Pinephone Pro

• Performance: 3/5
• Affordability: A bit expensive for the performance but decent for linux first devices
• Compatibility: 4/5
• Battery Life: 2/5

Setup information

• OS: Danct Archlinux 2025/07/28 (Updated 2025/08/05)
• Kernel: 6.15.6 Megi Danct
• DE: Phosh
• Mesa: 25.1.7
• Uboot: Megi 2024.04 uboot w/ rkbin

Hardware Supported

Hardware	Supported
GPS
aGPS ¹
Cameras
Microphone
Bluetooth
Modem
Accel/Tilt
Orientation/Gyroscope
Light/Proximity

¹ Not hardware but important usability feature and is optional

Cell Service

Cell service was tested in the US utilizing US Mobile MVNO, referral link, as it allows for easy testing of the 3 major US network providers. The downside is the TMobile service has deprioritized download speeds so your speeds can be on the slower side. Download/Upload speed tests were done using ookla speedtest.net and netflix fast.com with the data waster option enabled. As service seems to vary from moment to moment, I ran multiple tests and grabbed the best results for each section.

Note: US Mobile seems to think the EG25-G/PPP is a mobile hotspot device and will kick the line offline if you are on an unlimited plan and requires you to be on a by the gig/pooled line instead. Learned this the hard way by physically moving my personal sim from my FLX1 to the pinephone pro and the line went dead and required customer support to fix it.

The eSIM adapter works on the PPP but it doesnt have a built in way to change profiles easily. It does not work with eSIM Manager, hopefully it will in the future as I see there are discussions and even commits related to enabling AT backend support.

US Mobile Light Speed (Tmobile)

Phone	Tech	Speedtest down	Fast down	Fast up	VoLTE / VoNR
PPP	4G
Pixel 6	5G
Pixel 6	4G

Performance

The PPP is not a fast device, while leagues faster than the original pinephone it does not hold a candle to other devices in its price point. The RK3399s with its 4GB of memory can be pretty limiting but is decent enough for non demanding end users that have some patience. Where it falls flat though is when it comes to doing development work that requires compliation or even with any application or framework that is compute heavy that isn't accelerated somewhere in hardware. The RK3399s even though is binned is still not really designed for such a small form factor so it gets very hot and as a result will start to throttle in any sustained workload, the modem itself also generates significant heat when in use which only exasterbates the problem when trying to use the device out in the real world. Luckily GTK4 and QT6 "should" all be accelerated automatically so most applications run just fine without any hassle. Browsing the web is not fast but is decent enough to not be painful to use and can even handle video playback in software.

Compatibility

The PPP is almost compatible with everything, its a mainline device running a downstream kernel that has been built into pretty much every mobile linux OS and works with every mobile linux DE. The SOC is way newer than the one in the pinephone so it has support for opengl ES 3.1 so it doesnt run into the same issues that the pinephone is running into now adays with GTK dropping GLES 2.0 support. It is sadly lacking support for vulkan so applications that are vulkan only or even applications that implement GLES as an after thought might run into issues. One example of this is the rust WGPU library which is the main library used most rust applications for getting hardware acceleration. WGPU gles implementation seems to be spotty on mobile linux so it doesn't actually work on the PPP so all rust GUI applications need to be forced to run in software. Some of the other qualcom mainline devices work around this by just running WGPU in vulkan but that isn't an option on the PPP. The good thing though is those are far and few in between and pine has a large community around it so when new mobile linux applications are developed they are usually tested on the PP or the PPP.

Other OS have varying levels of community support such as Sailfish, Ubuntu Touch, postmarketos and mobian. While sailfish and ubuntu touch are prodominetely OS used in halium devices they run on the PPP perfectly fine utilizing the mainline drivers for everything. UT on the PPP though does lack some features that make it hard to daily, OTA/Camera/Spotty Calls, compared to other halium UT devices. All the OS that the PPP runs though are all community supported with no involvment usually from the parent companies, with the exception of mobian with the mobian team officially supporting the PPP.

Android

Android support is handled by the upstream waydroid. Setting it up is pretty easy by installing waydroid from the danctnix repo or from aur. Another helpful tool is waydroid-helper which is also in the aur for easy install. Waydroid does not integrate with the system in anyway so theres no settings for it in the gnome settings app but waydroid helper does atleast make it easy to manager certain features such as mapping in folders and even stopping and starting the container from a GUI. Sensor passthrough is pretty limited which some work arounds existing such as for GPS with the following script geobridge. Waydroid performance is actually better than expected though there is a slight delay when tapping. Leaving it running will eat up limited resources so its best to keep it off, luckily startup time is under a minute so you can start it up just when needed and then shut it down.

Sensors passed to Android

Tested using Sensors Toolbox app

Sensor	Passed through
GPS
Cameras
Microphone
Bluetooth
Modem
Accelerometer
Geomagnetic
Orientation
Gyroscope
Light
Pressure
Proximity
Gravity
Linear Acceleration
Rotation Vector

Docking

The PPP similar to the original PP has excellent docking support. It supports video out natively through DP-Alt mode so you can use any dock that utilizes that standard or even plug directly into something like a NexDock for a laptop like experience. This level of docking support is what all other mobile linux devices should strive for and makes it great for using it as a single device to cover all your needs. It makes it super handy for traveling as it allows you to keep all your files in a single location and research information in a bigger screen and then take it to go with you when you are heading out.

