Absolutely incredible for the $120 price point. If they release a PineTab Pro in the future with 4 (or dare I say 8GB) of ram, I'd be all over it. At that point, I could really start to be productive. 2GB is a bit limiting for the modern web unfortunately, but there is a ton of potential here. I'm considering buying one to use as my main machine for this next year at Uni. Taking notes in VS Code/Vim would be fine, but I could see some of my course load being hindered by the ram.
As a portable SSH machine, a kid's first computer, or a nice portable machine with a screen for hobby projects, I think this will be fantastic.
It works reasonably well. I have touch screen driver support (even managed to get it working with Wayland, once, though that was too slow for the Atom processor), the keyboard is good, and the speed is o.k. The major downside is that the touchpad on the keyboard is terrible. They also went with a custom connector, not the Surface Go one, so you're stuck with a subpar touchpad. Since Linux is not always very touch friendly, it is a bit tricky to use (when no external mouse is available).
Edit: It also has one USB-C and two USB-A and a SD Slot, which is quite handy for a device of such a size
Having only 4 GiB of non-expandable RAM is really my only complaint with the PineBook Pro. I bought one anyways though. The only other complaint would be not being upfront about the video encoder and decoder not being ready, but the decoder looks like it'll work when kernel 5.8 releases. Still though, it's hard to find a $200 laptop with a 1080p IPS display regardless, it being open source just makes it so much cooler in so many ways.
I just wish it was easier to try out git kernels (ones with the prototype patches for video decode) on ARM devices. Having to deal with hacking up device tree files is a bit daunting. It's a good learning experience nonetheless.
It's nice to be able to collect random patches for things and apply them to your kernel and pretty much being good to go on x86. With ARM you have to ensure you instantiated the driver in the device tree file which gets stuck in the boot partition along with the kernel .
I have to say though - this is not a windows or macos machine. Each of those operating systems run an enormous number of background processes (many not in your best interests)
Meanwhile with linux your memory needs are generally modest.
That's part of the problem. Even a hyper optimized Electron app will consume a non trivial amount of RAM. The other factor is that Electron is accessible to people who don't have experience with developing desktop applications. They make some mistakes with a big impact on the user experience. Additionally, the NPM community isn't exactly known for producing few large profile high quality libraries. Instead you just cobble something together by using thousands of small packages with little to no accountability.
There is - you can just install NoScript to block all scripts and stop video autoplay in Firefox setting. Presto - a slim web. (Sites that need JS often have a slim alternative - there are superfast "lite" or "mobile" sites for GMail, Reddit, Facebook and many more.)
Is there something less aggressive? Firefox already stops auto play based on a permission. If you explicitly click on a video then it allows you to start the video within the mouse event.
There are lots of reasonable use cases for JavaScript. Think of something purely event driven like sorting a table by clicking on columns or an input field with autocomplete where you see a preview of results as you type.
I think the web in and of itself isn't the problem. I haven't checked but I don't think any JS framework asks for gigabytes of memory. The problem is browsers prioritizing speed over everything else.
I noticed this has a removable battery, which makes this very interesting to me.
What I'd like to know is if it will work with the battery compartment empty on AC power only.
I'd like to have "smart" displays wall mounted around the house with dashboards on them. I've read about so many instances where people used wall mounted iPads and Android tablets where the batteries would swell after a period of use.
> I've read about so many instances where people used wall mounted iPads and Android tablets where the batteries would swell after a period of use.
Made that mistake myself. I now have a wall mounted iPad with the charger plugged into a timer powerpoint that only switches on for 1hr a day. Been running like that for 5+ years now without issue. (I'd planned for that to just be a proof of concept, and to use a wifi powerpoint that'd turn on when the battery dropped to 20% and back off where it hit 80%. The easy solution has turned out to be "good enough" and has remained in production, like that cronjob perl script from 2004...)
That is a great idea. I wish I had thought of that myself (even though I already do something similar with a USB powered cordless phone that stops charging when I sleep my system).
One of my use cases is to monitor my surveillance cameras, which drains my batteries quickly, but I have unused wemo switches that I could put on a schedule to just cycle power more frequently for intermittent charging.
