This just sounds unsustainable
While that doesn’t state anything definitively, it sounds like they plan to either increase prices later on, or that the first batch (of PRE-orders keep in mind) is being released early in order to get feedback from customers.
In either case it doesn’t sound like they’re planning to operate as a charity forever.
None of us is as smart as all of us ~ Ken H. Blanchard At the core of our philosophy is the notion that PINE64 is a community platform. [...] The goal is to deliver ARM64 devices that you really wish to engage with and a platform that you want to be a part of.
As such, if you can help them source better quality IPS panels, I know a guy you should talk to.
Better would be something like "Disclaimer: the product can have up to 10 dead pixels which are not covered by warranty."
If you are looking for a turnkey solution, not all of Pine64's offerings are able meet your needs (but do snag a $1.99 CH340 Serial console.) and if you preorder the "Braveheart" phone, there is no stable off the shelf OS prepared for it. You cannot buy this and mail it to ahead your hotel and give a demonstration to the board by next Thursday.
That said, and I don't think this is superlative at all, Pine64's efforts currently exemplify the internet dream of a "Global Village" economy.
> 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.
And:
> [...] make no profit from selling these units. 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 Pinebook. Thank you.
Projects that respect their customers are usually on the edge of oblivion because they don't have a profit or ownership motive. But they are vulnerable to others copying and cost-reducing their work. Customers usually choose the cheaper copy.
Projects that are sucessful assure themselves a profit by closing their products and restricting things. Customers are limited in what they can do, or have to be content with buying a crippled product.
sigh.
UBPorts community have done a commendable job in continuing Ubuntu Touch development after canonical left it. Even Nexus 4 receives regular updates, albeit old kernel due to libHybris
Ubuntu Touch is the most accessible Linux phone now because of their support to older available devices. Unfortunately, they don't get enough attention as Purism or PostmarketOS gets.
Hopefully, PinePhone should change it.
I just spent the last two weeks attempting to get an Ubuntu Touch phone to work as a mobile transceiver / network hub for a BLE peripheral that my company is developing. Our device works very well with the standard Linux bluez stack and tools (bluetoothctl, hcitool, etc.), so we thought that this would be the easier route for a one-off project than developing an Android app from scratch, given Android's BLE quirks (e.g. minimum notification interval of 11.25 ms instead of the 7.5 ms that the BLE spec requires -- we have a high bandwidth device that needs the shorter interval).
It was a nightmare, and we eventually gave up and wrote an Android app.
I didn't know of this project, however my first thought at putting the ideas "ubuntu" and "phone" together would be: another phone that doesn't respect you.
This comes from the way ubuntu forces stuff you might not want, like the amazon app, telemetry and stuff like snap.
I might be thinking unfairly.
(meanwhile purism takes great pain to think of the user compassionately via GPL)
There's some good and bad here, the hardware is surprisingly good for a $250 open source laptop (cost + shipping + taxes) but it's nowhere near as polished or usable as a comparable $250 Chromebook. The software is squarely beta quality so expect to spend time tracking updates, flashing firmware and doing things like patching u-boot from someone's github repo, etc.
Daily use annoyances: the touchpad is mediocre, battery drain while the machine is asleep is higher than I expected. Lots of things that should be possible (ARM hibernation support) aren't because rockchip based their kernel on 4.4 and the mainline upstreaming effort is slow moving.
Desktop performance is solid though, as is streaming video playback. Basic system performance is great, storage is fast, system is responsive etc.
> Since this is a community driven side-project, we have started considering making the dev-kits available to everyone in the store.
That would be awesome. I've been looking for an open watch to play with recently. I hope they go forward with that idea.
This might actually turn out more useful than many of the boutique smartwatches.
And ideally, I would like a pineTime as well. I would like to write a program to alert me when I'm forgetting my phone while travelling, for instance :)
[1] Asked here: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=8158&pid=51528#p...
