For those of us concerned about data 
privacy and user control of technology, 
there's a fairly promising development 
on the horizon: the Pinephone, a US$150 
linux phone. Its projected release date 
is sometime in the final quarter of 
2019. Developer devices are already 
shipping.

The Pinephone initial release will come 
pre-loaded with Ubuntu Touch (which is 
maintained by UBports). There are plans 
to shift the pre-loaded distribution 
with each batch of phones produced 
(possibly Plasma Mobile in the second 
wave), but users should be able to load 
any of the available distributions 
without trouble. I have to wonder if 
this is a better way forward for all of 
the groups involved in the Halium 
Project[1].

In addition to supporting open source 
software (and Pine64 has committed to 
contributing to the OS projects 
financially), the phone will also 
include a number of hardware switches 
under the back cover, so that users can 
manually (and selectively) turn off 
radios and peripherals.

If you're interested and want to follow 
the Pinephone's development, here are 
the best sources of information I've 
located so far:

There is a good Pinephone discussion 
thread at UBports[2].

You can also find a lot of interesting 
information and conversation about the 
phone in the Pine64 IRC channels. When 
you go to the page referenced below, 
there's a "Channels" dropdown menu near 
the top left. Select pinephone and then 
browse through the logs by date[3].

Finally, the Linux Lads podcast 
interviewed Pine64's community manager, 
__Lukasz, on March 4, and he revealed a 
great deal of information about the 
specs, OS plans, and potential 
accessories. There's even the 
possibility of an attachable sliding 
keyboard at some point in the future[4].

*If you're wondering about the 40-column 
width, I'm experimenting with formatting 
for mobile.


[1] https://halium.org/

[2] https://forums.ubports.com/topic/2403/pinephone/39
 
[3] http://irc.pine64.uk/?

[4] https://linuxlads.com/episodes/season-2-episode-4