I'd been intending to aim for 20%-80% cycles, because I read that's "good for lithium batteries".
The timer switch I grabbed to do my proof of concept only has 15min resolution (it's a weird old mechanical one where you move plastic pins in the stop/start time rings). I recall setting it to 45mins because the docs says the iPad gets 80% charge in 1 hour, and it'd occasionally run down and switch off, so I bumped it up to 1hr and haven't touched it since.
I just checked now, it charged for an hour overnight finishing ~10.5 hours ago, and is currently saying 59% charge. I honestly have no idea how low or high the charge level gets, just that I haven't needed to wake it back up from a shutdown in over 4 years...
I've come to doubt the details there are important. Don't leave it on charge 24x7, that'll kill it fairly quickly (~9 months in one data point of mine). Charge it long enough and regularly enough to keep it running, but at the low end of that spectrum. Keep in mind my goal here is less "extend the life of the battery", and more " prevent the battery from swelling up and damaging the device/catching fire", but I suspect there's a fair bit of crossover between those goals, since I've not needed to increase the charge time in response to any battery capacity decrease over 5 years (which in retrospect surprises me somewhat).
If I was aiming to maintain the best possible range in an electric vehicle, I'd probably pay much more attention to max charge and min discharge levels, but "the simplest possible thing" has been working well enough for me to just leave it alone.
If it dies on me tomorrow, I'll be happy enough with the use I got out of it and the tradeoff of time I spent futzing with it.
(Note: I'm also quite familiar with abusing LiPo batteries way past safe limits, I raced FPV quadcopters 5-6 years back, and in my worst excesses, I'd be aiming to completely drain a flight pack in ~2 minutes. They'd end up too hot to touch, and start to decline to the point of not being race competitive within 20 or 25 cycles. They'd also catch into unextinguishable fire in big crashes and occasionally while charging. I have a healthy fear/respect of high capacity and high current LiPo batteries...)
I have a six year old phone that still runs on the original battery. The capacity is pretty low but still lasts for 2-3 hours of active usage. Just charge it for an hour per day and you'll be fine.
I've had an iPad 2 on my wall for home automation which I just removed because we are moving. Now I'm afraid to open it and see what the battery did after all those years on a charger.
> What I'd like to know is if it will work with the battery compartment empty on AC power only.
The Pinebook laptops can work without a battery while connected to AC, but not out of the box. A simple hardware mod is necessary to enable this, that's documented by Pine.
It’s really not, especially for high end models if you are stressing your hardware and it’s not an awfully thermally limited design you’ll drain the battery even when you are connected to the charger.
You have 60W chargers usually for systems with max power draw of the CPU+GPU that can reach around 200W peak and in the mid to high 1XXW sustained if you have a DTR/high-performance “mobile” CPU + dGPU.
Even if your laptop comes with a 90W charger it’s still a problem because it’s not enough to power a 65W series H CPU and a high end GPU that draws another 80-120W.
Most laptops will always use the battery directly and trickle charge it due to the power draw.
Power(hungry)ful modern gaming/DTR style laptops can use both concurrently, heck older gaming laptops used to come with multiple power supplies that were needed simply because even the battery wasn’t enough at the time to serve as a buffer, so you had to plug in 2 power adapters to power the laptop fully.
Even without this constraint having a single power path is cheaper and simpler to design so most manufacturers just only draw from the battery and have a separate charging circuit that charges it without having to add power balancing and switching circuitry.
IBM thinkpads used to advertise that you can switch the battery while the laptop was plugged into the charger most laptops of that period didn’t support this either.
If you go even further it was even more of a headache because older laptops used LiPo batteries which were even more finicky.
I have a couple of old ThinkPads that work but seem to throttle heavily, I've attributed it to need for better burst draw handling.
Also one of their older W models that will only run on battery if a standard 90W power supply is connected and will only charge the battery if the device is off. Running on external power is only supported with the 135W or (stock) 170W PSU.
MBPs at some point switched to drawing power faster than it could be provided by the plug alone. Of course, you can't tell nowadays whether laptops will work without a battery, because most batteries are non-removeable.
