PinePhone CE With Manjaro Linux ARM Now Available For Pre-order
PINE64 announced its next PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition (CE) last month and today it is available for pre-order. The new PinePhone CE features Arch Linux ARM-based Manjaro Linux ARM by default for the first time.
If you want to place an order right now, go to the official PINE Store. However, at the time of writing, PinePhone maker PINE64 has not made any official announcement yet.
PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition
As you may also know, PinePhone Manjaro CE is the third iteration after PinePhone with Ubuntu Touch and postmarketOS arrived earlier.
Similar to PinePhone postmarketOS CE, Manjaro Community Edition also comes in two hardware variants: Regular and Convergence Package, along with the same PCB (Printed Circuit Board) version 1.2.
The $149 regular edition offers 2GB of RAM and 16GB of eMMC, while the $199 Convergence Package is an extended edition offering 3GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC bundled with a USB-C dock.
Under the hood, this 5.95-inch smartphone with HD IPS capacitive touchscreen is powered by an Allwinner A64 64-bit quad-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex A-53 processor and MALI-400MP2 GPU.
On the software side, it ships a user-friendly Arch-based Manjaro ARM rolling distribution, which supports nearly all of PINE64 SBCs (Single-board computers) and devices including PinePhone, PineTab, and Pinebook Pro.
Interestingly, Manjaro alpha builds also comes in variety with the availability of three mobile user interfaces: UBport’s Lomiri, Purism’s Phosh, and KDE-based Plasma mobile.
It is also worth mentioning that PinePhone is still not a consumer-ready product and Manjaro OS software build is also currently an Alpha software build. However, PinePhone supports core functionality such as telephone calls, SMS messages, LTE, GPS, GPU acceleration, and so on.
The estimated dispatch of PinePhone Manjaro CE is scheduled for early November 2020.
