Yeah, probably about as well as any of the quicker RPi clones would, which is pretty decent for light tasks. $100 is about as much as you’d pay for one of those plus a touchscreen anyways, so it sounds like a fair deal.
Mind if I ask what you use it for? I’m always tempted to buy one but I don’t really know what I would do with it besides stick it in my drawer of cool but not particularly useful tech that gathers dust.
At least it’s cheaper than my Google Glass and GoPro...
I'm so close to buying a Pinebook, and I know that everyone wants "just one more feature", but jesus, 4 GB or RAM?! If it had at least 8 I'd buy it in a sec. But 4 just won't cut it (thank you, modern web).
While I'm not one of those people who work in the browser (bleurgh!), I find that it's a much bigger resource hog than my DM. My KDE desktop takes around half a gig, but it's Firefox that used to bring my old 4GB laptop to its knees.
OTOH a touchscreen-enabled device is exactly where a heavier DE might make some sense. GNOME3 is still only borderline-usable on 2GB of RAM (though you can obviously work around this by adding swap).
4GB is actually more usable than you'd think; most web browsers have performance settings that make the experience just fine with even a hundred tabs on low-end devices (Chromium gets more points than Firefox on this for its toaster mode), and outside of web browsers, there's not much else to worry about. If you set it up with one of the 'in-RAM compressed swap' solutions available like you should, you probably won't ever notice it, but even then it's still really fairly comfy.
The small RAM sizes on these devices is a limit of the SoC. The RK3399 in the Pinebook Pro can only drive 4GB of RAM. The A64 in the original Pinebook and this tablet can use 3GB but that would mean using more memory chips.
It has an old and slow A64 processor and 2GB of RAM, but a respectable 64GB of storage. The screen is 1280x800 and it comes with a pretty hefty 6AH battery. Plus it comes with a detachable keyboard and touchpad. So overall you're getting a lot of bang for your buck compared to any other tablet.
I was working on a PyQt inventory management system for our robotics club (https://github.com/arc-bphc/sims-gui) back in undergrad. We weren't able to finish this project, but our plan was to have a Raspberry Pi 3 with Ubuntu MATE connected to a 7" touchscreen for running the inventory management software. This tablet would have made life much easier for us.
I think there might eventually be a market for a high-end ARM64 Linux laptop or convertible with excellent build quality, long battery life, lots of cores and RAM, etc.
Technically, Amazon Fire tablets are also Linux, and cheaper. (But the Fire runs Linux in the outdated-Android-with-crapware sense, of course, so this is still quite different)
Anybody here remember the HP Touchpad firesale where HP liquidated their stock of cancelled not-quite-iPad-competitors for $99.99 and people went nuts for them?
It's weird how that felt like a great deal and yet this one is expensive enough to make me question if I could get anything close to that much value out of it. The HP firesale was back in the days where a decent tablet cost around $500 and it was a screaming deal. Now people practically give tablets away, I've seen Amazon's Fire tablets sell for $39 brand new.
Maybe it also reflected less of a worry about losing software support at that time. If Apple told us that the iPad was now discontinued and you could get an iPad Pro for $99, I wonder how many people would jump on it. If the software is dead the device is a brick. That concept wasn’t really on people’s minds as much in the PC days.
In retrospect it’s unbelievable that HP had the lack of foresight to abandon webOS and Palm devices. Maybe there’s a lot of business reasons why it would have never worked but I remember Palm and HP TouchPad devices being very popular in the early consumer smartphone days, and the software was competitive. If it wasn’t good we wouldn’t see it all over smart TVs today.
The HP webpad has pretty good software support even today, albeit obviously unofficial and not from HP. People are even looking into running pmOS on it; it's just hard because it's not a standard device in any sense, so it comes with its own booting, flashing etc. workflows.
> I've seen Amazon's Fire tablets sell for $39 brand new.
Agreed -- there's a big subsidy from Amazon there. But LCD screens and much of the same parts as computers+phones have had big economic forces driving the prices down.
I have one of those HP touchpads, and it is the best non-Apple/Android tablets I’ve seen. The webOS was so ahead of its time, and everyone generously borrowed its UI/UX. I can start it and it works flawlessly, an impressive feat For a 9 year old
device.
Do you have that running Linux via Crouton or have wiped the C201P? Or something else?
