Furilabs Linux Phone

$500 price point is a lot for an open source enthusiast phone, especially one unknown.

The Pine64 PinePhone is $150-$200, with similar hardware provenance, but various open source projects that might at least give better software longevity and software trustworthiness. https://pine64.com/product-category/pinephone/

An additional consideration: as much as we like and respect our global colleagues, unfortunately I could see both hardware brands getting banned in some locales and by some organizations, like some other telecom brands have been banned. A phone that can't be used as a phone has little value, no matter how open it is.

For somewhat different provenance, the Purism Librem 5 is coming in at $800+, which is too high a high price point for most open source enthusiast contributors. https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

And Purism's made-in-USA version, the Liberty Phone, is at $2K+. I guess maybe government or enterprise sales? https://shop.puri.sm/shop/liberty-phone/

I'm thinking that better for the Western open source developers and non-wealthy enthusiasts would be something more palatable to Western governments, and usable as a daily driver, like Librem 5, but priced somewhere in (guessing) $200-$400.

The original pinephone was an allwinner soc that had like 4x a53 cores, a weak GPU, and pretty meh ram. This phone has a fairly modern mediatek soc with a78 cores, a fairly modern Mali GPU, ufs storage, and lpddrx5 ram.

> with similar hardware provenance

no not at all Pine64 hardware is pretty crap (performance wise, very normal independent of the OS at that price point)

Like you are comparing things like 3GB LPDDR3 SDRAM (Pine64) to 6GB LPDDR4X which is world apart (not only does it move from a "very tight on memory" to "somewhat acceptable memory" (very big deal) it also is much faster (~2x).

Similar on the Pine64 you have 4 old little cores here you have 2 big + 6 little cores and all more modern (end even just the little cores are faster when comparing one core with another, ignoring that you have 2 more little cores and 2 big cores).

Storage moves from a quite tight 32 GiB (through I guess if you only do stuff like mail it might be enough) to a likely more then enough 128GiB (also faster).

Noticeable faster GPU too, I guess.

And way better camera, at least by by numbers.

So not comparable at all.

But what matters most is not the absolute differences but moving it from a "so tight on RAM,CPU,GPU,Storage that you run all times into problems" to a "enough for all common tasks". I.e. from you need micro optimized apps for it to work nice to yes it works if your app is imperfect territory. And that is a pretty big deal.

But also lets be realistic. Atm. _any_ Linux Phone is a pure enthusiast product balancing various problems (price, small production lines, only android diver problems, proprietary blob problems etc.). And many of the enthusiast earn enough money to afford a 500$ toy, through maybe just rarely and with thinking twice about it.

$500 and (hopefully) works is a lot better than $800+ and works or $200 and doesn’t work worth a shit.

Good points about hardware capability specs, but I meant to talk about a separate consideration.

I meant provenance as in geopolitical. Later in the comment alludes to this more, and one way it can be a showstopper.

Sorry I was being vague, but it's awkward to mention, and unfortunate that there is ever any potential conflict.