I don't think I've ever seen that behavior with a MacBook Pro of any vintage -- and I've had an MBP of one stripe or another since at least 2007, using the date of the 2007 MacBook Pro gathering dust bunnies nearby -- except when I use the wrong power supply with it, e.g., a 13" MBP power supply with a 15" one, or my MacBook Air's power supply with any MBP now.
I wouldn't doubt it's possible to draw more power than the adapter can give you if you're pushing the MBP full-bore, but I'm pretty sure that under normal power loads, this doesn't happen.
Try mining cryptocurrency, running prime95, playing fps shooters, or even dota on high settings. You will notice the battery draining while plugged in. You also see it if you are on an airplane, but that is usually because the charger tries to pull too much and overheats and gives up ghost. Macbooks have underpowered chargers.
I had 180W for my old HP laptop, and recently ~135W (or 170W) for Thinkpad W541.
<100W adapters were mostly for potato laptops, until USB-C came into picture which supported up to 100W and now manfucaturers adapted (and probably wait for 200W PD).
I must say that I love that I just plug out the laptop power adapter and plug it into my phone (or mouse) and it charges.
Even when it comes with lower performance of the laptop.
I suspect that this is the reason why MBPs now refuse to boot on low battery. You used to be able to start up the machine when your battery was at 0% (as long as you were plugged in), but newer MBPs complain and don't boot up until you recharge to 10% or so.
They just bumped the power adapter on the 2019 MBP up a little bit. I've seen people say that if they max all cores and leave it that way it will drain the battery even if it's plugged in. I haven't attempted that, and I've never seen the behavior under any other circumstance.
I've run into it a few times with mine (2017 15" MVP, 3.1GHz Quad i7, 16GB RAM, Radeon Pro 560). I had an issue the other day where a virtual machine got stuck in a loop while testing some background jobs. Each time I tested it, another infinite job booted up. Eventually, I had like 30 of them running when I took off my headphones and heard the fans. Checked my battery and I was down to 65% despite being plugged in. I'm guessing that happened over the course of an hour or so.
I've also had it happen a few times when running unit tests for a different project in Docker, but that's likely just because Docker for Mac makes Electron look resource efficient.
It does, just launch any game that uses 3D (tried Starcraft 2 and WoW) - you will see that battery will drain when you have power adapter plugged in - MacBook Pro from (AFAIR) 2018.
That's unusual for modern machines. It was de rigeur from the first portables up to about 2005, as I recall.
I was rudely surprised by my first Core 2-era machine that wouldn't boot without a battery installed, because prior to that, from Pentium-based Toughbooks back to the 486-based Noteflex back to various 8088 and even pre-x86 machines (PC8201A, club100 represent!), they were all absolutely fine running from the power inlet alone with no battery.
The Zenith MiniSport was the sole exception because the power jack was actually physically on the battery, but you could still gut an old dead battery and make a dummy, and it would run from the brick just fine. (This is documented in the very first issue of Brian Mork's excellent Minisport Laptop Hacker zine, available wherever fine textfiles are sold.)
Lenovos etc. don't care, but I've seen this first hand with some Acer and Asus laptops. It has nothing to do w/peak power consumption, that is a wholly different problem, of a different class of devices.
some Lenovo devices do throttle though. If you do not have a battery and are using the 65W not 90W lenovo chargers on an X220, it will throttle your power.
I went with raspberry pi + LCD. Even though there are many LCD options I recommend going with their official pi touch display, it just works without headaches. I did use their official enclosure, but it doesn't really seem to be well designed for wall mount (some 3d printing and magnets helped).
I think going with an android tablet is fine and headache free. I just don't like aesthetics of that solution.
> I think going with an android tablet is fine and headache free.
The problem with many tablets is that leaving them plugged can cause batteries to swell, which can end up being a huge headache.
I've heard stories of offices that used iPads as wall mounted displays having this problem, so I don't think any particular make or model is immune to this issue.
I considered Pi+Monitor, but for me, something like the Pinetab is a cleaner, simpler solution. And at $99 without the keyboard, that's a pretty decent price.