I just use mine for fun/learning. Have it flashed w/ Libreboot and running PrawnOS (Debian / Linux-libre based) which keeps seeing a nice amount of improvements. https://github.com/SolidHal/PrawnOS
While I wouldn't call it polished, at the very least, the PrawnOS image will give you a quick way to get a Debian-based distro onto the c201 to customize as you see fit.
I noted above it uses Linux-Libre, so the internal WiFi does NOT work with the distro "as is". EVERY other component is supported though. If you need internal WiFi instead of external USB WiFi, you can modify the build script to use the regular Linux kernel & add the non-free Debian repos to sources.list. I've done it before and it works fine.
The default image when you build or download it puts you at a command prompt where you can either use it "as is", run a script to install a pre-configured desktop environment(XFCE, GNOME, or LXQT), or custom install things yourself.
GNOME was just recently added. The RK3288 processor in the c201 is now supported by Panfrost for 2D/3D acceleration, but I think it still has a bit to go before GNOME is completely usable. If save the resources if you're doing development.
4k output should be available soon, just tested patches for that. Admittedly 2160p was much smoother. Eventually there will also be hardware video decoding. The RK3288 has a full Hantro G1 VPU and drivers for that were recently merged into the kernel.
I still have an Acer C720, which cost $250 back in 2013. It's a lovely piece of equipment, once you remove ChromeOS. I've taken it apart more times than I can recall, lots of empty space inside. The only downside is 2GB of RAM, 4GB would have been better, otherwise it's a perfect device even today (for development and browsing the web).
I always meant to buy a couple more RAM chips and solder them down to the motherboard (there's a couple of unpopulated pads), but never got round to it.
Sadly the wifi chip is soldered down, that's one of my only grips (RAM I get, but typically wifi would be an m.2 slot unless you're really cheap).
So I imagine you could get a lot done with this, even with the terrible performance. If you're just programming and using a browser you really don't need much oomph.
Soldering everything down and limiting max memory for mobile chipsets have been my biggest gripes with chromebooks and newer computers in general.
I upped my C710 to 16GB for $50 a couple years ago
(also swapped the 847 board for a 1007u, and dropped in an SSD), and it's been great. If and hopefully when 16GB DDR3 sodimms drop in price I'd like to bump it up to 32GB.
I took my intro to databases course on a $160 (sale) Acer C670 in 2015. Fantastic battery life, Crouton was a breeze to get working, and was my first introduction to doing work in a unix environment. The only problem was that the larger tests would take more than 2GB of ram, and start swapping out to disk - so suites that took my classmates 5 minutes to run took me closer to an hour. I got very careful at thinking over the code in my head before hitting run.
Wonderful little system for a broke CS student, and nothing but fond memories.
Fellow C720 owner here. Love the thing, have had it running Elementary on a new SSD for ages now. Have recently switched to a E111 (despite only 32GB EMMC) because I got it to take 8GB RAM: https://taoofmac.com/space/com/Acer/Aspire%20ES1-111M, but otherwise the experience is still largely the same: extremely lightweight, quiet, "disposable" laptop tha I can use to code anything, browse anything, fiddle with the electronics (this one has pads for a SATA connector... haven't traced the electronics yet to see if they are there at all...)
They seem to be totally overrun by demand. And give a terrible user experience when you try to order from them. Friends of mine have ordered (and paid!) Pine64 products weeks ago and get no information when they will be shipped. When you send them an email, it either gets ignored or you get a reply by someone who does not speak English. Telling you something like "Yes will inform you when be shipped".
Why not charge 50% more and treat your customers like customers?
This taints the whole Pine64 brand for me. I totally want a Linux phone and a Linux tablet. But I don't know if I should trust a brand that treats their customers like this.
This isnt really a finished product that they are comfortable selling to the general population. I actually feel like they are doing a pretty good job of setting customers expectations. From the order page for the pine tab I see these disclaimers:
The PineTab comes with UBports OS build installed. Please note that the OS build is still in a beta stage, and while most core functionality works, some elements remain a work-in-progress.
Small numbers (1-3) of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect.
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.
To me that means, this is not a "product" in the traditional sense. They're just trying to accommodate hackers by providing more fully fleshed out development kits in hopes that they can make a more fully fledged product in the future.
How does the statement about dead pixels help people who ordered and paid a phone but get no information on when it will be shipped?
Regarding general population vs hackers: Do you imply that hackers value low price higher then others? Are hackers particularely poor? I thought hacker often means coder which usually means higher income then the general population.
