I doubt this is aimed at hobbyists but looking to court developers looking for a quick and dirty hammer to drive their IoT nails. Remember those Spin scooters that were running off a Raspberry Pi? That's the market they are after. People who want a cheap low effort embedded computer that runs Linux. They can run a webthing in a container that talks to a cloud thing and bangs on some IO and you have a product.

You can buy the chip, but I'm not sure what that gets you. The only publicly available documentation seems to be the datasheet, which only covers its physical and electrical specifications. I don't see any register-level documentation or even a BSP available for it. I don't think you'd be able to actually do anything with the chip without entering some sort of contractual relationship with Qualcomm.

Qualcomm even put up a datasheet for the chip, which is almost unheard of. No technical reference manual though, so the usefulness is limited.

Although the graphics part is weird: 720 x 1680 @ 60 Hz

Vertical, and a bit longer than 720p? It's probably some standard size in some industry or type of device, but caught me off guard...

The openness of this market gives me home that we could make something like a pinephone with actually decent hardware and open-enough drivers.

$45 to compete with a Pi3*

> I don't see the PMIC they're using anywhere online either

Historically QC chips require QC PMICs and those are usually a profit center for QC

> something that can compete with a Pi 4

Qualcomm being as hostile to open-source as Broadcom is definitely something in common for both SBCs.

That's not $20 to compete with a Pi 4, that's $20 for the bare chip. You have to buy all the supporting hardware on top of that. Hobbyists want to avoid routing LPDDR like the plague. There's also the inconvenient fact that digikey shows "0 In Stock", so this listing is just that, something you can't get your hands on as a hobbyist.