Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[Meatball]

Overall a very sturdy and nice piece of hardware.
The metallic case gives a very premium feel although finger grease do stick pretty easy and it scratches easy and I will keep my pbp in a leather case away from other stuff in my bag, I would advise others to do the same.

The keyboard have this really nice feel to it with a pleasant ”springiness” that gives a nice flow to typing. Not to be confused with sponginess. A more extensive key travel than normal on notebooks which is impressive considering the thickness of the machine as a whole. The keys don’t wiggle at all and the chassi gives no significant flex.
The track pad have a input lag issue, I hear pine64 are working on a fix for this as well!

I have had problems with the screen though and since I haven't seen anyone else talking about these issues elsewhere on the forum it might be a problem with my specific unit. When I first started the unit it had big problems with flickering that grew when battery drained. It got better when I disabled dimming in the power management but it didn’t go away completely. After some charging cycles I find the problem have diminished but is still present, especially when battery is low and the screen brightness is dimmed.
I have a related problem with the screen in which it emits a high frequency noise which is more apparent when brightness is turned down. Its still present when fully lit though! When there’s a lot of sound in my surroundings this is not a problem but it is quite annoying when alone in a quiet room.

The pd charger I bought to charge both my phone and the pbp doesn’t seem to be able to supply enough power as the battery still drains(albeit very slowly) while connected. It could be that the cheap charger I bought isn’t providing the advertised output, the pbp is using more than 18w of power(the rating of my charger) or that the pbp isn’t using pd to it’s fullest potential. 18W is when using 12v and 9v, using 5v provides a maximum of 15w.

The sound also turns on emitting a white noise even if set to mute. Only for a couple of seconds and not loud in any way but still there.
I tried the debian build but didn’t like is as much as the ubuntu one, can’t put my finger on why so I followed the tutorial by wizzard to install the ubuntu image om my emmc. This worked after some fixes which are explained in the tutorial. Firefox feels more stable in the ubuntu image and I haven’t experienced the crashes I had in the debian one. Might be that I installed something wrong or whatever but I include such things when I judge stability since I am somewhat of a newbie!
I do some hobby programming in c++ and qt and as such I found it really helpful that I could install the qt-creator IDE without any self-compiling or such and it installed without any problems. Compiled a simple hello world application all right. can’t speak for performance when it comes to larger programs of course.
For file syncing Owncloud client installed natively and connects to my nextcloud server as intended.


As I said, overall it’s a very nice piece of technology and i’m very happy with it! Most of the problems I mention aren’t dealbreakers and this computer have made me go outside of my comfort zone tinkering and compiling which I haven’t done before and it’s a lot of fun. I’m actually surprised how much that is working without special workarounds considering the armhf architecture and everything.