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 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...)
> 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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.)
[+] [-] neonate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zachberger|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjice|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] terhechte|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] Teknoman117|5 years ago|reply
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 .
[+] [-] sylvain_kerkour|5 years ago|reply
8GB RAM, 128GB MMC, USB-C for up to 300$ and it will be the perfect Microsoft Surface Go's contender I'm waiting for!
[+] [-] als0|5 years ago|reply
This saddens me...
[+] [-] dleslie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buckhx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slantyyz|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bigiain|5 years ago|reply
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...)
[+] [-] zozbot234|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] comboy|5 years ago|reply
I think going with an android tablet is fine and headache free. I just don't like aesthetics of that solution.
[+] [-] zlalanne|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jandrese|5 years ago|reply
2GB of RAM is pretty limiting but 64GB of storage is quite respectable at this price point. The 6AH battery pack is quite beefy too.
[+] [-] calvinmorrison|5 years ago|reply
no or low amounts of QA significantly reduce cost
[+] [-] iicc|5 years ago|reply
The webpage for the product is https://www.pine64.org/pinetab/
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NikolaeVarius|5 years ago|reply
I would rather use i3/lighter DE + touch screen support for some GUI apps?
[+] [-] boogies|5 years ago|reply
https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/
[+] [-] ipnon|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ne6G0-hn9g
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|5 years ago|reply
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.
[1]http://gpd.hk/
[2]https://www.1netbook.com/
[3]https://store.planetcom.co.uk/collections/devices
[+] [-] ssivark|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnyan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sangnoir|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veridies|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boogies|5 years ago|reply
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.
Edits: price, s/this/this functionality/
I took this out of context (sorry), it's a very pre-production device that has received a lot of work since then and will receive much more. https://www.pine64.org/2020/05/15/may-update-pinetab-pre-ord...
[+] [-] deergomoo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KuiN|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djrogers|5 years ago|reply
Apple would be KILLED if they released anything with that much touch lag.
[+] [-] jareds|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exikyut|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coolspot|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bArray|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] gorgoiler|5 years ago|reply
- 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!
[+] [-] wltprgm|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] axegon_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imprettycool|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pathartl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drcongo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|5 years ago|reply
The PineTab – $99.99 The magnetic backlit keyboard – $19.99
That's interesting. I love my iPad mini 5, but at this price I may have to pick one of these up.
[+] [-] chrismorgan|5 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] progval|5 years ago|reply
Do you know if these binaries are required to run the Pinetab?
[+] [-] megous|5 years ago|reply