[StillBored]

But the point is your looking at a SoC with A53's, which is a 9 year old in-order design. Or for that matter, the rk3399's A72's which is a 5 year old design. That puts them at somewhere between an 6x->4x (geekbench) slower per core vs a modern smartphone depending on which benchmark you compare.

Then you add in the overhead of not being a mobile optimized OS, and your also burning massively more power.

The market share for these phones will remain geeks who want to have a more "open" phone and are willing to deal with a slow, buggy, inefficient device.

Frankly, this won't change until Qualcomm/etc decide to make their SoC's more open, so that smaller companies can build products like these without signing piles of NDAs and shipping android BSP kernels. But then again, that might cut into their business because they won't be able to deprecate 2 year old phones by simply refusing to provide security updates.

Most geeks would be better off picking up a year or two old phone and running lineageOs. At least the devices tend to work, even if they have a dozen or so proprietary blobs.

[mswann]

Yes, unfortunately you're right in that there's lots of room for improvement. Nevertheless I'd call the rk3399 a decent SoC, but then for me the fact that it runs without proprietary firmware is certainly more important than pure performance. What I'd really like to have though, is more RAM - I run my desktop on the rk3399. And I already use the PinePhone as a daily driver although I see that it's not there for most of the people.

But maybe this could not only change at the big vendors' whim, but also if more people express their wish for systems that are less locked in by changing their priorities.

[CameronNemo]

Rockchip certainly does not have access to the smaller processes or newer designs like Qualcomm and Samsung do.

But at least their new SoCs will have A55 and A76s! It's progress, no matter how slow.

Maybe we will see an rk3566 tablet out and about one day.