Personally, I would totally prefer to pay 50% more and have my emails answered and my orders shipped.
> We're under constraints that we have no control over (e.g. border being closed between HK and mainland China), the shipping companies and carriers are under many constraints (self-imposed or imposed by regulators) and the logistic chain as a whole - including people - is under regulatory constraints. In short, current situation is not business as usual. I am getting many PMs and emails asking about status reports - as soon as I know something, I post it here, there is no need to PM or email me. Thank you for your continued patience!
Also, somewhere I've read that their shipping team is 4 people packing about 1000 items per day. Why increased demand doesn't cause increase in shipping team - that I don't know.
You can also connect to IRC/Telegram/Matrix channel and ask there - somebody with more knowledge might answer you.
The price is low because they are generally selling things at cost as a service. This isn't a standard "make a device for $50 then sell it for $400 because we can" company because they don't want to be.
Orders are delayed because, and this may surprise you, there is a global pandemic right now which is affecting factory workers in China, causing production and Q&A issues because of restricted staff, visitors, and shipping.
If you prefer to spend more money then go do it and shut the hell up. "Personally, I'd like everyone to have to pay $50-75 more for this unfinished product because I'm an arrogant impatient idiot" is the worst take in the world
They have said that orders for people who opted for the faster DHL shipping option had already shipped out 6/5 - 6/6 and would be given a tracking number and contacted by DHL, yet there are some of us who have still received nothing in terms of updates.
Here we are, a week later, and even after their update 3 hrs ago, the Pine team has yet to acknowledge this.
Ordinarily I would have shrugged it off, but the shipping carrier needs to reach out to collect their taxes before we can get our devices.
E: offtopic, but there's no need for the namecalling. We like to think we're classier than that 'round here.
Not that you're wrong about the rest, but we can't actually do this; there are no stores that will sell you a working smartphone or smartphone-based tablet. (That is, with compiler, shell, kernel- and driver-patching, etc that constitute a operating system.)
The PineTab comes with UBports OS build installed. Please note that the OS build is still in a beta stage, and while most core functionality works, some elements remain a work-in-progress.
Small numbers (1-3) of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect.
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.
That doesnt mean their customer service as in giving an estimate of a shipping time should be that bad. They could at least say "hey, we're a bit overwhelmed right now, we'll let you know when it's ready to ship but dont have more info right now, sorry" or something like that
By releasing things as cheaply as they can within reason, this vastly broadens who can get one. Given that they depend on the community to create most if not all of the software, this means that software support gets there much earlier than it would otherwise; compare the progress on the Librem handset to the PinePhone: one took three years, has gone over the predicted timeframe multiple times, and still isn't quite right (or released), while Pine64's is actually surprisingly decent, and got there much faster.
On 'customer' experience:
Every time I've ordered from them they've been perfectly responsive and have gotten things shipped on a reasonable time frame. They're based in China and, if you weren't aware, there's kind of a big event happening over there that's interrupted their everything. They're not Apple and it'd be worse if they were trying to be; they aren't treating their customers badly, they're treating their workers well; chill out.
> By releasing things as cheaply as they can within reason, this vastly broadens who can get one. Given that they depend on the community to create most if not all of the software, this means that software support gets there much earlier than it would otherwise;
This is exactly it, if we want linux on phones to be a real experience that can offer something on par with Google and Apple, then the very first step is getting hardware into hackers hands; the software will never follow if there aren't any users. The exact kind of person you want using these devices is someone willing to pay less money and pay with their time instead.
I think it's a bit much to expect their entire support staff to write in perfect English, since they are not based in an English-speaking country. I don't think it's a very big operation, either.
I have one of their boards and can only say I had a good experience buying from them. I think compared to some of the alternatives in the price range (ie., random, no-name eBay crap), their documentation and forums is very good.
They are upfront they are selling hardware to developers, pretty much.
The complete opposite of Librem, who do the same thing but charges $2000 for a laptop that barely boots without hacking libreboot every week and then proceed to use that money in marketing for their linux mobile phone which will be in the same sorry state and sold for the same high price and empty promises.
Raising the price to $110 might make demand match their supply (by dropping, say, 80% of demand), but losing $10 per unit sold may be an extremely good deal for all the marketing the excess demand generates.