> I considered Pi+Monitor, but for me, something like the Pinetab is a cleaner, simpler solution. And at $99 without the keyboard, that's a pretty decent price.
Of course you should go for what is easier for you, and the pinetab does sound easier, however I'd argue that it is not cleaner.
Separating the screen and main unit will allow for a more serviceable solution, changing either piece if it breaks, or upgrading the main unit if you need more power/different connectivity.
Very interesting! I've been looking for cheap wall-mountable touchscreens so I can have permanent, single-purpose interfaces and displays. For example, I have a KanbanFlow board to track my work, and I use an old tablet mounted to the wall next to my standing desk.
I was thinking I'd get cheap Android tablets and root them, but I'd much rather support something where it's built for user control from the beginning.
Side thought... is it even cheaper if you just have displays/use an ESP to do http requests to a local server... guess depends what they have to do. I mean I think you would need a 32 to drive the display too vs. just an ESP01
Why not a Raspi Zero W with a USB ready monitor? The price point is almost similar and the build will be more modular. Or even just a buncha USB/HDMI based screencasting devices, synced to a cast-server which casts content based on recipient nodes?
Had seen a simple conf room notification system on those lines (which just mentioned who has blocked the room, when is the next blocked meeting by whom, calendar etc)
More modularity isn't a plus if I don't intend to swap the modules around; for me it's just added clutter and headache. And if I understand what you're proposing with screencasting, that's less modular. A tablet is a simple, standalone unit that can be repurposed for a variety of things. And I'm after interactivity, not just static screens.
"When fulfilling the purchase, please bear in mind that we are offering the PineTab at this price as a community service to PINE64 communities. If you think that a minor dissatisfaction, such as a dead pixel, will prompt you to file a PayPal dispute then please do not purchase the PineTab. Thank you."
I wonder what are the odds of finding dead pixels today. I saw lots of them in the past, and in a few cases they were really nasty to stand (imagine a pixel stuck at full brightness in the center of a screen mostly containing dark terminals) , but admittedly in the last 10 years or so I can't remember of a single one. However, although all vendors bury the dead pixel disclaimer, being so open about it makes one wonder if their quality checks are cheaper than others.
I would happily pay more to be 100% sure there are no dead pixels btw.
They do have some QA. My Pinebook Pro is in good shape hardware wise. Arstechnica reported that because of the pandemic their QA has been terrible lately(switched factories, not able to come onsite for QA training and such).
I like what Pine64 guys have been doing, great devices to hack at reasonable price creating foundation for a pure linux based linux mobile devices; of course projects like Ubuntu Touch, PureOS, PostmarketOS maturing at the right time has been a blessing.
Now, this is what I need Pine64 - 'A small pocketable, user repairable linux laptop with GSM module' which can replace smartphone. Current options are GPD[1], One-netbook[2] both of which are expensive, not-user repairable, built for windows.
Then there's planet computer's devices[3], but they seem to be android first although they offer linux as multi-boot option.
Why pocketable linux laptop when there's PinePhone, Librem5? Well, the main bottleneck in the linux app ecosystem is adapting it to the touch screen of the smartphone. I think a pocketable linux laptop could serve well in the interim, may be the form factor will prove better for productivity and will stay as a separate profitable segment.
The Pine folks have been doing fantastic work over the last several years. Does anyone know of ways to support them other than buying products? I don’t really need these gadgets right now, and don’t have the time to tinker, but want to encourage the ecosystem from a long-term perspective. For example, I’d love to give them some money and become a long-term member/shareholder/something. I don’t really care for the rate of return; I’m more interested in a reason to stay engaged with the organization as its products might mature into my use cases, and help them along the way.
One suggestion, buy a product for someone who could use it but doesn’t have the resources. As a kid who loved to tinker and had no money this would have meant the world to me at that time.
I know what you mean; I was in a similar situation growing up. One very unfortunate phenomenon among most of the kids I see today is that they are so swamped by “structured” activities that they have no time to “tinker” for the heck of it. They feel pressured that all their time ought to show returns on their resume/exams/applications/etc :-/
I would love to enable a few kids and engage with them so I might at least vicariously get some of the fun of tinkering.
