I've been using the Pinebook Pro since the beginning of November and collected some impressions so far that I would like to share.
In the following I mostly speak about the hardware. The software seems to be in the flow and as more fixes/updates or simply new distros appear more and more works. For example, the initial issues with Firefox are gone and it works perfectly.
Obviously the selection of software is limited at first since most Linux binaries are for amd64. You need to build stuff from source or wait for somebody to provide a binary for aarch64 or add that software to the package management of whatever Linux distribution you're using. I'm positive that over time the "usual" software will be easy to install.
Also the performance so far seems to be surprisingly good. The only time I noticed a larger difference was when I compiled a dotnet project. It took noticeably longer than on my other machine (which is fair enough since the other one is a modern intel i5). But browsing, youtubing, apt-getting and so on works snappy as advertised
So let us move on to the hardware which is something you have to live with once you bought it.
*Disclaimer: please bear with me, the resume comes at the end. Some parts are critical but I would like to mention everything, feel free to respond to me with enquiries or hints.*
Screen:
Just great, no questions asked.
The lid:
Few people mention this but I just cannot keep quiet about that - it does not open far enough. It is not always comfortable to work *on your lap* with this laptop. Yes, I know it is a design choice and could be seen from the initial pictures already and it is the same with many other models out there. Just saying I like laptops better that open further.
Camera:
I've only tested it in VLC. Did not look very sharp to be honest but I cannot say more since I have not actually used it for anything meaningful.
Battery lifetime:
So far it has been great. Both with original Debian as well as Manjaro ARM the lifetime seems to be very good.
Wifi:
works fine for me, did not try larger distances.
Bluetooth, privacy switches:
did not use yet
- and now to the bigger topics -
Keyboard & Trackpad:
The initial issues where touching the trackpad while typing would disable the keyboard were fixed by the firmware update as promised which is nice. The update worked on the very first try without any problems. What remains an issue is that the cursor occasionally jumps somewhere as you type because you've touched the trackpad with just a tiny edge of your palm. So suddenly you're typing in the middle of another paragraph - happened while typing this text 5 times or so. Hopefully the firmware becomes just a bit more intelligent in this regard but it is OK.
The keyboard itself is indeed fine. Obviously it does not quite compare to my Thinkpad at work but it is OK (and most certainly better than on a Macbook these days - I was really shocked when I tried typing on a Mac the other day but that is a different story).
It takes a while to get used to not having a dedicated delete, home, end, pgup, pgdn buttons and using funny Fn+... combinations - especially when combining with Shift or Ctrl. I'm still not 100% used to that but ok that was the design choice.
What I cannot figure out though are some problems with using the Meta (Pine logo) key. With Manjaro ARM + KDE I can use many of the keyboard shortcuts involving the Meta key BUT NOT ALL?! E.g. Meta + 1 opens/toggles the first app in the quick launch bar (Firefox in my case), or I've configured Meta + D to show the desktop. However using Meta + arrow keys does not do anything although it is configured to tile the window to the right, left, etc... It seems however that no keystroke is sent form the keyboard for this particular combination. Annoying!
The trackpad feels very nice, reacts to taps, no need to press all the way down. Fine. However, as described by others the "drunk" cursor behaviour is really disturbing. It sounds like a small detail but it is surprising how difficult it makes some tasks like selecting particular words of a sentence and such. I hope more improvements of the firmware are on the way in this regard.
Whine / noise:
Being a machine without any fans one would expect it to be as inaudible as any other tablet or phone. Unfortunately there are some issues with PWM (or whatever) signals that do produce an audible whining noise which depends on screen brightness as discussed elsewhere. The noise disappears at maximum or minimum screen brightness but exists in between.
Note that most people reported a noise when the audio interface is up. This is the really loud noise that everyone hears. However even with audio disabled one can hear (at least I can) a very faint high pitched noise. It is very subtle but it can be heard and you notice just how annoying that is once you turn the screen brightness all the way up or down and suddenly it is really silent in the room.
I've also noticed some loud whining noise when booting the machine while it is plugged-in for charging but I do not really care about this since I usually charge it while it is off over night.