I will get one, just to have one. Just like I wanted to get that $100 laptop a decade (or more?) ago but I never got the chance. I see it more as supporting an endeavour that may benefit more people down the road, than any thought I got on my mind.
For anyone who wants a a decent tablet (Android 5 though) on 10", I suggest the Amazon Fire HD (7th gen is fine), you can get a used for for £30-£50, then "hack it" to remove the Amazon crap/bloatware (plenty of sites with instructions out there) and use that. I have set up multiple friends like that. They buy it, meet for a coffee, I de-crap it for them in 20mins and they end up with a nice 10" android tablet to read and watch Netflix.
(Not advertising or affiliated with Amazon)(I think Bezos should give more to his staff and less to his pocket) ;)
I ordered a pinebook pro on April 1st and arrived on June 3rd. I knew it was a pre-order when I paid. This meant months before the product arrives and that I would have to monitor the news from their website. They posted monthly (and bi-weekly, towards the end) updates on the shipping status, manufacturing issues and coronavirus impact. I had a problem because I am moving houses and their support team has been very helpful in accomodating me.
When I got the laptop I was expecting a cheap plastic build but got an aluminium sturdy frame. Best laptop purchase I ever had, this comment is actually being written from my new pinebook pro.
I m sorry you feel you are not treated like a customer. Given the company's size they are really doing wonders.
> This taints the whole Pine64 brand for me. I totally want a Linux phone and a Linux tablet. But I don't know if I should trust a brand that treats their customers like this.
Frankly, it seems like this isn't the device for you. I agree, you should probably wait. But words like "taint the brand" seem incredibly strong to me.
These devices are for developers and tinkerers, not the general population. The goal is to get these devices into as many hands as possible, hitting a price point as low as possible. This allows for more people to get access to the hardware and start tinkering, helping to build out the (woefully lacking, at this time) software ecosystem.
To be honest, I feel like they have done a really good job of setting expectations around this, so I'm not terribly sympathetic to this class of complaint. I ordered a PinePhone and am patiently waiting for it to ship. I'm glad it's so cheap! It's not going to be a device to replace my primary phone (yet), it's a project to tinker with. As such I don't want to spend much more money.
> Friends of mine have ordered (and paid!) Pine64 products weeks ago and get no information when they will be shipped. When you send them an email, it either gets ignored or you get a reply by someone who does not speak English. Telling you something like "Yes will inform you when be shipped".
They are very transparent about the delays in shipping. You can find the most up to date information in a sticky post on their forum[1].
> This taints the whole Pine64 brand for me.
That's an extremely charged response, you definitely should check the forum post to get some perspective. In short, there were QA issues with the first batch of Pinebook Pro and PinePhone orders, they are running the remaining unshipped units through a second round of testing before shipping, and the combination of COVID-19 and China/Hong Kong border issues have further delayed shipping.
My PinePhone was lost in shipping during the start of the pandemic like you mentioned. They happily sent me another a few short weeks later, no complaints! Awesome customer service
I happen to agree. I am still waiting for my phone. They do have defense with Covid impact, but, were it any other company, I doubt I would be as patient or forgiving. They have a lot of goodwill. They should do what they can not to squander it.
Adjusting pricing may be better for them especially if demand is that high.
This explains why so many people have trouble with Kickstarter and I love it. I think these things are not for you. You have a lower risk tolerance and strong quality requirements for your customer experience. I think there were adequate signals that these were not going to be met, but if I ever do something like this I'm going to make it even clearer that this is early-access tool for the community and there are lots of failure points.
Honestly, I suspect this experience is just not for you, man. It's like when we funded the glowing plant on Kickstarter, or the smart mattress topper that became Luna and then Eight, or funded the development of neovim. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. These are people experienced at doing a thing but not all the things around the thing. There's going to be drop-offs.
I really wish there were a way to just say "If you have normative expectations, go elsewhere". I really want to be able to participate in this specific subsector of the economy without the general-consumer folks increasing costs because I'm willing to accept lots of cut corners on beta products and they want all the trappings of working with folks.
As an example, one of the things I bought they took two weeks to respond to me (it was a combination GPS/Glonass/Galileo antenna for cheap). That's okay for me. It took months to arrive with many delays every few months. That's also okay for me. I don't want them to hire more folks to ensure they can respond to everyone. I don't want them to hire more folks so they can manage the customs hassle. I want them to be able to validate the product itself because I want more of that product.
