Plans for further HW revisions?

[marcih]

Since the next Manjaro batch and the last PMOS batch were both the same hardware revision, which itself was a minor revision of the UBPorts board, are there any plans for a final-final-definitely-for-real-this-time hardware revision of the PinePhone, or should the 1.2a be considered as such?

[bcnaz]

As forum members,  we can "Speculate" :

From the development phone to the Brave Heart,  then the Ubuntu Touch phone,  they discovered 'flaws'  that they remedied,  as those flaws showed up.

The PMOS phone would seem to have fixed the 'discovered flaws',  the convergent version has a slight boost to cover a wider usage than the standard phone.

There is now  a possible issue with the existing modem and use for MMS messaging,   Can that be fixed with firmware, or will that require yet another upgrade..?

I CAN live without MMS, but a lot of people it seems cannot...  Next will be the 5g issue, I can definitely do without, BUT....  others will be DEMANDING that next.

TLlim has stated he plans to support the current Pine phone for at least 5 years,  I sincerely hope that is possible.

BUT in todays "Techno world"  nothing is permanent or final.

[marcih]

There is now  a possible issue with the existing modem and use for MMS messaging,   Can that be fixed with firmware, or will that require yet another upgrade..?

I CAN live without MMS, but a lot of people it seems cannot...  Next will be the 5g issue, I can definitely do without, BUT....  others will be DEMANDING that next.

I think it's far too late now to swap out a major part like the modem and still call it "PinePhone", it would have to be marketed to be a distinctly different device, i.e. PinePhone with a 5G capable modem would have to be something like "PinePhone 5G". I do however wonder why this particular modem was chosen... Lots of frequency bands supported for maximum world-wide compatibility? Well-tested and stable? Well, we know the latter isn't the case since the modem is the source of the most of the PP's current woes. Maybe mainlined drivers? It's hard for me to tell, I haven't been around the PinePhone community long enough. Oh and the MMS issue? Correct me if I'm wrong but from what I gathered from the forum posts, the modem is receiving the MMS messages just fine, it's just the the texting applications that can't display them properly so that's purely a software issue.

[lot378]

Due to a flaw, I believe there is at least one revision to board 1.2a that is coming with the Manjaro edition PinePhones in November 2020.

For details see: https://xnux.eu/log/#022

[marcih]

Due to a flaw, I believe there is at least one revision to board 1.2a that is coming with the Manjaro edition PinePhones in November 2020.

For details see: https://xnux.eu/log/#022

Hmmm, I remember reading about a backlight issue that was present in 1.2 and still is in 1.2a: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=PinePhone_v1.2a
The one that you've linked on megi's dev log is a different one, right? The wiki seems to say so anyway.

I wonder why the fact that the Manjaro batch will (supposedly) be a new revision hasn't been advertised. Have hardware revisions previously been announced ahead of release (so that, for example, a user with an older revision can buy the new batch with a new revision that fixes a bug that has annoyed them)?