pinephone 2 specs discussion - 5G WiFi6 BT5 NFC? -

[mitcoes]

Will we have a pinephone 2 specs discussion?

I would like a 5G + WiFi6 + NFC + BT5 model, even if the rest is the same as the 1

And if it has socket/s for RAM and ROM to add more RAM/ROM or change them to higher capacity or replace them if damaged or plug the ROM in other device if phone fails if some information was not backed up even better.

[alexandre]

A smaller one (but i admit it would make a lot of work to do to (re)design it at both the hardware and the «UI» level…)

[neil_swann80]

I'd quite like an IR transceiver. Working in AV it's nice to have a device that you can use as a one-for-all remote.

[misha64]

Pinephone 2 software as open source as possible. This gives more trust in the whole project in contrast to regular android phones:

no binary blobs for booting
no blobs for camera
open source wifi firmware - pinecone is already worked on

Work on open sourcing modem firmware is amazing. further development on this front for pinephone 2 would be really great

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Better hardware. Often chunky experience is reported for UI on pinephone.

Ram >=4gb
better cpu
better power management
camera - the one available now is just poor

Quartz 64 looks like a very good starting point for pinephone 2/pro - with much improved performance, power efficiency and possible support for better camera

Would be great to see some timelime for pinephone 2

Pinephone 1 reached some level of maturity and most of work is done on optimizing software while nothing conceptually new will be done on the hardware to improve the experience. And w/o better hardware possibilities of improvement are quite limited.

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hardware killswitches available from outside w/o need to take phone apart

[sagaracharya]

+1 on above answer. I'd not like more RAM though. I believe a small phone shouldn't use much RAM. Current RAM is enough.
I'd like a RISCV processor to remove ARM TrustZone.

I'd like better camera for sure. Hardware switch is great but in today's world of surveillance, a flap for front an back cam can be helpful to make sure that psychologically we know that camera is off.

And I'd also like shipping to Maharashtra, India.

[misha64]

everything i read here would make the phone more expensive.. for example, i don't buy a phone that costs more than 150 USD, but i made an exception for a linux phone.. if you go higher, you reach less people.. but there is still room for something between the pinephone and librem 5

To my mind price could go higher for better hardware - lets say around 300-500 euros you can get new pixels with grapheneos, so this price would make pinephone 2 a good competition


Also we have already seen regular and convergence editions with different prices and specs of pinephone.

Keeping one phone as lower spec (camera, maybe screen) and cheaper and other more beefy but with higher price. Majority of hardware could stay same -so same software etc would work for both

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+1 on above answer. I'd not like more RAM though. I believe a small phone shouldn't use much RAM. Current RAM is enough.
I'd like a RISCV processor to remove ARM TrustZone.

I'd like better camera for sure. Hardware switch is great but in today's world of surveillance, a flap for front an back cam can be helpful to make sure that psychologically we know that camera is off.

And I'd also like shipping to Maharashtra, India.

RiscV is very interesting and cool option.

I guess decision will depend on how well software works on arm vs risc. might be riscv more feasible for pinephone 3

as for ram - only problem is current web, firefox can easily eat few gigs with opened tabs

[bitsandnumbers]

We cannot make assumptions for the best optimized hardware unless software is optimized itself.

I believe the wise thing to do before getting into these new hardware considerations is to wait and see what software can actually deliver with the current hardware. Then it will be easy to evaluate what kind of specs/price would be best for a new PP iteration.

[arkadione]

i don't ask for much for pinephone2 in terms of hardware

-100% working camera
-easy to use interface
-3 or even 4 GB of ram
-5G wifi

that's it.

don't care about NFC, IR, thumbprint scanner etc.

[misha64]

We cannot make assumptions for the best optimized hardware unless software is optimized itself.

I believe the wise thing to do before getting into these new hardware considerations is to wait and see what software can actually deliver with the current hardware. Then it will be easy to evaluate what kind of specs/price would be best for a new PP iteration.

True

But not much can be expected from Allwinner A64. It is from 2015 with 40 nm architecture. No wonder poor power efficiency and performance. This is 6! years old hardware not even designed for mobile use, you most probably do not use laptop from that time anymore.

[Zebulon Walton]

True

But not much can be expected from Allwinner A64. It is from 2015 with 40 nm architecture. No wonder poor power efficiency and performance. This is 6! years old hardware not even designed for mobile use, you most probably do not use laptop from that time anymore.

I am writing this on a laptop that was manufactured in 2004. It has a 32-bit "Core Duo" T2300 CPU. Originally designed for Windows XP, I upgraded it to 2GB DDR2 memory (its maximum) and installed an old 30GB SSD I had handy. (The laptop has SATA 1.0.)

I use this old laptop practically ever day. It's now running Linux with LXDE desktop and has no problems with general web browsing and even videos. (Not the fastest thing in the world obviously but it's really not bad.) So the idea of the Pinephone using 6-year-old tech doesn't seem especially worrisome to me, particularly given the price.