From my Pine64 experience as an initial backer, I 100% agree.
I think where Pine64 failed to deliver is that they overpromised on when they could deliver the product. I received mine very late and I couldn't boot the OS and support wasn't helpful.
Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi 3 with 64bit support was announced after Pine64 and delivered before the Pine64 without hiccups.
Pine64 could have improved but I woule rather stick with something like a Raspberry Pi where there is a better level of support (from my experience).
The Raspberry PI foundation essentially is a branch of Broadcom, a chipmaker with $20 billion revenue in 2018. Pine64 had to crowfund their first boards 5 years ago while Broadcom already had been a chip vendor for the US military. They are not even comparable.
Moreover, I wouldn't take the Pi Foundation as an example after what they did with the Zero, which was sold for years in extremely low quantities at cost, or bundled with unnecessary stuff, just so that word of mouth of that price would prevent people from purchasing boards from competitors.
it seems like they would benefit from a purchasing experience that's a bit less like the traditional e-commerce checkout. i think this is one of the things kickstarter really excels at - allowing companies to sell products that aren't really ready for normal consumer purchasing without it "tainting their brand", because it sets expectations correctly.
If pine doesn't want price to be a barrier to purchasing their products (which is an admirable position), and they don't have the resources to serve all the orders they're getting, they should throw up some other barriers in the purchasing process to handle the demand. instead of selling direct, do bulk buys through linux user groups or something like that.
I hate this “race to the bottom” behavior that a lot of Linux OEMs are doing. We need a flagship Linux product, not cheap throwaway products that will tarnish its reputation. This is Android all over again.
I wonder if the performance of those tablets would improve if android was removed and run pine linux instead.
that said size of the screen is actually a big factor in price, also you need more powerful processor to push pixels on that screen and bigger battery for power draw. all those costs add up. plus they maybe following razer blade model.
You'd probably end up with the opposite (Android will run faster). Source: I own an ODroid3 which can have Linux or Android installed. Android is a lot faster due to better GPU support.
That "better" GPU support often relies on proprietary drivers, though. Which means you're stuck with a crappy downstream kernel until the graphics support gets reverse-engineered and pushed to the mainline kernel.
In common parlance "Linux (Phone|Tablet)" does not include android because the userspace is usually very different than what most people running linux think as linux.
I bought a RCA Cambio 12.2 tablet last summer for something to play with ($220). It has decent specs (Celeron N4000, 64GB storage, 12" display at 1920x1200) except for the 2GB RAM handicaps it greatly for Windows 10 usage. I put Debian on it and I've been working on getting drivers for everything. If I can get all the drivers I need, it'll be a pretty sweet little tablet.
Besides that it's trendy on hackernews to make fun of designers they are an important part of every commercial product. As an designer it is really hard to contribute to oss the whole environment is just so hostile for non devs.
I'd be interested in this if it weren't for the screen resolution. I've long since found that 150ppi is the dividing line for me with tablets where I can't ignore the pixel grid anymore.
Slightly off topic, but I'm still always shocked when I see small businesses running iPads just to plug in a Square card reader, or run some basic form-fill application.
You can get a refurbished iPad for $100 and a new one for $280. And you know all your employees will be familiar with the interface. Why bother using anything else?
How well does iOS really work as a kiosk when your customers might interact with it, possibly unattended? I know I've seen many iPads in such a situation where they go on a lock screen and ask for a passcode, or you can hit Home and go to Springboard to open some apps or change settings, or at one point I had it pop up a prompt to update the major version of iOS and I hit "yes" and it seemed quite busy working on that upgrade ....
I guess there is "Guided Access Mode", but I literally just learned about it googling for this question, and it would seem a lot of people don't know about it.
usually it's the employee using the ipad and they'd only hand it to the customer to sign the receipt and tip. But the customer can totally screw with it if they felt like a jerk I guess.
Some "real" payment terminals are also suspectible to customer misuse. There have been many cases of customers issuing "refunds" of thousands of euros to themselves when they were supposed to be inputting their PIN - easier if the terminal is out of sight of the seller - e.g. in a car at a drive-in:
> And you know all your employees will be familiar with the interface.
That's quite an assumption. About half a billion iPads have been sold, so about 6 billion people have probably never used one. I certainly haven't and I live in the UK.
