02-08-2025, 01:37 AM
Yesterday I unboxed a new PinePhone Pro bought recently. Here are some things I noticed that were problematic (posting here as feedback to Pine64):
- The battery was completely dead, as in 0 volts at the terminal. There was a plastic protector over the terminals, so that wasn't the issue. At first I thought maybe internal low voltage protector had kicked in. I charged it for a bit then checked the voltage and it was at around 2V. It really is a dud battery. I managed to charged up to full (constantly checking temperature and whether it's expanding or not). As expected, capacity seems to be way down (voltage drops rapidly when using it), I'll probably have to toss it. Ordered a Samsung J7 replacement. Pine64, please test the batteries before shipping!
- Even though rk2aw was installed to SPI, there's no primary or fallback bootloader installed. This caused me massive amounts of pain, because rk2aw needs to boot to a bootloader. When I turned on the phone for the first time, I saw u-boot, so assumed it's installed to SPI. I selected to boot off the first option, but after waiting a bit I just saw a black screen, so assumed maybe no OS is installed. I anyway wanted Mobian, so I flashed it from SD card to eMMC. This wiped the bootloader off the eMMC, and I was thus stuck with a non-booting phone (since my Mobian image doesn't have a bootloader). I couldn't find an image that had a bootloader already installed and writing a bootloader onto the SD card didn't work for me (bootloader loads but hangs on booting up a kernel). The only fix that got me out of this mess was to use tow-boot's installer image to wipe rk2aw off the SPI and put tow-boot there. Pine64, PLEASE put a primary and fallback bootloader into SPI as part of your rk2aw installation, I recommend u-boot (with binary bits for DDR) as primary and maybe tow-boot as secondary fallback? This would avoid so many problems!
Anyway apart from those issues, now that I finally have a working OS installed, it's great
- The battery was completely dead, as in 0 volts at the terminal. There was a plastic protector over the terminals, so that wasn't the issue. At first I thought maybe internal low voltage protector had kicked in. I charged it for a bit then checked the voltage and it was at around 2V. It really is a dud battery. I managed to charged up to full (constantly checking temperature and whether it's expanding or not). As expected, capacity seems to be way down (voltage drops rapidly when using it), I'll probably have to toss it. Ordered a Samsung J7 replacement. Pine64, please test the batteries before shipping!
- Even though rk2aw was installed to SPI, there's no primary or fallback bootloader installed. This caused me massive amounts of pain, because rk2aw needs to boot to a bootloader. When I turned on the phone for the first time, I saw u-boot, so assumed it's installed to SPI. I selected to boot off the first option, but after waiting a bit I just saw a black screen, so assumed maybe no OS is installed. I anyway wanted Mobian, so I flashed it from SD card to eMMC. This wiped the bootloader off the eMMC, and I was thus stuck with a non-booting phone (since my Mobian image doesn't have a bootloader). I couldn't find an image that had a bootloader already installed and writing a bootloader onto the SD card didn't work for me (bootloader loads but hangs on booting up a kernel). The only fix that got me out of this mess was to use tow-boot's installer image to wipe rk2aw off the SPI and put tow-boot there. Pine64, PLEASE put a primary and fallback bootloader into SPI as part of your rk2aw installation, I recommend u-boot (with binary bits for DDR) as primary and maybe tow-boot as secondary fallback? This would avoid so many problems!
Anyway apart from those issues, now that I finally have a working OS installed, it's great