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!
I’ve noticed that my Poco F1 with 1/3 more battery but a good enough CPU runs around 3 times as long as my 5 years newer OnePlus 9, both running LineageOS 22 and same usage.
Maybe we are way past the curve where more processing power means shorter processing times/more energy savings vs. going full power for every little bit.
In summary, why would you still pay over $400 for a phone nowadays, if all you get is a better camera (which still doesn’t make noticeably better photos) and less battery time?
Because carriers are smart and greedy and lobbied the government to sell a block of spectrum that is only used in the US for 5g, so if you want good connectivity in the us, you have to buy a phone from them at 3 times the price.
Well, in the case of the liberux and the 9 pro, you get a lot more storage space built in (very fast storage), way more RAM, etc.
Its up to you whether that’s all worth it. To me it is, I max out sub-$400 phones very quickly. The pinephone feels very choppy to use too by comparison.