The KDE project and Pine64 announce the availability of PinePhone KDE Community Edition with the Plasma Mobile operating system.
Pine64 designs, manufactures and sells single board computers, laptops, tablets that run open-source Linux operating systems. With these announcements, you can now have the KDE Plasma Mobile on your PinePhone devices.
PinePhone KDE Community Edition with Plasma Mobile
This is a significant announcement, considering the flexibility of KDE Plasma across device form factors. Plasma Mobile is capable of Convergence. That means you can easily connect your PinePhone to any monitor or larger display with peripherals, and it works as a computer. The native Plasma applications such as Okular, VVave is capable of responsive display across different displays.
The Plasma Mobile is in heavy development, and new apps are being written using Kirigami and Maui as we speak.
The PinePhone already runs Ubuntu Touch, PostmarketOS, and Majaro with a Linux base. And now, it’s available with KDE Plasma Mobile.
KDE has advantages over Ubuntu Touch, Manjaro in PinePhone because of Apps. The Plasma Mobile can run already existing KDE Apps with minor tweaks via KDE Connect. That means if you are running any native KDE Apps in KDE Neon or Kubuntu – well they will be available in PinePhone eventually.
The mobile-specific applications, such as Calls, SMS are already there and improvements are added via PLasma Mobile development.
PinePhone KDE Community Edition – Spec
A quick rundown of the spec of PinePhone KDE Community Edition:
- Allwinner A64 Quad Core SoC with Mali 400 MP2 GPU
- 2GB/3GB of LPDDR3 RAM
- 5.95″ LCD 1440×720, 18:9 aspect ratio (hardened glass)
- Bootable micro SD
- 16GB/32GB eMMC
- HD Digital Video Out
- USB Type C (Power, Data and Video Out)
- Quectel EG-25G with worldwide bands
- WiFi: 802.11 b/g/n, single-band, hotspot capable
- Bluetooth: 4.0, A2DP
- GNSS: GPS, GPS-A, GLONASS
- Vibrator
- RGB status LED
- Selfie and Main camera (2/5Mpx respectively)
- Main Camera: Single OV6540, 5MP, 1/4″, LED Flash
- Selfie Camera: Single GC2035, 2MP, f/2.8, 1/5″
- Sensors: accelerator, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer, ambient light
- 3 External Switches: up, down, and power
- HW switches: LTE/GNSS, WiFi, Microphone, Speaker, Cameras
- Samsung J7 form-factor 3000mAh battery
- The case is matte black finished plastic
- Headphone Jack
The PinePhone Community Edition with Plasma Mobile will be available for pre-order in December 2020. For more details visit the Pine64 website.
Image credits: Kde.org, Pine64