Store doesn't load for me right now, so I might be wrong, but previously on pages of some devices I saw something like this written in a small print: "Pine64 offers this device at this price as a service to the community and doesn't make any profit out of this". So maybe not a final device like pine(book/phone/tab), but one of single-board computers?
You can help them by porting, authoring or fixing bugs in software (apps or drivers). This is one of the reasons they are providing devices at cost to the FLOSS community, and you can support them that way if you are so inclined.
This looks wonderful, and I bought it as soon as preorders opened; I'd love to have a Linux tablet to read books on and take to work (I'm a teacher, not a programmer). It definitely is pretty low-powered, though, and I'd appreciate a higher-end alternative. Is there any Windows-based tablet that you can reliably and easily install Linux on?
If this functionality was demoed by Apple on a new $999 "MacPad Pro" there would be arguments over if it was the end of the PC and the beginning of the next generation of computing, a leap like the smartphone revolution.
Are we watching the same video? This is basically no different to what you get on any Windows convertible (though the tablet-mode interactions are closer to the iPad), except way, way jankier.
Nah, that’s way higher latency than my Surface Book (which is a much more powerful machine, but is also driving a 3000×2000 display) gets. That video is at 25fps, and exhibits latencies of 7–8 frames (~300ms) on scrolling a web page, and 9–12 frames (~400ms) on resizing windows. I can’t measure latency accurately on my device at present, but I estimate that I’m getting around 50ms of latency in both of those scenarios.
(Oh, I guess you were talking about the functionality, not the latency. Ah well, I’ll leave this comment up anyway.)
It's really cool, but my main takeaway from that video was multi-second input lag and you can see several times when he's dragging things around the computer doesn't do what he's expecting. It's a cool tech demo but I don't see how it's going to change the world like that.
Agreed. I think Apple would have made a device with maybe 4 times the specs (eg. 8 Gb RAM instead of 2) and ten times the price (edited the parent to reflect that) and kept it top secret until right before release. There's still hope that this will eventually be polished to perfection, but it will probably take years of revisions.
Meh, I don't know. It looks clunky in lots of ways, the GNOME3 UX feels a lot cleaner and more intuitive. Hopefully future GNOME versions will be able to run usefully on 2GB RAM. Or perhaps MATE and Xfce will adopt some of the same touch-friendly interaction principles.
Uhh, that looks... Horrible. And I say that as someone typing this on a keyboard attached tablet right now - I love keyboard attached tablets, but that looks janky and laggy as heck.
Apple would be KILLED if they released anything with that much touch lag.
The iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard is incredible. If you can get past the astronomical cost, it’s so worth it.
The biggest difference is that the Magic Keyboard never fails. Not like it works 95% of the time or even 99% of the time. 100% of the time it types when you expect it to, connects when you want it to, disconnects easily, doesn’t double inputs or skip inputs. There’s nothing I would change about it.
Surface pro keyboard is also incredible--this is coming from someone who used thinkpads for over a decade and has a model M attached to his desktop. It isn't as good as a proper mechanical keyboard, but I'm nearly as fast and accurate on the surface type cover as on a proper keyboard.
To the parent- the surface works fine on a lap, provided you use a case with a solid kickstand (the stand on the actual tablet wants to fold in far too easily). For reference, the reason I abandoned the thinkpad is that I am managing a warehouse and spend ~50% of my day using the surface either standing, on my lap, or haphazardly resting on a pallet of product. I wanted something light and portable, I haven't regretted the tablet decision yet. I seriously considered iPad, but unfortunately it is essentially a phone OS. Win10 isn't the greatest, but it is a full-fledged OS for real work. My only gripe is that it isn't 100% touch optimized, so I can barely use the surface if I don't have the keyboard attached. Oh, and I do dearly miss the trackpoint. However, the keyboard has been great, and with WSL I don't really have any issues with getting the development side of my job done either. I have had a /. account long enough to be considered slightly 'rabid', but as much as it pains me to say Microsoft have made an excellent product.
Does anyone know if there custom OS has a screen reader? I'm totally blind and this is priced at the point where I'd like to play with it assuming it's usable for me.
