PinePhonePro First Impression
Hardware
I received my PinePhone Pro [1] on Thursday, it seems in many ways better than the Purism Librem 5 [2] that I have previously written about. The PinePhone is thinner, lighter, and yet has a much longer battery life. A friend described the Librem5 as “the CyberTruck phone” and not in a good way.
In a test I had my PinePhone and my Librem5 fully charged, left them for 4.5 hours without doing anything much with them, and then the PinePhone was at 85% and the Librem5 was at 57%. So the Librem5 will run out of battery after about 10 hours of not being used while a PinePhonePro can be expected to last about 30 hours. The PinePhonePro isn’t as good as some of the recent Android phones in this regard but it shows the potential to be quite usable. For this test both phones were connected to a 2.4GHz Wifi network (which uses less power than 5GHz) and doing nothing much with an out of the box configuration. A phone that is checking email, social networking, and a couple of IM services will use the battery faster. But even if the PinePhone has it’s battery used twice as fast in a more realistic test that will still be usable.
Here are the passmark results from the PinePhone Pro [3] which got a CPU score of 888 compared to 507 for the Librem 5 and 678 for one of the slower laptops I’ve used. The results are excluded from the Passmark averages because they identified the CPU as only having 4 cores (expecting just 4*A72) while the PinePhonePro has 6 cores (2*A72+4*A53). This phone definitely has the CPU power for convergence [4]!