PinePhone postmarketOS Community Edition Pre-Orders Kick Off in Early July

PinePhone postmarketOS Community Edition

PINE64 and postmarketOS communities announced today that there will be a new community edition of the PinePhone Linux phone powered by the postmarketOS mobile operating system.

In early April 2020, PINE64 and UBports Foundation announced the availability of the PinePhone Ubuntu Touch Community Edition (CE), which was sold out in a matter of weeks and it’s still out of stock at the moment of writing. Basically, it’s the PinePhone Brave Heart Edition, but branded with the UBports logo and shipping with the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS pre-installed.

Same thing is happening now with postmarketOS, a free and open-source operating system for smartphones. In early July 2020, you will be able to pre-order the PinePhone postmarketOS Community Edition (CE), which will ship pre-loaded with the postmarketOS mobile operating system and branded with the postmarketOS logo on the back.

PinePhone postmarketOS Community Edition
PinePhone postmarketOS Community Edition – Image courtesy of PINE64

The PinePhone postmarketOS Community Edition will ship with the GNOME-based Phosh user interface by default, which was developed by Purism for their Librem 5 Linux phone. Unfortunately, there won’t be a version with Plasma Mobile, but postmarketOS devs said that you’ll be able to install it at any time just by flashing the Plasma Mobile postmarketOS image on the PinePhone device.

The device will come with basic smartphone functionality like phone calls, SMS, mobile data, and Wi-Fi, even though postmarketOS is still in beta state, as well as full disk encryption, thanks to postmarketOS’s latest on-device installer.

“To our knowledge, postmarketOS is the only non-Android free software phone operating system that offers full disk encryption,” said the postmarketOS developers.

If you want to buy a PinePhone Linux smartphone with postmarketOS pre-installed, you will have about a month and a half from the moment pre-orders kick off in early July, but I bet they will be gone in just a few days. The device will cost as much as the Ubuntu Touch edition, namely $149.99 USD + shipping, and PINE64 will donate $10 USD for each device sold to postmarketOS developers.

PINE64 will provide details about the hardware included in the PinePhone postmarketOS Community Edition in the coming days, so I will update this article accordingly. Meanwhile, you can check out the Phosh user interface of postmarketOS in action in the screenshot gallery below, courtesy of postmarketOS.

Last updated 4 years ago

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