Wow, what an interesting question. Open source first-class accessible tinkerer/maker-oriented hardware design.
That gets me wondering... what would be the ideal here? I don't have much experience with blind-oriented usage but I get the impression blind users only keep screens around for when software/the OS falls apart and orientational cues completely break down... but perhaps sighted assistance is needed less often than I presume, and blind users simply use phones and laptops with screens because that's what dominates the market.
Maybe you could viably get away with having a quick-access mechanism that lets someone use their own device's display whenever assistance is required. I can totally see a device that serves VNC over HTML5 to any web browser via a built-in hotspot, that would be pretty universal.
Which leads me to the question of how useful touchscreen gestures are - since that's all touchscreens are useful for in a blind context - and if there isn't a better input method than that. I get the impression keyboards are pretty much "it". It would be pretty cool if your entire computer was a keyboard with a 3.5mm headphone jack :)
The Pinetab is basically a highish-end ARM system with its own bits of novel hardware added on, so the base question becomes "how usable is the mainline AArch64 Linux experience for blind users?". I suspect it's somewhere between "poor" and "fair"; and bespoke hardware in this device may add a small amount of extra strain on top of that.
Now I'm puzzling over which mechanical keyboards are the thinnest, and if you could cram a power bank and ARM development board into the footprint space underneath.
I've seen a computer in 2008 that was like the bottom part of a laptop and between the keyboard and where the hinges would be it had a 3 row braille display.
It was pretty old at the time and quite thick, with modern technology could be as thin as a tablet.
These things have a very narrow audience so they're one digit more expensive than their regular counterparts.
I would love to give you a definite answer, but only way to know for sure is to test yourself.
PineTab can run any ARM OS, so you can install one that you have positive experience with.
These OSes are touch-optimized and recommended:
UBPorts (community-driven Ubuntu Touch)
postmarketOS
Arch Linux ARM
I know that desktop Ubuntu has screen reader (Orca) installed by default. No sure about Ubuntu Touch. My Google-fu shows very outdated answers.
Just purchased one, very excited. Looking forward to it arriving sometime in August.
My use case is basic browsing, taking notes in meetings, reviewing papers (using something like xournal), SSH'ing into remote machines, a small amount of dev'ing (compiling on remote) and perhaps presentations (has HD output). I travel alot and having a machine that doesn't break my back would be cool. If the keyboard is half-way decent I may even use it for writing too.
The reason for this device over other existing solutions are many: low price, built for Linux, lightweight, low-power (good battery), form factor (where did you go netbooks :( ) and a great community!
The further I get with computers the less I need. I’ve been teaching computer graphics using a 160 x 48 pixel display rendering Unicode Braille dots. It’s absolutely enough for:
- random colored text
- line drawing fun
- circles
- z buffers
- convex hulls
- ray tracing spheres
(Checkerboards are too noisy though, and no Newell teapots. Alas, if only my browser supported PBM, the graphics format of winners.)
So yeah, bring it on! Doing more with less feels like a journey worth traveling. I want one!
May I know what's that 160 x 48 display and processor you are using to teach?
I am interested to learn low level stuff like CPU assembly, operating system and VGA, VBE, linear frame buffering graphics. I want to see how far I can go with low end x86, arm, misp, and fpga devices
I am not going to lie, I'm not a big fan of the arm experience on Linux. While the situation has improved, it is still a painful experience. It has always felt like you're trying to run windows 7 on a pentium II, regardless of lightweight desktop environments or even no desktop environment. That said, this does look like a very appealing solution for something to shove in the backpack when hiking or whatnot, as opposed to carrying around a 1.5k ultrabook. I'll keep an eye out and wait for some review and real-world experiences and I might jump on that train.
I love what Pine is trying to do, but man those A53 CPUs and Mali-400 GPUs are really pretty crummy. Similarly spec'd Allwinner chips were on the PlayStation Classic and Nintendo Classic microconsoles.
I have no idea what I'd do with one of these, but that price point is barely more than a Raspberry Pi 4 with a few accessories. I think I might buy one.
I suppose the keyboard needs to be attached to operate?
