saying the pinephone is bad, but it’s intended really as a development platform and a toy, not a device for consumers to use yet. Hopefully the next edition comes not too far in the future and really rocks the socks off of everyone.
Thanks for the info, learned a lot in this thread about the differences - I think coming from Android where more RAM generally is desirable is throwing me off with the 2 vs 3GB options.
I would love to be able to get a hint of what the next version might be, but to be honest once the software gets better optimization (especially for those apps/websites I use) then I’ll be quite happy (though I would like to play with a Librem 5 as well to see what it’s like).
Hard to say right now what will be the SoC in a hypothetical PinePhone2.
Pine64 is working now with the Rockchip RK3566 (in their upcoming SBC Quartz64), and that one supports 8GB ram and has a significantly better MALI G-52 GPU. But overall it isn’t much faster than the A64 currently used in the PinePhone and because it is a different chip vendor it will likely require a completed redesign of the PinePhone motherboard.
I think end of 2021 we will see a PineTab based on it (with an e-ink screen option), but for the PinePhone they might be waiting a bit longer until a really much better SoC is feasible (so 2022/2023 earliest).
Unrelated to the pinephone itself, will Pinebook Pro receive a RAM upgrade in the next batch? 4GB is good for me but most people would prefer 8GB.
No, as the used SoC AFAIK doesn’t support more than 4GB ram. But being a low powered system in general I have not yet encountered the need for more than 4GB ram… the CPU becomes a bottleneck anyways. I could imagine though that if you plan to do code compilation then 4GB could become an issue. For general everyday use it isn’t though as long as you accept that the Pinebook Pro is a low-end machine in general.
The SoC is a bit underwhelming for a laptop, that’s for sure. But for the price i guess you really can’t complain too much considering it’s a small-volume device and it’s running open source software. Hopefully the RK3588 comes out soon (finally) and pine can start working towards getting it up and running and proceeding to pack it into a pinebook pro with 8GBs of ram.
The box redesign looks worse imo but overall good news. Glad to see how far the pinephone has gotten
