Why not sell the upgraded phone separately for people who don’t want the dock then? My main worry is that a 2 GB RAM phone will become unusable a lot faster as Linux mobile applications improve and become more complex. I’m pretty sure a low-mid range Android phone typically has 4 GB.
The idea is that this current pinephone will be low end to force developers to optimize for low powered hardware. That and it’s a phone… you only have one app open at a time… And with only a few tabs open in a mobile-oriented browser such as angelfish or morph you shouldn’t be anywhere near using up 2 GBs. Things are much lighter in Linux than android. As for games, the A64 is the bottleneck anyways. By the time an application will start eating up anywhere near the 3GBs of ram (or even 2GBs), the A64 will already be the main bottleneck to things running smoothly, not the ram.
The idea is that this current pinephone will be low end to force developers to optimize for low powered hardware.
Not really. It’s a nice side-effect, but it’s not the reason they made this phone low-end.
It’s low-end because there really isn’t much hardware out there that can support a close-to mainline kernel and other requirements Pine64 has. They’ve chosen the A64 because it was already used in other products of them and their community was already working on mainlining it.
Because it is the “convergence” edition? Convergence means that you can use it with a dock.
But IMHO the hardware difference isn’t big anyways and buying such a dock (normal USB-C) would costs around $30-40.
Why not sell the upgraded phone separately for people who don’t want the dock then? My main worry is that a 2 GB RAM phone will become unusable a lot faster as Linux mobile applications improve and become more complex. I’m pretty sure a low-mid range Android phone typically has 4 GB.
The idea is that this current pinephone will be low end to force developers to optimize for low powered hardware. That and it’s a phone… you only have one app open at a time… And with only a few tabs open in a mobile-oriented browser such as angelfish or morph you shouldn’t be anywhere near using up 2 GBs. Things are much lighter in Linux than android. As for games, the A64 is the bottleneck anyways. By the time an application will start eating up anywhere near the 3GBs of ram (or even 2GBs), the A64 will already be the main bottleneck to things running smoothly, not the ram.
Not really. It’s a nice side-effect, but it’s not the reason they made this phone low-end. It’s low-end because there really isn’t much hardware out there that can support a close-to mainline kernel and other requirements Pine64 has. They’ve chosen the A64 because it was already used in other products of them and their community was already working on mainlining it.
This. The extra RAM really only start making sense when you use the dock and run desktop applications on an external screen.
Plus: comparing the PinePhone to Android devices is apples to oranges anyways.