What is missing though is a way to handle wireless docking such as the halium devices running UT that can wirelessly cast to a remote display via miracast. If the PPP does support miracast in hardware then no one has gotten around to getting the software side of it implemented and UT on the PPP does not have this feature implemented. There is limited development around miracast in general though so not sure if this is something someone will ever develop/research for the PPP.

Web Browsing

Web browsing works decently. Firefox runs well and comes with postmarketos mobile-config-firefox for a better experience on the mobile screen. Benchmarking results with speedometer 3.1 with scale set to 100% are below, based on results below kumo works the best! Kumo itself is relatively new so if you run into any issues please report them upstream so they can be fixed for all users, the developers are very active and friendly. Waydroid firefox actually has really good cpu performance and scales really well since its an android app, just know video playback in it is awful and there is a slight dely when tapping on things including the keyboard.

Media Playback

Below is a table of different video codecs and their playback performance. The hardware has support for decoding h264/h265/vp9 and there is work being done on adding in the software support though no timeline on when it will be widely avaliable in everything. Results seem to be pretty mixed though luckily almost everything is able to play h264 which is still pretty much everywhere. It does struggle to play some of the newer codecs that are starting to take over such as AV1 being limited to just 720p. Waydroid firefox struggles with everything so if you need a browser for video playback just stick with native firefox. Kumo seems to be in a weird part where it can play 720p av1 and vp9 but h264 stutters and seems to struggle.

Player Information

H.264/AVC

Player	1080p@30	720p@30
MPV
Clapper
Livi
Celluloid
Firefox
Waydroid Firefox
Kumo

H.265/HEVC

Player	1080p@30	720p@30
MPV
Clapper
Livi
Celluloid
Firefox
Waydroid Firefox
Kumo

AV1

Player	1080p@30	720p@30
MPV
Clapper
Livi
Celluloid
Firefox
Waydroid Firefox
Kumo

VP9

Player	1080p@30	720p@30
MPV
Clapper
Livi
Celluloid
Firefox
Waydroid Firefox
Kumo

Camera

Library	Supported
Libcamera	¹

¹ Libcamera supports the sensors but as of this review, it is missing autofocus which is a hard requirement for actual usage

Abstraction Layer	Supported
LibMegapixels
Gstreamer
Pipewire

Example

Flashlights were pointed at the ceiling and everything left on auto, Pixel 6 and Iphone 12 both have a night mode where it took 3s for the low light photos

Versions

Normal Temp Medium Light

PPP Libcamera	Pixel 6	iPhone 12

Normal Temp Low Light

PPP Libcamera	Pixel 6	iPhone 12

Low Temp Medium Light

PPP Libcamera	Pixel 6	iPhone 12

Low Temp Low Light

PPP Libcamera	Pixel 6	iPhone 12

Battery Life

The phone has

Testing was done using the following settings:

• Screen brightness set to 50%
• Screen timeout disabled
• Measured from 100% battery to device shutdown
• Without android unless specified
• With sim unless specified
• With Wifi enabled
• Video playback is 720p 30 fps h264
• Charge time tested on pinepower v1 desktop
• Prometheus polling every 15 seconds

Screen Time

Video Playback

Standby

• taken with sleepwalk enabled utilizing the default settings
  • SLEEP_STEP=30
  • SLEEP_MAX_SECS=600
  • WAKE_SECS=30

Charging

Charging Curve

• Prometheus polling every 5 seconds
• Measured from Sonoff S31 running esphome

Support

Support from Pine64 is nonexistent, especially now that they have officially discontinued the device and are no longer producing it. Even before the discontinuation the only official support pine provided was if something was broken on arrival but due to the low warranty period it was a rush job to go through that process of validating it and contacting them. I've had to contact them once for a separate pine device, keyboard, and the support itself was fine. In that instance they sent me a replacement motherboard that I then had to go in and manually swap out and this was outside the warranty period at the time. Most of the support for the pine devices actually come from the community. Due to the low price of entry for most pine devices, the community itself is massive especially compared to all other mobile linux communities. The PINE64 discord community is the primary place where everyone works and talks all pine things so if you are keeping up with the conversations you know everything going on with all the pine ecosystems. Lots of the developers involved in working on pine devices all hangout in there so theres discussions on things they are working on. One of the great things about the community based development is that tons of people can pick it up and focus on things that are important for them, one of the main driving forces is Megi on the downstream kernel side where his kernel is used in basically every pine OS. Some members in the community though are not so keen on relying on a downstream kernel forever so there are multiple memebers of the community that have been working on upstreaming bits and pieces to reduce the hard requirement of the downstream kerenel.

Conclusion

My Involvement / Disclosures

I've been involvement in multiple different pine related software projects. Ive worked on Megapixels and Libcamera for the user camera software stack on implementing fixes and features for a better experience. My biggest contribution I'm most proud of would be located the Raspberry PI imx258 (rear camera) driver in their downstream kernel and adapting it so it supports the imx258 variant used by the PPP and pushing it all upstream to the offical linux kernel which then made its way to megi's kernel and all pine devices.

The pinephone pro and all pine devices were all purchased with my own money. I have financially contributed to multiple developers in the pine/mobile linux ecosystem though such as Megi (Kernel), Martijn (Megapixels), Guido (Phosh), PostmarketOS (OS), Ubuntu Touch (OS).

My involvement with the pine community has mostly dwindled as I've moved to other devices in the mobile linux ecosystem but I do try to keep up with things that are happening as I still have some pine devices I wish to use more in the future.