I am alaraajavamma and let’s start with this. I do not work for or receive any compensation from Furilabs. I am just a satisfied customer and Linux phone enthusiast who desperately wants to see linux mobile succeed. This is the sixth chapter in my Linux mobile journey.

The incredible community effort around the original Pinephone had proven the viability of FOSS mobile, but it had also hit a hard ceiling: the sheer lack of power. All the excuses for not adopting it as a daily driver boiled down to the fact that it was just so freaking low.

The arrival of the Pinephone Pro (PPP) felt like the final piece of the puzzle. Pine64 listened, and the promise was simple: give the community a powerhouse successor that could finally put the speed excuse to rest.

I was incredibly excited. The PPP should have solved all the issues, right?

Powering the Pocket PC Dream

When I got my first Pinephone Pro, I was genuinely impressed. The device was a massive leap forward in performance.

• Processor Boost: The PPP features a powerful Rockchip RK3399S processor (a lower-power variant of the RK3399), which includes two ARM Cortex-A72 cores and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores.
• RAM and Storage: With 4GB of RAM and 128GB of eMMC storage, the PPP could truly compete with some low-end desktop computers.

This level of performance was more than enough for daily driving a Linux phone. Suddenly, running complex applications and navigating the Phosh or Plasma Mobile interface felt fast and responsive. A joyous change from the sluggishness of its predecessor.

Crucially, the Pinephone Pro also solved the display out issues that plagued the original. The convergence experience, while still demanding, was now genuinely usable thanks to the horsepower under the hood. The PPP was finally delivering on the desktop side of the pocket PC equation.

The convergence part with wired display-out is actually that good that I still have one Pinephone Pro in daily use but only as portable computer.

The Remaining Battles: Heat and Endurance

With speed finally conquered, the community’s focus shifted back to other fundamental hardware challenges:

1. Heat: On heavy use (like video streaming or intense tasks), the PPP would become very hot. While this issue has seen some improvement through kernel and firmware updates since its initial release, it still runs quite warm when pushed hard.
2. Battery Life: While the battery life in a suspended (idle) state was acceptable, heavy use could quickly drain the power. You could burn the battery flat in as little as 30 minutes if you were pushing the phone hard.
3. Camera and GPS are still not in par what you would expect from modern smartphone. I would say they are more proof-of-concept than really usable.

These were the classic trade-offs of performance vs. endurance in a small chassis, and while frustrating, they felt like solvable engineering challenges.

The Unspeakable Problem: A Phone That Can’t Call

The biggest, most demoralizing downside for me was a problem that persists to this day: call audio is simply not tolerable.

A phone’s primary function is communication, and despite the efforts of the entire community, the Pinephone Pro has never achieved reliable, clear call audio quality. I have owned a total of eight Pinephone Pros, and together with community heroes like Biktorgj and Megi, we spent countless hours debugging this issue but we simply got nowhere. If you are more interested I did write notes on the Pine64 forum and in various repositories.

The fact remains: the audio pipeline for calls is still not working as it should. What kind of a phone is a phone that can’t call? This Achilles’ heel – likely rooted in subtle hardware, firmware, or kernel interaction issues – transforms the PPP from a groundbreaking pocket PC into a beautiful, powerful PDA.

The Pinephone Pro is a testament to what FOSS can achieve when given horsepower, but its failure to nail down basic telecommunication functions is a painful reminder that the journey to the perfect Linux mobile daily driver is far from over.

Last words… remember to support your favorite Linux mobile project using whatever method suits you best! Since I am quite bad at coding, I try to put my money where my mouth is, so I have personally supported every project I write about financially.
I can also proudly encourage you to buy my current daily driver FLX1s – please feel free to ask me questions about it if you are curious. 2026 will be the year of Linux mobile, so jump in and enjoy the ride!