This blog post is already quite long, so it will omit changes merged for Plasma 6.5 (releasing in October, to be announced in a future post).
With the Plasma 6.2 release, we moved Plasma Dialer and Spacebar to the Plasma release cycle, allowing us to have consistent releases of the two apps. This completes our year long move to having all Plasma Mobile related projects released as part of wider KDE releases, streamlining the work for distributions and taking a load off us on having to maintain a separate release cycle!
In other news, a Fedora spin for Plasma Mobile was released! It will only be targeting devices that can currently boot Fedora (i.e. not ARM phones), but is very exciting nonetheless!
The way that I see, Linux phones will only get traction when we are able to install android apps and use high end spec phones with good security. I hope that I’m wrong.
Liberux NEXX is supposed to be a thing but they sorely need backers. It costs about the same as an equivalent Android phone (pixel 9 pro 1tb costs $1,500, liberux nexx 1tb costs $1,300).
8 core/32gb RAM/1TB storage phone in a very sleek body, Linux phones could have their flagship soon (and unlike pinephone it sounds like Liberux is gonna do the actual work on developing the software).
I think RK3588S is nowhere near Pixel 9 CPU.
That’s a good callout. I’m not super familiar with it, do you know how it might bench against the Tensor G4?
Here is the comparison with Tensor G4.
RK3588S is a bit slower then Snapdragon 865, which is 5 year old.
Wow, that’s quite the difference. What’s more shocking to me though is the fact that the rockchip somehow is built to handle a higher resolution than the tensor despite being weaker (8k@60fps vs 4k@60fps), and has AV1 support where the tensor doesn’t.
Interesting observation!
Honestly, I’d buy a phone with RK3588S, but $1,300 is overkill. I’d rather much prefer to downscale other specs to make it around 400-500$.