When the PinePhone began shipping to early adopters, it had all the hardware you’d expect from a smartphone, but it lacked the software needed to make some of that hardware work. If you were one of the first people to get your hands on a PinePhone, you had a Linux-friendly phone with a camera that […]
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Plasma Mobile updates make the user interface more customizable (and a bit more Android-like)
There are several different user interfaces available for Linux smartphones, but the one that will probably feel the most familiar to Android users is KDE’s Plasma Mobile. Like Android, it has a home screen, an app drawer, navigation buttons on the bottom, status notifications at the top, and a quick settings panel that appears when […]
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Open Source phone news roundup: FreeBSD, Google-free Android, and Ubuntu Touch
The next version of Ubuntu Touch is scheduled to launch on March 10, and the folks at UBPorts are looing for testers willing to check out the latest features, bug fixes, and more. The developers of the ExpidusOS smartphone Linux distribution that uses the Xfce desktop environment have outlined a roadmap for the next six […]
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Linux smartphone news roundup: Xfce for phones, browser and camera updates, and more
There’s a new Linux distribution for smartphones that’s the first I’m aware of to be based on the Xfce desktop environment, but while the first pre-release builds of ExpidusOS for the PinePhone are now available for download, there’s still a lot of work to be done to make it into a usable operating system. It […]
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F(x)tec Pro1-X will ship in August with a Snapdragon 662 processor rather than March with an SD835 chip
The F(x)tec Pro1-X is a smartphone with a slide-out keyboard and support for running Android, LineageOS, or Ubuntu Touch operating systems. The phone went up for pre-order through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in late 2020 and it was scheduled to begin shipping in March. But now the ship date has been pushed back to August. […]
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Future PinePhones will ship with Manjaro and Plasma Mobile (and other updates on the keyboard, modem firmware, and more)
After shipping five different PinePhone Community Edition models, each with a different operating system and/or user interface pre-installed, Pine64 ended the Community Edition program this month. So what’s next? A few things: Pine64 has announced that future PinePhones will ship with Manjaro Linux and the KDE Plasma Mobile user interface pre-installed. If you already have […]
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DIY smartphone keyboard made from salvaged Psion 5 PDA parts
An official PinePhone keyboard accessory is on the way, and a handful of modern phones even have physical keyboards built-in. But some folks have been making their own DIY keyboard solutions for the PinePhone and other smartphones for a while. One hardware hacker decided to do that by pairing a bit of new tech with […]
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Sxmo 1.3.0 brings usability, performance improvements to this simple, geeky Linux phone UI
Sxmo is a collection of simple applications designed to run on Linux phones. It’s not a full-fledged operating system, but rather a lightweight and speedy user interface and set of apps that runs about as well as any software I’ve tried on the PinePhone so far. But Sxmo isn’t necessarily for everyone. You have to spend […]
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Hackers develop open source firmware for the PinePhone modem, use it to make phone calls
The PinePhone is an inexpensive smartphone designed to run free and open source operating systems like Manjaro, postmarketOS, Mobian, or Ubuntu Touch. But the phone isn’t 100-percent open hardware: its modem ships relies on proprietary, closed-source firmware. A team of independent developers are working to provide an alternative – and it looks like they’re getting […]
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PinePhone Community Edition program comes to an end
Over the past year Pine64 has shipped tens of thousands of smartphones loaded with GNU/Linux distributions as part of its PinePhone Community Edition program. Each new batch of phones shipped with a different operating system pre-installed, with $10 from the sale of each phone going to the developers of that operating system. Now after shipping […]