If you were plucky enough to pre-order a PinePhone Brave Heart edition last month you may be interested to know that devices start shipping from January 17, 2020.
Yes, this week!
Pine64’s Lukasz Erecinski shares the date in the company’s latest monthly update, explaining: “We’re now ready […] to confirm that PinePhones will begin shipping …on January 17th 2020. The dispatch process will take a couple of days, however, so your unit may ship on the 20th or 25th. At any rate, you’ll have your PinePhone soon”.
The handsets are being shipped through a company called Asendia who, Erecinski says, offer a good balance of shipping times (important to buyers) and cost (important to Pine64, who don’t exactly make huge profits all on this tech).
The PinePhone itself will come housed in a (stylishly designed, I think) presentation box (made of recycled material, no less). The box contains the phone (with plastic screen protector pre-applied), a USB Type-C charging cable, and a small “introductory leaflet”.
No plug — I’m not sure what the American term for this is? — is included, so you’ll need to use one you already have or buy one especially should you not have one. You can, naturally, charge from a computer port too (though it may take longer).
Do remember that the PinePhone Brave Heart models comes with no real OS. You will need to download one and pop it on an SD card for booting to actually use it as, y’know, a phone!
That said there is a “factory test image” (based on postmarketOS) so that folks can actually check the phone works, and test the various IO, e.g., touch screen, networking, speakers, etc.
You’ll find plenty of links to development builds of various Linux mobile operating systems over on the Pine64 forum. I’ll (naturally) be posting articles related to some of them here on omg! as soon as I receive my unit!
Holding off buying a PinePhone until the final “consumer ready” model is ready? Well, you’ll be interested to know that the PinePhone is still expected to go on general sale in March, with shipping set for April.
However…
This date may slip if none of the (multiple) Linux phone OSes being crafted for the device are consider ready enough to ship by default. Pine64 don’t, after all, want to make a bad first impression.