I live in the US. I've used iPads in The doctor's office. I know how to input text on them and tap onscreen buttons; I haven't any idea how to get to the home screen to launch another app, much less do anything else. The most technical thing I've I've ever done with an iPad or iPhone is entering a URL in the address bar.
No USB 3 ports? Only USB 2? That's a little disappointing. Aside from that, this looks pretty cool. I haven't been huge into using tablets, but mostly because I don't like the locked down ecosystems of iOS and Android. This might change my mind about them.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadAt least it’s cheaper than my Google Glass and GoPro...
Have used it as my only laptop a few times too but I mostly work from home.
Upd: if it's too slow for you, consider this: http://media.lrdu.org/sxmo_pinephone_demos/sxmo_demo_0_allfe...
[1] https://www.pine64.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/pinetab_KB...
https://youtu.be/l53h_uQ41Ao?t=274
It's weird how that felt like a great deal and yet this one is expensive enough to make me question if I could get anything close to that much value out of it. The HP firesale was back in the days where a decent tablet cost around $500 and it was a screaming deal. Now people practically give tablets away, I've seen Amazon's Fire tablets sell for $39 brand new.
Maybe it also reflected less of a worry about losing software support at that time. If Apple told us that the iPad was now discontinued and you could get an iPad Pro for $99, I wonder how many people would jump on it. If the software is dead the device is a brick. That concept wasn’t really on people’s minds as much in the PC days.
In retrospect it’s unbelievable that HP had the lack of foresight to abandon webOS and Palm devices. Maybe there’s a lot of business reasons why it would have never worked but I remember Palm and HP TouchPad devices being very popular in the early consumer smartphone days, and the software was competitive. If it wasn’t good we wouldn’t see it all over smart TVs today.
Agreed -- there's a big subsidy from Amazon there. But LCD screens and much of the same parts as computers+phones have had big economic forces driving the prices down.
Saves crippling my shoulder by carrying a "Damm Heavy" bag with me.
I kind of expected/hoped this to be better than that old Chromebook, but reading this https://www.cnx-software.com/2015/04/09/relative-performance... it looks like it has even worse performance (A17 vs A53)
I just use mine for fun/learning. Have it flashed w/ Libreboot and running PrawnOS (Debian / Linux-libre based) which keeps seeing a nice amount of improvements. https://github.com/SolidHal/PrawnOS
I noted above it uses Linux-Libre, so the internal WiFi does NOT work with the distro "as is". EVERY other component is supported though. If you need internal WiFi instead of external USB WiFi, you can modify the build script to use the regular Linux kernel & add the non-free Debian repos to sources.list. I've done it before and it works fine.
The default image when you build or download it puts you at a command prompt where you can either use it "as is", run a script to install a pre-configured desktop environment(XFCE, GNOME, or LXQT), or custom install things yourself.
GNOME was just recently added. The RK3288 processor in the c201 is now supported by Panfrost for 2D/3D acceleration, but I think it still has a bit to go before GNOME is completely usable. If save the resources if you're doing development.
4k output should be available soon, just tested patches for that. Admittedly 2160p was much smoother. Eventually there will also be hardware video decoding. The RK3288 has a full Hantro G1 VPU and drivers for that were recently merged into the kernel.
For alternatives, there is a decent list here that might be better suited to your needs: https://github.com/nikolas-n/GNU-Linux-on-Asus-C201-Chromebo...
I always meant to buy a couple more RAM chips and solder them down to the motherboard (there's a couple of unpopulated pads), but never got round to it.
Sadly the wifi chip is soldered down, that's one of my only grips (RAM I get, but typically wifi would be an m.2 slot unless you're really cheap).
So I imagine you could get a lot done with this, even with the terrible performance. If you're just programming and using a browser you really don't need much oomph.
I upped my C710 to 16GB for $50 a couple years ago (also swapped the 847 board for a 1007u, and dropped in an SSD), and it's been great. If and hopefully when 16GB DDR3 sodimms drop in price I'd like to bump it up to 32GB.
Wonderful little system for a broke CS student, and nothing but fond memories.
They seem to be totally overrun by demand. And give a terrible user experience when you try to order from them. Friends of mine have ordered (and paid!) Pine64 products weeks ago and get no information when they will be shipped. When you send them an email, it either gets ignored or you get a reply by someone who does not speak English. Telling you something like "Yes will inform you when be shipped".
Why not charge 50% more and treat your customers like customers?
