Pinephone Beta Edition – open for preorder soon

As we found out in the March update from Pine64, there will be a PinePhone preorder option soon. Pre-orders will likely begin later this week or next week. This, of course, is still subject to change.

The upcoming production-run, as well as the next two or three following it, will be referred to as the Beta Edition. The term “Beta” indicates the present software status. Despite huge strides made by Manjaro and KDE Plasma Mobile teams in the past 3 months, the software isn’t yet at a stage where we’d be comfortable selling the PinePhone as an end-user ready product; even if the target end-users of the PinePhone are informed Linux enthusiasts. It will be yet a couple of months before the software reaches a status where we’d be willing to pitch the PinePhone as a “completely functional smartphone for advanced Linux enthusiasts”. That said, let’s take a moment to appreciate the fact that the software has moved out of an Alpha-stage and that core smartphone functionality has now reached considerable maturity, thanks in large part to the Community Edition (CE) scheme which ran throughout 2020. 

Lukasz Erecinski, March Update: Status Report: https://www.pine64.org/2021/03/15/march-update/