I use a Surface Book. I’ve been interested to discover that I would quite often like to have the keyboard continue to work after detaching the base, because when drawing on the device a keyboard is still useful for switching between tools, activating things, typing in precise values when necessary, &c. To be sure, a large part of this is just that I’m using apps that haven’t been optimised for keyboardless usage (I’m talking things like Krita, Inkscape, OpenToonz), but even if they were, a keyboard would still be useful. As it stands, I’d need to buy a second keyboard, one that worked by Bluetooth, to achieve this goal.
(In the particular case of the Surface Book, detaching the base isn’t quite as useful as you might imagine, because ¾ of the battery life is in it, so you’ll get ~3h at most, <2h if using it much.)
It's got pogo pins, it looks likely to just be a pogo pin USB port down there? Pretty sure they'd mention if the keyboard was wireless. Honestly, I hate having a second battery to worry about charging: I'd much rather a keyboard just be a keyboard.
yes, keyboard is attached via pogo pins (which actually are just USB), but tablet also has a "normal" USB port where you can just insert any plain USB keyboard.
I bought one. The USB configuration sounds a bit sad. USB 2.0 Type-A and Micro-B is a very dated configuration, especially considering the PinePhone has a USB-C. But I am interested in seeing how the ecosystem comes together and the price is absolutely right for this thing.
I've been waiting for this to come out. Unfortunately, I tried to buy the pinetime late last year and discovered they only sell through paypal and you need an account to make the payment, you can't just pay by credit card.
If there's anyone from pine watching: Please, add a normal credit card option. Paypal is a horrid company. I'm prepared to pay directly with a credit card via them, but I _will not_ make an account with them just to buy your stuff. Please let me give you money without making a legal agreement with a third party :(
Interesting, it's enabled for me -- that's how I bought it -- without creating an account. Maybe this feature is perhaps region locked somehow? I'm in UK.
EDIT: it is indeed gated by some vague heuristics[1].
>Buyers don't always have the option to complete their purchases without using or creating a PayPal account. This option is presented based on several risk factors, including but not limited to the buyer's PayPal purchase history, PayPal cookies stored on the buyer's computer, the buyer's location, or a credit assessment.
That's probably why. I use addons that autodelete cookies as soon as I leave webpages because no one has the luxury of pretending they don't know how badly cookies are abused at this point.
I guess the inevitable next step was for companies that abuse cookies to start punishing people for refusing to take their shit.
I reiterate: paypal is a shit company. Pine, please provide an alternative.
Newer Linux releases generally work quite well on these tablets as far as hardware support goes. The one thing that's marginally underpowered is the amount of RAM, and in my experience 2GB still suffices for simple use cases.
...2GB RAM is a bit of a disappointment for those of us spoiled by higher end devices (like my Note 10+ w/ Dex), BUT - there is room to expand with some kinda SD and then map a bunch of SWAP space to it, right?
As someone who has more experience than I care to quantify regarding RAM-starved, swap-abundant systems: no. Well... OK, a subjective measurement on the "death by how many thousand cuts"-scale would be somewhere between 10,000 and 1,000,000 cuts, IMO, depending on what you're trying to do.
You'll also rapidly exhaust the SD card's flash lifetime, and all the spare capacity... which will make the SD return read errors, nicely corrupting the contents of RAM.
You can verify the slowdown/lag/pain factor easily enough: boot Linux on any PC with `mem=2G`, attach an SD card you don't mind nuking :), and go nuts.
Cortex-A53 is a very slow in-order core. Think Pentium 1 -level IPC. Eg: it can dispatch at most one multiplication, and will stall the entire pipeline for a few cycles if you try another one soon after. I doubt this is going to perform well
This may finally replace my surface-rt for movies on long car-trips; it's a 16:10 rather than 16:9 but otherwise checks all the boxes: widescreen, usb port (so I can just put files on an old thumb drive), and can run VLC.
Not a ton of ports, USB 2.0 Type-A and Micro-B, Micro-HDMI out, SD card. But there's an expansion card slot, which is pretty unheard of for a tablet. So you can add like an SSD or a LoRa radio or what-have-you.