They are also developing an open source tablet, PineTab. They already have several full lines of SBC Raspberry Pi killers as well. Several are designated LTS Long Term Support with guaranteed availability (See offer for details, restrictions apply, Pine64 can not be held responsible for any sweet hacks or enjoyable Sundays caused by its devices. Hack Responsibly.)
I can always get a more powerful Linux machine at another time. ;)
I wish the site had better photographs. The keyboard pictures are awful, and the Javascript they use to show the pictures prevents me from zooming in to see any detail.
Ignoring the trackpad, the keyboard will sometimes refuse to register keypresses or will repeat keys. This is particularly problematic when you type fast (like a password). On mine, the tab key also gets stuck rather often. The trackpad doesn’t have much control for fine movements, which makes resizing windows... interesting. And the trackpad frequently activates spontaneously which causes cursors to move around.
Aside from a small issue I had with a loose bezel, the rest of the machine is very nice. It is a good sized (14”), very sturdy design. The screen is pretty good too. Maybe if the keyboard and trackpad firmware gets fixed, then it could be a usable machine.
On my machines, regardless of OS, I turn the trackpad off. I prefer a mouse set to max sensitivity, so that my hand doesn't move, just my fingers, and barely at that. And then I try to use keystrokes as much as practical.
People who sit at my laptop get dizzy and fall off the edge.
https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/design-and-build...
I couldn't find any info on the website.
> Although the original Kickstarter page mentioned a company called "Pine64 Inc.", all devices are manufactured and sold by Pine Microsystems Inc. based in Fremont, California. Its founder is TL Lim, the inventor of the PopBox and Popcorn Hour series of media players sold under the Syabas and Cloud Media brands.
Hardware switches for almost everything and open source software :D
I just flipped through the various pinephone PDFs linked from the November update and saw no evidence of hardware kill switches. Maybe they're buried in the schematics, but the exploded phone diagram has nothing for them.
Can you link where you saw mention/proof of this?
>The detachable back panel – which covers the privacy switches, pogo pins and the removable battery – is made of a durable soft-touch plastic.
https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone
> Privacy Switches: LTE (include GPS), Wifi/BT, Mic, and Camera
edit: You can see them at the first link (picture "PinePhone mainboard + daughterboard (prototype) "), its the little switches above the sdcard reader
Turns out their eMMCs are defective. Here's what's happening:
The eMMCs ignore the first read instruction, and then work from the second one on. On Linux boot, initrd makes a read request that never returns, and hangs.
If you boot off of a mSD, it woris well. You can still mount the eMMC, but you cant boot with them.
I did receiver a report that someone found a bootable (doesn't ignore first read) eMMC. But that was 1.
(Disclosure, I opened a PayPal dispute and sent back the eMMCs of my own expense. But the never responded so I got all $293 back. This goes along with 0 communication even when I was trying to do the right thing. I'm also trying to start a hardware business, and chose this platform because of no embedded radios, etc, and 1gigE on its own SPI bus.)
Tldr. Defective hardware, don't buy.
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/7783-cant-install-pine-a64-l...
Do you have any more information or a link where to follow up on this? Skimming the threads in the forum
https://forum.pine64.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=67
has more then one person saying that they managed to boot from the EMMC.
edit: nevermind found it
https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/df6yxz/pine...
edit2: Are you sure you didnt run into a problem with Armbian? Did you test it with any other OS? There seem to be more people who had an issue which sounds similar, not being able to boot from EMMC but from SDCard with armbian.
Yes, I tried eMMC boot on every emmc capable OS that the Pine-fork of Etcher suggested. And I also tried openBSD as well on suggestion from freenode #pine64 user, to no avail.
I then was able to order a usb3->eMMC adapter, and was able to debug the USB and determine my assertions were correct: those eMMC chips ignored the first read operation.
I didn't have a jtag for the allwinner chips, but I also did have a serial console. I'd like to say I went above and beyond for testing what I'm defining as defective merchandise.
Now, the A64-LTS, the rtc batery holder, and the POE injecters are pretty darn good. I was just hoping for better overall performance with using eMMC.