Sound:
Guess I'm unlucky with this one. My right speaker has a loose contact. It keeps coming up and then dying as you touch the chassis in any way (put the wrist down on either side, etc...) I hoped it was actually just the contact of the speaker not properly soldered to the cable but, alas, the problem is at the motherboard. I opened up the machine and let it play some audio. It was touching the board that made the difference while the cable and speaker are indifferent to any movement. Guess there is nothing I can do about that?
Apart from that the sound (through the headphones) is fine except for two things: One was mentioned above, the whimering noise of the PWM depending screen brightness that is amplified into the speakers output; the other disturbance is simply white noise being emitted as soon as the sound interface is enabled. It is not so big a problem when using the built-in speakers but is not so pleasant when wearing headphones.
In short: sound is usable so long as you watch a 20min. episode of your favourite show and wear headphones - you won't care too much about quality in this scenario. If you want to listen to music for a longer period of time (and the music is dynamically more diverse than thrash metal
use some other device (or maybe BT headphones / boombox).
This got longer than I initially intended. So what is my resume?
I do believe it is a good device and a step in the right a direction: a Linux first, ARM laptop. It is fully functional and serves its purpose. The device does not feel, look or perform as great as some Dells or Thinkpads or what not (but those are also in a completely different price range).
Taking into account that this is a community effort, and the moderate price, I do think this is a good device and sincerely hope it will find more and more users.
I sincerely hope that keyboard/trackpad firmware will be open sourced and improved further. It is certainly doable, only question is how soon.
I'm a bit unhappy with the audio interface and the noises that this devices emits. However, even if the review above sounds very harsh, one can deal with it. I'm not forced to listen to music through this laptop and in environments other than at home there is always enough ambient noise to cover the faint whining noise emitted from the circuitry of this machine.
The reason I discussed some shortcoming in great length is because I hope this will be taken into account for future revisions of the hardware - possibly delivering a more refined product in a future iteration.
In that spirit, please keep up the good work!
edit: PS.: One thing I forgot to discuss but I think it is important. It is not clear why a barrel jack has been chosen as the primary power source. I understand you cannot solely use the USB-C because that is also used for connecting peripherals but then why not just add a micro-USB like on most phones or Raspberries? This way we could have saved ourselves from yet another charger that works with precisely one device in the household. I guess that is something to consider for future models.
In the following I mostly speak about the hardware. The software seems to be in the flow and as more fixes/updates or simply new distros appear more and more works. For example, the initial issues with Firefox are gone and it works perfectly.
Obviously the selection of software is limited at first since most Linux binaries are for amd64. You need to build stuff from source or wait for somebody to provide a binary for aarch64 or add that software to the package management of whatever Linux distribution you're using. I'm positive that over time the "usual" software will be easy to install.
Also the performance so far seems to be surprisingly good. The only time I noticed a larger difference was when I compiled a dotnet project. It took noticeably longer than on my other machine (which is fair enough since the other one is a modern intel i5). But browsing, youtubing, apt-getting and so on works snappy as advertised
So let us move on to the hardware which is something you have to live with once you bought it.
*Disclaimer: please bear with me, the resume comes at the end. Some parts are critical but I would like to mention everything, feel free to respond to me with enquiries or hints.*
Screen:
Just great, no questions asked.
The lid:
Few people mention this but I just cannot keep quiet about that - it does not open far enough. It is not always comfortable to work *on your lap* with this laptop. Yes, I know it is a design choice and could be seen from the initial pictures already and it is the same with many other models out there. Just saying I like laptops better that open further.
Camera:
I've only tested it in VLC. Did not look very sharp to be honest but I cannot say more since I have not actually used it for anything meaningful.
Battery lifetime:
So far it has been great. Both with original Debian as well as Manjaro ARM the lifetime seems to be very good.
Wifi:
works fine for me, did not try larger distances.
Bluetooth, privacy switches:
did not use yet
- and now to the bigger topics -
Keyboard & Trackpad:
The initial issues where touching the trackpad while typing would disable the keyboard were fixed by the firmware update as promised which is nice. The update worked on the very first try without any problems. What remains an issue is that the cursor occasionally jumps somewhere as you type because you've touched the trackpad with just a tiny edge of your palm. So suddenly you're typing in the middle of another paragraph - happened while typing this text 5 times or so. Hopefully the firmware becomes just a bit more intelligent in this regard but it is OK.