It doesn't sound like this is for you. If "wife test" means the wife using and it and liking it, pretty sure it would fail. It's not what this is marketed for. An Amazon Kindle tablet would be more what you're looking for, if this is the price point you want.
I think it's because "wife test" looks a lot like "wife acceptance factor" [1], which has a much more degrading meaning than what you wanted to convey.
"the wife test" is a common turn of phrase relying on/reinforcing the stereotype of women as non-technical and men as technical. it's not really clear in your original post that you are literally referring to your wife's opinion of the device vs simply invoking the sexist phrase to describe the device's user friendliness for non-hackers. i hope you can see how i took it the wrong way, though i still apologize for jumping to conclusions
I purchased directly from their web store, not via a forum group buy or other means. They have my contact information, and I have not received a single peep to inform me on the status of my purchase. Just radio silence.
If I'm expected to go root out some forum thread to monitor progress on things I purchase from the pine64 store, that's worth noting here to inform everyone's expectations.
They could post a shipping update on the wall of their local laundromat for all the good that did me when I'm not monitoring their message forums.
If not for this thread, I'd still be operating in the dark having basically forgotten I even bought the thing. I appreciate your comment pointing me at the forum, pine64 should have emailed that link to everyone who ordered one in the affected time period.
They gave a shipping update to forum users/readers. I have also not received an update since ordering on 11th of May. Like the parent said, an e-mail would be nice, they have it.
Most failures either happen shortly because something was made poorly or after >1 year which is why extended warranties are mostly garbage.
Just for the sake of argument lets suppose it had a 1% chance of failing between 30 days and 1 year even though I would hope it is far less when it would normally have been covered. Assume you remedy the issue by replacing it out of pocket.
Expected cost is 0.99 * 100 + 0.01 * 200 = $101
Also keep in mind that brands pay for warranty services out of profits earned from higher margin sectors and volume neither of which is applicable here.
I didn't expect my comment to be popular, and it's probably going to decimate the measley 7 points I've accrued (I had 9 prior) as might this one, but I tend not to buy anything without a decent warranty. I'm certainly not buying anything that could go wrong after 30 days without any recourse other than paying to get it fixed or to buy a new one. My view about warranties are to do with the confidence the seller/manufacturer has in their product, this one doesn't endear my confidence in the product. Just my opinion but I keep holo of my electronics as long as I can. Still using a phone bought 4 years ago, laptop 8 years ago and a desktop I built 10 years ago.
Complaining about down votes usually attracts you guessed it... more down votes.
I didn't down vote either your prior post or this one. I value durable things. My 8ish year old desktop just died. Both my phone and my laptop are 5 years old. On the other hand I see the value in cheap things that will be affordable to all made by small distributors that value our freedom to use our devices. Everything in life is some degree of trade off and I see room for this one.
Not all devices are supposed to be that good. This is a hacker grade toy device, not something you should depend on - after all, the price reflects that.
Well, if it's a high-res display then there's a lot more pixels so a greater chance of failure.
I actually really like this system and wish that I could trade-off further down the spectrum on quality. After all, to get a zero-dead-pixel device you just have to check in the second-hand market like people do for high-binned CPUs. The volume of true demand for those CPUs is high enough that there are retailers like Silicon Lottery that explicitly look out for that.
It turns out that most consumers don't really want a zero-dead-pixel guarantee though.
>It turns out that most consumers don't really want a zero-dead-pixel guarantee though.
Alternatively they just buy their displays from brick and mortar companies that allow you to return for any reason at all and just return for replacement any device that has any number of dead pixels.
I've never bought a display that had any number of defective pixels in almost 3 decades of using computers I'm betting lots of people are in the same boat. Logically the price is built into whatever such places are selling them for based on some percentage of users returning anything with any number of dead pixels.
They don't subsidize anything here, so yeah, cost of shipping is really the cost to take a box from China to your house, pretty much. FWIW, when I got my PineBook Pro, DHL was literally like overnight from Hong Kong to the US. I think if you consider it part of the cost ($150 for tablet and keyboard shipped), it's still a pretty good deal.
