PinePhone Pro Shows Off Its Speed While the SOQuartz System-on-Module Gets a Blade Carrier Board
New Rockchip RK3399S system-on-chip gives the phone a big performance boost — while a SOQuartz carrier crams 12 boards into 1U.
Pine has offered a first-look at the performance improvements you can expect from its new, higher-end PinePhone Pro — and has also unveiled a new carrier board for its SOQuartz system-on-module, which is designed to cluster in 1U server racks.
Pine unveiled the open source PinePhone Pro last month, but while it promised better performance than the original PinePhone it wasn't a true successor: The company instead confirmed plans to sell the two side-by-side, offering the original PinePhone to those on a budget and the Rockchip RK3399S-based PinePhone Pro for those with a little more money to spend.
Now, with pre-orders closed, the company has showcased those performance gains for the first time. "The device is fast, very fast when compared to the original PinePhone and other similar devices," claims Pine's Lukasz Erecinski. "UI animations are perfectly smooth, applications open nearly instantly (Firefox opens in under 4 seconds on an OS running from SD card), scrolling in the web browser or interacting with elements of an application results in an immediate input reaction. For a lack of a better word, everything feels instant on the PinePhone Pro."
There are other improvements, too: "The panel is really bright and the colours are rich; the vibration motor is much more powerful than on the original PinePhone; 5Ghz Wi-Fi connectivity has been exceptionally good even when compared with my 2 year old flagship Android phone; and the phone has some heft to it, which is a good thing."
Erecinski has also detailed a delay the PinePhone Keyboard, a keyboard-and-case add-on styled roughly after the old Psion Series 5 personal digital assistant assistant. The keyboard's membrane, Erecinski explains, required an unspecified fix — and will now go on sale in December, priced at $49.95.
The SOQuartz system-on-module, first unveiled back in June, now has a new carrier board design: The SOQuartz Blade, which is designed to accept the SOQuartz — or, technically speaking, any other system-on-module compatible with the pinout, including the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 - and add high-speed storage and gigabit Ethernet connectivity.
"The Blade hostboard is designed to fit into a 1U server rack and, in a sense, brings the legacy of the SOPine and SOEdge Clusterboard to the next generation of PINE64 modules," Erecinski claims.
"More than a dozen Blade hostboards can be housed in a standard server rack, making any cluster compute project highly scalable depending on set requirements. Using the hostboard, new modules can also be easily added ad-hoc to the cluster setup."
More details on all the announcements, including improvements to the PineTime smartwatch, can be found on the official blog.