PinePhone Comes With Six Physical Switches For Wi-Fi, Bluetooth And Others

 

Buying a smartphone these days is purchasing into an ecosystem that forces you to adhere to hundreds, if not thousands, of applications and functions that are clogging up your phone.

Even if the user is proactive and disables the functions and apps, the phones have a mind of their own, tending to enable things without specific user consent. PinePhone is the answer for those of you who want to have more control over the communication functions of your phone, offering physical kill switches that control the modem, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, microphone, rear camera, front camera, and even the headphone jack.

Developed by Pine64, a company oriented towards providing and developing ARM-based products since 2015, the PinePhone, or at least some iteration of the model, was on sale earlier this year, with Pine64 selling in tandem a Community Editions with various Linux distributions pre-installed. 

With Google introducing an overwhelming number of restrictions, in the name of user data security, and phone rooting more complicated, the presence of Linux on this line of phones is a pleasant surprise. The phone also offers the option of running custom ROMs like LineageOS and Paranoid Android, but with limited functionality because of the restrictions. 

Still, for a $150 phone produced in limited quantities, with physical switches for all the communication functions in the unit, the phone is a conspiracy theorist’s dream. Having a kill switch that physically disables the connections to the particularized component, granting full control over the hardware, is rarely seen on smartphones these days. To note, the Pine64 is not the only phone that offers kill switches for certain features, the Librem 5 smartphone also runs Linux, and it has three physical switches on the side for the GPS, accelerometer/compass, and ambient light/proximity sensors.