Community Pine64 and the KDE project have announced smartphone availability PinePhone KDE Community Edition (firmware with the KDE Plasma Mobile user environment).
The KDE edition complements previously released smartphone variants that ship with postmarketOS, UBports / Ubuntu Touch, and Manjaro.
About PinePhone KDE Community Edition
This new edition highlights that there are improvements throughout the system for filling the software, which have been transferred to different versions of the firmware.
Linux kernel patches have been prepared to improve hardware support. The screen refresh rate has been increased to 60 Hz (1/3 more than before) for smoother output and better response when entering or operating on the touch screen.
As to operation, this has been improved as a portable workstation pocket that you can connect to a monitor and get a familiar desktop with typical Linux applications.
The process of returning from sleep mode has been sped up when receiving an incoming call. Greater reliability of working with Bluetooth devices. The quality of voice calls has been significantly improved. The general condition of the platform and the telephony is evaluated as already adequate for daily use.
In addition, significant enhancements to the KDE Plasma Mobile platform are mentioned, which is based on the mobile edition of the Plasma 5 desktop, the KDE Frameworks 5 libraries, the Ofono phone stack, and the Telepathy communications framework.
To create the application interface, Qt is applied, a set of Mauikit components and Kirigami framework from KDE Frameworks, allowing you to create versatile interfaces, suitable for smartphones, tablets and PCs. The kwin_wayland composite server is used to display graphics. PulseAudio is used for sound processing.
The structure includes applications like KDE Connect to pair your phone with a desktop, document viewer Okular, VVave music player, Image Viewers, Koko and Pix, Buho System Maintenance Notes, Calindori Calendar Planner, File Manager, Index, Application Manager and more.
Between recent changes in KDE Plasma Mobile, you can highlight the application thumbnail display when switching tasks, the taskbar interface modernization, a new screen for entering the PIN code for the SIM card, the Bluetooth quick setting mode, a button to power on the flashlight on the Pinephone.
KClock, KWeather, Alligator applications have been improved (RSS client), QMLKonsole, Qrca (QR code scanner) and Calindori (calendar planner). Correct display of call history in dialer has been set.
The SpaceBar application has been completely redesigned, in which the interface has been improved, and in order not to lose SMS / MMS when the application is idle, a special background handling process has been implemented.
Added a new module to the configurator to configure the virtual keyboard Maliit. New applications have been proposed: a metronome for Rattlesnake musicians and a NeoChat matrix client (a fork of Spectral based on libQuotient).
Get PinePhone KDE Community Edition
The PinePhone smartphone edition with KDE It will go on sale on December 1 and will be delivered in versions with 2GB RAM + 16GB eMMC and 3GB RAM + 32GB eMMC + USB Type-C adapter to connect to a monitor (HDMI), network (10/100 Ethernet), keyboard and mouse (two USB 2.0 ports).
In addition to the KDE Plasma Mobile environment, boot images are being developed for PinePhone based on postmarketOS, UBports, Maemo Leste, Manjaro, LuneOS, Nemo Mobile and the partially open Sailfish platform.
Work is in progress to prepare builds with NixOS. The software environment can be loaded directly from the SD card without the need for flashing.
Finally, for those who are interested in being able to obtain this edition of PinePhone, they can obtain a version of the devices with KDE from the official website.
The editions will cost $ 149 and $ 199 respectively and in addition to this, shipping costs must be taken into account.
Source: https://www.pine64.org