This taints the whole Pine64 brand for me. I totally want a Linux phone and a Linux tablet. But I don't know if I should trust a brand that treats their customers like this.
Regarding general population vs hackers: Do you imply that hackers value low price higher then others? Are hackers particularely poor? I thought hacker often means coder which usually means higher income then the general population.
Personally, I would totally prefer to pay 50% more and have my emails answered and my orders shipped.
Quoting from there:
> We're under constraints that we have no control over (e.g. border being closed between HK and mainland China), the shipping companies and carriers are under many constraints (self-imposed or imposed by regulators) and the logistic chain as a whole - including people - is under regulatory constraints. In short, current situation is not business as usual. I am getting many PMs and emails asking about status reports - as soon as I know something, I post it here, there is no need to PM or email me. Thank you for your continued patience!
Also, somewhere I've read that their shipping team is 4 people packing about 1000 items per day. Why increased demand doesn't cause increase in shipping team - that I don't know.
You can also connect to IRC/Telegram/Matrix channel and ask there - somebody with more knowledge might answer you.
Orders are delayed because, and this may surprise you, there is a global pandemic right now which is affecting factory workers in China, causing production and Q&A issues because of restricted staff, visitors, and shipping.
If you prefer to spend more money then go do it and shut the hell up. "Personally, I'd like everyone to have to pay $50-75 more for this unfinished product because I'm an arrogant impatient idiot" is the worst take in the world
Just go buy a finished product from a store
Here we are, a week later, and even after their update 3 hrs ago, the Pine team has yet to acknowledge this.
Ordinarily I would have shrugged it off, but the shipping carrier needs to reach out to collect their taxes before we can get our devices.
E: offtopic, but there's no need for the namecalling. We like to think we're classier than that 'round here.
Not that you're wrong about the rest, but we can't actually do this; there are no stores that will sell you a working smartphone or smartphone-based tablet. (That is, with compiler, shell, kernel- and driver-patching, etc that constitute a operating system.)
Small numbers (1-3) of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect.
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.
On price:
By releasing things as cheaply as they can within reason, this vastly broadens who can get one. Given that they depend on the community to create most if not all of the software, this means that software support gets there much earlier than it would otherwise; compare the progress on the Librem handset to the PinePhone: one took three years, has gone over the predicted timeframe multiple times, and still isn't quite right (or released), while Pine64's is actually surprisingly decent, and got there much faster.
On 'customer' experience:
Every time I've ordered from them they've been perfectly responsive and have gotten things shipped on a reasonable time frame. They're based in China and, if you weren't aware, there's kind of a big event happening over there that's interrupted their everything. They're not Apple and it'd be worse if they were trying to be; they aren't treating their customers badly, they're treating their workers well; chill out.
This is exactly it, if we want linux on phones to be a real experience that can offer something on par with Google and Apple, then the very first step is getting hardware into hackers hands; the software will never follow if there aren't any users. The exact kind of person you want using these devices is someone willing to pay less money and pay with their time instead.
I have one of their boards and can only say I had a good experience buying from them. I think compared to some of the alternatives in the price range (ie., random, no-name eBay crap), their documentation and forums is very good.
The complete opposite of Librem, who do the same thing but charges $2000 for a laptop that barely boots without hacking libreboot every week and then proceed to use that money in marketing for their linux mobile phone which will be in the same sorry state and sold for the same high price and empty promises.
For anyone who wants a a decent tablet (Android 5 though) on 10", I suggest the Amazon Fire HD (7th gen is fine), you can get a used for for £30-£50, then "hack it" to remove the Amazon crap/bloatware (plenty of sites with instructions out there) and use that. I have set up multiple friends like that. They buy it, meet for a coffee, I de-crap it for them in 20mins and they end up with a nice 10" android tablet to read and watch Netflix.
(Not advertising or affiliated with Amazon)(I think Bezos should give more to his staff and less to his pocket) ;)
When I got the laptop I was expecting a cheap plastic build but got an aluminium sturdy frame. Best laptop purchase I ever had, this comment is actually being written from my new pinebook pro.
I m sorry you feel you are not treated like a customer. Given the company's size they are really doing wonders.
Frankly, it seems like this isn't the device for you. I agree, you should probably wait. But words like "taint the brand" seem incredibly strong to me.