The keyboard itself is indeed fine. Obviously it does not quite compare to my Thinkpad at work but it is OK (and most certainly better than on a Macbook these days - I was really shocked when I tried typing on a Mac the other day but that is a different story).
It takes a while to get used to not having a dedicated delete, home, end, pgup, pgdn buttons and using funny Fn+... combinations - especially when combining with Shift or Ctrl. I'm still not 100% used to that but ok that was the design choice.
What I cannot figure out though are some problems with using the Meta (Pine logo) key. With Manjaro ARM + KDE I can use many of the keyboard shortcuts involving the Meta key BUT NOT ALL?! E.g. Meta + 1 opens/toggles the first app in the quick launch bar (Firefox in my case), or I've configured Meta + D to show the desktop. However using Meta + arrow keys does not do anything although it is configured to tile the window to the right, left, etc... It seems however that no keystroke is sent form the keyboard for this particular combination. Annoying!
The trackpad feels very nice, reacts to taps, no need to press all the way down. Fine. However, as described by others the "drunk" cursor behaviour is really disturbing. It sounds like a small detail but it is surprising how difficult it makes some tasks like selecting particular words of a sentence and such. I hope more improvements of the firmware are on the way in this regard.
Whine / noise:
Being a machine without any fans one would expect it to be as inaudible as any other tablet or phone. Unfortunately there are some issues with PWM (or whatever) signals that do produce an audible whining noise which depends on screen brightness as discussed elsewhere. The noise disappears at maximum or minimum screen brightness but exists in between.
Note that most people reported a noise when the audio interface is up. This is the really loud noise that everyone hears. However even with audio disabled one can hear (at least I can) a very faint high pitched noise. It is very subtle but it can be heard and you notice just how annoying that is once you turn the screen brightness all the way up or down and suddenly it is really silent in the room.
I've also noticed some loud whining noise when booting the machine while it is plugged-in for charging but I do not really care about this since I usually charge it while it is off over night.
Sound:
Guess I'm unlucky with this one. My right speaker has a loose contact. It keeps coming up and then dying as you touch the chassis in any way (put the wrist down on either side, etc...) I hoped it was actually just the contact of the speaker not properly soldered to the cable but, alas, the problem is at the motherboard. I opened up the machine and let it play some audio. It was touching the board that made the difference while the cable and speaker are indifferent to any movement. Guess there is nothing I can do about that?
Apart from that the sound (through the headphones) is fine except for two things: One was mentioned above, the whimering noise of the PWM depending screen brightness that is amplified into the speakers output; the other disturbance is simply white noise being emitted as soon as the sound interface is enabled. It is not so big a problem when using the built-in speakers but is not so pleasant when wearing headphones.
In short: sound is usable so long as you watch a 20min. episode of your favourite show and wear headphones - you won't care too much about quality in this scenario. If you want to listen to music for a longer period of time (and the music is dynamically more diverse than thrash metal
use some other device (or maybe BT headphones / boombox).This got longer than I initially intended. So what is my resume?
I do believe it is a good device and a step in the right a direction: a Linux first, ARM laptop. It is fully functional and serves its purpose. The device does not feel, look or perform as great as some Dells or Thinkpads or what not (but those are also in a completely different price range).
Taking into account that this is a community effort, and the moderate price, I do think this is a good device and sincerely hope it will find more and more users.
I sincerely hope that keyboard/trackpad firmware will be open sourced and improved further. It is certainly doable, only question is how soon.
I'm a bit unhappy with the audio interface and the noises that this devices emits. However, even if the review above sounds very harsh, one can deal with it. I'm not forced to listen to music through this laptop and in environments other than at home there is always enough ambient noise to cover the faint whining noise emitted from the circuitry of this machine.
The reason I discussed some shortcoming in great length is because I hope this will be taken into account for future revisions of the hardware - possibly delivering a more refined product in a future iteration.
In that spirit, please keep up the good work!
edit: PS.: One thing I forgot to discuss but I think it is important. It is not clear why a barrel jack has been chosen as the primary power source. I understand you cannot solely use the USB-C because that is also used for connecting peripherals but then why not just add a micro-USB like on most phones or Raspberries? This way we could have saved ourselves from yet another charger that works with precisely one device in the household. I guess that is something to consider for future models.
