Introducing the PinePhone - KDE Community edition

Experience the future of KDE's open mobile platform

KDE and Pine64 are announcing today the imminent availability of the new PinePhone - KDE Community edition. This Pine64 PinePhone gives you a taste of where free mobile devices and software platforms are headed.

The PinePhone - KDE Community edition includes most of the essential features a smartphone user would expect and its functionalities increase day by day. You can follow the progress of the development of apps and features in the Plasma Mobile blog.

Plasma Mobile is a direct descendant from KDE's successful Plasma desktop. The same underlying technologies drive both environments and apps like KDE Connect that lets you connect phones and desktops, the Okular document reader, the VVave music player, and others, are available on both desktop and mobile.

Thanks to projects like Kirigami and Maui, developers can write apps that, not only run in multiple environments but that also gracefully adapt by growing into landscape format when displayed on workstation screen and shrinking to portrait mode on phones. Developers are rapidly populating Plasma Mobile with essential programs, such as web browsers, clocks, calendars, weather apps and games, all of which are being deployed on all platforms, regardless of the layout.

The idea of having mobile devices that can display a full workstation desktop when connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, has been around for years and both the KDE Community and Pine64 have been working to make it a reality.

The PinePhone handset itself is also ready for convergence. You can use any USB-C dock to connect it to extra USB devices (mouse, keyboard, storage), external monitors or even to a wired network. In fact, the 3GB version of the PinePhone already comes with such a dock that provides two extra USB ports, a full-sized HD video port and an RJ45 port.

Talking of hardware, the PinePhone's kill switches, located under the back cover and above the removable battery, allow you to deactivate the modem, WiFi/Bluetooth, microphone and cameras, and are especially designed to help preserve your privacy. This matches very well KDE's Community vision of "[a] world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy".

The PinePhone - KDE Community edition is also reasonably priced, allowing you to enjoy a device on which you can run Plasma Mobile during the next years. You can be one of the pioneers to test and mold with your feedback the mobile system of the future.

If you are interested in developing, you will be getting early access to an ambitious Free Software mobile platform and you can help contribute to Plasma Mobile and get a headway designing new apps that you can test and deploy right now.