These devices are for developers and tinkerers, not the general population. The goal is to get these devices into as many hands as possible, hitting a price point as low as possible. This allows for more people to get access to the hardware and start tinkering, helping to build out the (woefully lacking, at this time) software ecosystem.
To be honest, I feel like they have done a really good job of setting expectations around this, so I'm not terribly sympathetic to this class of complaint. I ordered a PinePhone and am patiently waiting for it to ship. I'm glad it's so cheap! It's not going to be a device to replace my primary phone (yet), it's a project to tinker with. As such I don't want to spend much more money.
They are very transparent about the delays in shipping. You can find the most up to date information in a sticky post on their forum[1].
> This taints the whole Pine64 brand for me.
That's an extremely charged response, you definitely should check the forum post to get some perspective. In short, there were QA issues with the first batch of Pinebook Pro and PinePhone orders, they are running the remaining unshipped units through a second round of testing before shipping, and the combination of COVID-19 and China/Hong Kong border issues have further delayed shipping.
[1] https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9942
Adjusting pricing may be better for them especially if demand is that high.
Honestly, I suspect this experience is just not for you, man. It's like when we funded the glowing plant on Kickstarter, or the smart mattress topper that became Luna and then Eight, or funded the development of neovim. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. These are people experienced at doing a thing but not all the things around the thing. There's going to be drop-offs.
I really wish there were a way to just say "If you have normative expectations, go elsewhere". I really want to be able to participate in this specific subsector of the economy without the general-consumer folks increasing costs because I'm willing to accept lots of cut corners on beta products and they want all the trappings of working with folks.
As an example, one of the things I bought they took two weeks to respond to me (it was a combination GPS/Glonass/Galileo antenna for cheap). That's okay for me. It took months to arrive with many delays every few months. That's also okay for me. I don't want them to hire more folks to ensure they can respond to everyone. I don't want them to hire more folks so they can manage the customs hassle. I want them to be able to validate the product itself because I want more of that product.
I think where Pine64 failed to deliver is that they overpromised on when they could deliver the product. I received mine very late and I couldn't boot the OS and support wasn't helpful.
Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi 3 with 64bit support was announced after Pine64 and delivered before the Pine64 without hiccups.
Pine64 could have improved but I woule rather stick with something like a Raspberry Pi where there is a better level of support (from my experience).
The Raspberry PI foundation essentially is a branch of Broadcom, a chipmaker with $20 billion revenue in 2018. Pine64 had to crowfund their first boards 5 years ago while Broadcom already had been a chip vendor for the US military. They are not even comparable.
Moreover, I wouldn't take the Pi Foundation as an example after what they did with the Zero, which was sold for years in extremely low quantities at cost, or bundled with unnecessary stuff, just so that word of mouth of that price would prevent people from purchasing boards from competitors.
If pine doesn't want price to be a barrier to purchasing their products (which is an admirable position), and they don't have the resources to serve all the orders they're getting, they should throw up some other barriers in the purchasing process to handle the demand. instead of selling direct, do bulk buys through linux user groups or something like that.
Seems like this PineTablet, at $US99, may just end up delivering on the promise.
Lets see.
If utility is limiting these kinds of devices more than price, then cutting a few bucks from the purchase price isn't going to change things much.
Is it like lowering the toll on a bridge that doesn't go anywhere most people want to go?
For the next billion users of the web/computers $100 is still a big investment.
that said size of the screen is actually a big factor in price, also you need more powerful processor to push pixels on that screen and bigger battery for power draw. all those costs add up. plus they maybe following razer blade model.
I guess there is "Guided Access Mode", but I literally just learned about it googling for this question, and it would seem a lot of people don't know about it.
(all in Finnish)
https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-9966606
https://www.is.fi/tampereen-seutu/art-2000006461066.html
https://mikkeli.datagroup.fi/fi/asiakkaille/blogi/haikailema...
https://www.is.fi/digitoday/tietoturva/art-2000005178637.htm...
That's quite an assumption. About half a billion iPads have been sold, so about 6 billion people have probably never used one. I certainly haven't and I live in the UK.
I've seen other RCA Voyagers going for $50 or less, even at Walmart.
* 7.0" touchscreen
* 1.3GHz Quad-Core processor
* 16GB of storage memory
* Google Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS
* Webcam, WiFi and Bluetooth
And then install Termux [2], which is a nifty Linux that runs on Android.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/RCA-Voyager-Keyboard-Marshmallow-RCT6...
[2] https://termux.com/